Privacy Statements in China, Germany, and the United States

Abstract

This chapter investigates how crowdsourcing platforms handle matters of data protection and analyzes information from 416 privacy statements. We find that German platforms mostly base their data processing solely on the GDPR, while U.S. platforms refer to numerous international, European, and state-level legal sources on data protection. The Chinese crowdsourcing platforms are usually not open to foreigners and do not refer to the GDPR. The privacy statements provide evidence that some U.S. platforms are specific in the sense that they explicitly state which data are not processed. When we compare the privacy practices of crowdsourcing platforms with the German fintech sector, it is noticeable that pseudonymization and anonymization are, at least in Germany, used much more frequently on crowdsourcing platforms. Most privacy statements did not exhaustively clarify what personal data are shared, even though they mentioned the sharing of data with third parties.