The Dystopian Digital Sweatshop That Makes the Internet Run

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/labor/dystopian-digital-sweatshop-makes-internet-run

Meet the workers making $1.20 an hour "microtasking" for billion-dollar brands like Microsoft and Amazon--right here in the US.



here's a workforce deployed by billion-dollar brands like Microsoft, eBay and Twitter – a workforce that has no entitlement to basic benefits, and is paid an hourly wage of approximately $1.20. They're the products and the projected future of corporate outsourcing, but they're not based in Chinese factories or Indian call centers. They're working at their home computers, in the US, right now. We depend on their labor to navigate the Internet and make our lives easier.

Microtasking is a fast-growing industry that is expected to take a significant chunk of the $400 billion made annually by the global outsourcing market. The average worker in what is called the "crowd" will work for hundreds of companies in one day, spending no longer than a minute on a single job.

Every time we search online for contact information, it's likely the website URL, phone number and address details were collected for a few cents each by hundreds of different workers, many of them in the US. Every time we find the right product on an e-commerce site, it's because it – and all the other products – were tagged by a human.

Microtasks and Human Intelligence Tasks, as they're called on Amazon's platform, are small repetitive jobs that computers can only do with a high degree of error, such as tagging pictures, recognizing handwritten text, categorizing the “mood” of a tweet, and assessing the “family friendliness” of an image.

[HiPointDem]

1. what fresh hell?

[xchrom]

2. When it comes to not paying people -

They're very inventive.