Small Business AI
Is Your Business Software Tracking Too Much? Five Privacy Questions to Ask Before You Sign Up
A privacy group filed complaints over how an AI platform tracked its workers. Here is a plain-English check to run on any tool before you onboard your team or customers.
By Kindloom Labs · October 27, 2026
What changed
On October 27, 2026, the European privacy group noyb filed five complaints against Scale AI over its Outlier platform, which uses freelance workers to help train AI. The complaints, filed in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Austria on behalf of individual workers, allege that Outlier allowed third-party trackers to collect workers' data repeatedly while they worked, and required invasive biometric checks to get paid, among other concerns. These are allegations under investigation by regulators, not proven findings or a court ruling. The reason it is worth a small business's attention is not the specific company. It is the pattern: a work or productivity platform quietly collecting far more than the job requires.
The honest nuance
An allegation is not a verdict, and most tools are not doing what these complaints describe. It would be wrong to treat every AI product as a surveillance tool. At the same time, the way to protect yourself is not to guess a vendor's intentions. It is to read what a tool actually collects and who it shares that with, before you put your team or your customers into it. Privacy rules also differ by location, so what is required or allowed depends on where you and your people are. The checklist below is about asking plain questions, not about assuming the worst.
Why it matters for your business
Small teams lean on freelancers and third-party platforms to get things done. A tool that collects unnecessary information about your workers or customers can create trust problems, compliance exposure, and a mess to untangle if that vendor has a breach or a regulator comes knocking. The cost of a quick review before you sign up is a few minutes. The cost of discovering a problem after you have onboarded your team and customer data is much higher. Choosing tools that collect only what they need is simply cheaper risk management.
What to actually do
Before adopting a freelancer, hiring, productivity, or monitoring tool, ask five questions. One, what does it track, and is any of it beyond what the job needs. Two, does it require biometric data like a face or fingerprint scan, and can people work without it. Three, which third parties does it share data with, and why. Four, who on your side can see what, and can you limit access by role. Five, how long is data kept, and can you delete it on request. If the vendor cannot answer plainly, treat that as an answer. Check the terms against the privacy rules where your team and customers are, and when in doubt, ask a professional before you onboard anyone.
From Kindloom Labs
The same instinct applies to what you feed any AI tool. The free Quick Read What Not to Paste Into AI covers the data you should keep out of these tools in the first place.
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