Platform Companies – Algorithmic Control in the World of Work

The short on Platform Companies analyzes the evolution of algorithmic control in the world of work and its risks of drifting toward forms of social surveillance.
The short starts from the emblematic case of Amazon, fined in France 32 million euros for excessive surveillance through scanners that track workers every minute, while in Italy similar sanctions are virtually non-existent (only 40,000 euros from the Privacy Authority). Amazon is presented as a “bridge” between the traditional industrial model and the algorithmic management typical of platform companies (Uber, Deliveroo, Glovo, Just Eat, Airbnb), which in Europe already involve 28 million workers in the gig economy.
In Italy, nearly 2 million people are subject, at various levels, to algorithmic control over their working lives, divided into intensive (88,000–98,000), moderate (350,000), and occasional (1,400,000). The model rests on three pillars: continuous data collection, algorithms that transform data into scores and sanctions, and weak and inadequate governance.]
The document then raises a crucial alarm: the same technological infrastructures (hardware, software, policies) currently used to maximize corporate profit could easily be converted into instruments of totalitarian social control, as demonstrated by the Chinese “Data State” model with its social credit system and over 500 interconnected smart cities. Three conditions for this transition — crises that justify exceptional measures, state access to private data, a population accustomed to surveillance — are already present in the West
The short closes by introducing the shift from algorithmic invasion (which controls how people work) to agentification (which determines whether people work), and with an appeal to put people back at the center, because a system that dehumanizes people and humanizes machines is not progress — it is regression