Compliance
Ethical sourcing and fair pay in AI data collection
How participants and annotators are recruited, informed and paid, and why that shows up directly in corpus quality.
- Pay
- Fair local rates, disclosed
- Recruitment
- Local recruiters, no brokers
- Consent
- Informed, voluntary
- Audit
- Open under NDA
The short version
- Participants are told what the recording is for, who broadly receives it and what they are paid, before they agree
- Payment is at fair local rates and made directly, with no deduction by intermediaries
- Annotators and transcribers are engaged on stable terms rather than piece-rate races that reward speed over accuracy
- No coercive recruitment through employers, institutions or community gatekeepers
- Participation is voluntary and can be stopped mid-session without penalty
Why it matters in practice
Fair pay is not only an ethics position; it is the cheapest quality control available. Underpaid participants rush prompts, underpaid transcribers guess at unclear audio, and both failures land in your training set where they are far more expensive to find.
Sourcing practices are open to audit under NDA, including rates paid and recruiter agreements.
How it is operated
| Practice | Standard |
|---|---|
| Participant pay | Fair local rate, disclosed on the consent form |
| Payment route | Direct to participant, no broker deduction |
| Session length | Capped with breaks; fatigue degrades prosody and accuracy |
| Annotator terms | Stable engagement, quality-weighted rather than pure piece rate |
| Recruitment | Direct local recruiters, no employer-mediated pressure |
| Withdrawal | Any time, without penalty, with pro-rata payment |
What you receive
- The relevant policy or template as a document, not a claim on a web page
- Programme-specific artefacts delivered with the corpus manifest
- Named contact for audit questions during and after the programme
- Written confirmation at close-out
If your legal or procurement team has a questionnaire, send it with the specification. It is faster to answer it once, up front, than to unblock a signed programme later.
Frequently asked
How much are participants paid?
Rates vary by city, session length and difficulty, and are disclosed to the participant before consent. We will share the rate card for your programme on request.
Can we audit sourcing practices?
Yes, under NDA, including recruiter agreements and payment records for your programme.
Does fair pay raise the price much?
Marginally at unit level, and it usually lowers total cost because rejection and re-collection rates fall.
Do you use crowd platforms?
Not for collection. Cohort control, consent quality and environment control are not achievable through anonymous micro-task crowds.
Related pages
Send your compliance questionnaire with the spec
We answer procurement, legal and security questionnaires alongside the technical scope, in the same working day where we can.