Data Collectives as a means to Improve Accountability, Combat Surveillance and Reduce Inequalities

TL;DR

This paper discusses designing sustainable worker data collectives to improve transparency, accountability, and equity in online labor platforms, addressing issues like surveillance and discrimination through collaborative, ethical frameworks.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for creating power-aware data collectives that address governance, privacy, and trust challenges in platform-based labor.

Findings

Frameworks like data feminism guide collective design.

Collaborative codesign can address platform accountability issues.

Focus on governance and privacy enhances trust and sustainability.

Abstract

Platform-based laborers face unprecedented challenges and working conditions that result from algorithmic opacity, insufficient data transparency, and unclear policies and regulations. The CSCW and HCI communities increasingly turn to worker data collectives as a means to advance related policy and regulation, hold platforms accountable for data transparency and disclosure, and empower the collective worker voice. However, fundamental questions remain for designing, governing and sustaining such data infrastructures. In this workshop, we leverage frameworks such as data feminism to design sustainable and power-aware data collectives that tackle challenges present in various types of online labor platforms (e.g., ridesharing, freelancing, crowdwork, carework). While data collectives aim to support worker collectives and complement relevant policy initiatives, the goal of this workshop is to encourage their designers to consider topics of governance, privacy, trust, and transparency. In this one-day session, we convene research and advocacy community members to reflect on critical platform work issues (e.g., worker surveillance, discrimination, wage theft, insufficient platform accountability) as well as to collaborate on codesigning data collectives that ethically and equitably address these concerns by supporting working collectivism and informing policy development.