Auditing African Content Moderators' Working Conditions by Using the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

TL;DR

This paper uses the GDPR to audit and reveal exploitative working conditions of content moderators in Kenya and Nigeria, highlighting legal and ethical issues in global tech labor practices.

Contribution

It demonstrates the extraterritorial application of GDPR to uncover violations of workers' rights in the Global South by BPO companies.

Findings

GDPR access reveals employment contract violations

Content moderators face structural disadvantages and rights violations

Legislation can be used to hold tech companies accountable

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.