Virtual sweatshops?

Just posted this as a response to a note on ReadWriteWeb that our partner CrowdFlower is exploiting children by embedding tasks within social games on sites like Facebook. A lot of the issues raised are similar to concerns we've heard earlier, so I'm posting my response:

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I'm the Founder of Samasource, a nonprofit that uses CrowdFlower's technology to connect extremely marginalized people, including refugees in Africa, to digital work. We were accused of creating "virtual sweatshops" a few weeks ago, which made me think really deeply about our model and the ethics of sending this kind of work to marginalized people. (While our workers aren't children, they aren't able to do many other types of work due to their location or status as refugees, making them vulnerable to exploitation.) 

 So here are my thoughts. It's worth noting that our perspective on this is independent of financial incentive; owners of a nonprofit don't get equity, and 90% of the income from the work we perform goes directly to workers. 

For something to be truly exploitive, it has to deny people choice. That can happen in two ways: either people are forced or coerced to do something, or they are incapable of making a choice because they're very young, very old, or mentally handicapped. The key thing about CrowdFlower's model is that it's based on choice, rather than coercion. Workers do tasks because they earn money and because the tasks only take a few minutes. It's also built to optimize worker performance and weed out people who do a bad job. It's hard to get accurate results from people who are coerced into doing work. 

From our perspective, this kind of "microwork" is fantastic for our beneficiaries who face grim alternatives for earning a living, like toiling under the sun on a field or in a quarry (those aren't made up -- many of our workers have done those things before to get by.) 

It's also nice for our beneficiaries that these tasks can be done virtually anywhere, at any time. CrowdFlower frees workers from 9-5 monotony by making it easy for them to log in and work when they want to. With Gambit, they're placing these tasks in all sorts of unlikely places that make them become less burdensome and more fun to do. Social games are one example of that. The iPhone app we launched with CrowdFlower (called Give Work) is another. 

The fact that children might be doing tasks as part of a game doesn't bother me in the least. If kids are savvy enough to hold their own in an online game, they're certainly capable of making choices about how they wish to spend their time. 

Child labor laws are designed to protect children from being exploited. In the countries where we work, children are made to skip school and weave rugs, work in brothels, or plow fields. It seems a little silly to put completing a few tasks as part of an online game experience in that category.