Privacy Meets Regulations: Shaping the Future of Work
Abstract
Crowdworking platforms facilitate diverse workers in executing tasks for various requesters, contributing to the growth of the gig economy and the emergence of competing and complementary independent platforms. This has led to the development of multi-platform crowdworking systems, where workers and requesters often engage with multiple platforms. Recently, there has been an increasing interest among governmental, legal, and social institutions in enforcing regulations, such as minimum and maximum work hours, on these platforms. Consequently, collaboration among platforms within multi-platform systems is essential to enforce these cross-platform regulations effectively. However, while such collaboration necessitates the transparent sharing of information regarding tasks and participants, it is crucial to preserve the privacy of all involved participants. This paper outlines a vision for regulating, preserving privacy, and structuring future multi-platform crowdworking environments. We propose a potential instance of a multi-platform crowdworking system capable of enforcing a significant subset of practical global regulations across distributed independent platforms while preserving privacy through the use of lightweight anonymous tokens and fault-tolerant protocols.