🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the systemic exploitation of African content moderators in Kenya and Nigeria, who endure precarious working conditions, lack basic labor protections, and are routinely excluded from employment contracts and data transparency. Innovatively repurposing the extraterritorial reach of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the research employs data subject access requests (DSARs), legal compliance analysis, and cross-jurisdictional strategies to successfully obtain critical documents—such as employment contracts and non-disclosure agreements—held by outsourcing firms. This approach not only transcends conventional data rights frameworks but also exposes the structural mechanisms through which technology companies evade accountability via outsourcing, thereby furnishing legally actionable evidence of digital labor rights violations affecting workers in the Global South.
📝 Abstract
In this article, we audit the working conditions of content moderators in Kenya and Nigeria employed by business process outsourcing (BPO) companies by using the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We demonstrate its extraterritorial scope for gaining access to elements such as employment contracts and NDAs that have never been provided to the workers concerned. The results of this approach provide legally grounded evidence of the structural disadvantages faced by content moderators in the Global South, whose exploitative working conditions violate workers' rights. Our work also highlights the benefits of legislation aimed at protecting individuals' data rights as a counterweight to the tech industry's discourse of exceptionalism, which obscures its dependence on BPOs to externalise labour costs and accountability, whilst claiming that its products, business models, and methods of resource extraction are unprecedented and fall outside any existing legal framework.