Data Privacy and Crowdsourcing : A Comparison of Selected Problems in China, Germany and the United States

This open access book describes the most important legal sources and principles of data privacy and data protection in China, Germany and the United States. The authors collected privacy statements from more than 400 crowdsourcing platforms, which allowed them to empirically evaluate their data privacy and data protection practices. The book compares the practices in the three countries and develops empirically-grounded policy recommendations.

A profound analysis on workers´ privacy in new forms of work in China, Germany, and the United States. 

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Däubler, University of Bremen

This is a comprehensive and timely book for legal and business scholars as well as practitioners, especially with the increasingly important role of raw data in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Professor Mingfeng Lin, Georgia Institute of Technology

Prof. Dr. Lars Hornuf completed his PhD at the Faculty of Economics of the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich in 2011 and subsequently received his habilitation in the field of business administration in 2019 at the University of Regensburg. Previously, he was a junior researcher at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research and a research associate at the Institute of International Law at the LMU. He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, Stanford Law School, Duke University, Georgetown University, the CESifo, and the House of Finance at Goethe University Frankfurt. In 2014, he became assistant professor of law and economics in the Department of Economics of Trier University. From 2016 to 2021, he was an affiliated research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. In 2017, Lars Hornuf became a full professor of business administration, specializing in the areas of financial services and financial technology at the University of Bremen, and recently a fellow of the CESifo research network. Since spring 2023 he has been a full professor of business administration specializing in financial services at Technische Universität Dresden. He has worked on numerous projects related to crowdsourcing and data privacy and raised external funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the German Ministry of Finance, among others. Since spring 2022 he has been a principal investigator of the research project “Platform Work and Data Privacy in a National and International Perspective,” which is supported by the Hans Böckler Foundation. His research interests also include fintech, law and finance, and behavioral science. Media including The Economist and Foreign Policy have reported on his research findings.

Dr. Sonja Mangold is an assessor in law. Following her two state examinations in law, she worked as a research associate at the Collaborative Research Center 597 (Sonderforschungsbereich “Transformations of the State”) in Bremen (Germany) from 2012 to 2015. She completed her PhD in the field of transnational labor law and EU anti-discrimination law in 2018. Her doctoral thesis received the Hugo Sinzheimer Award in 2019 from the Hugo Sinzheimer Institute for Labor and Social Security Law (Frankfurt a.M.) and the BMT Award 2019 from the Faculty of Law at the University of Bremen. Sonja Mangold is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Business Studies and Economics at the University of Bremen. Since spring 2022 she has been a principal investigator of the research project “Platform Work and Data Privacy in a National and International Perspective,” which is supported by the Hans Böckler Foundation. Her current research interests include consumer data protection laws from a comparative law perspective, regulation of new digital business models, alternative and cooperative forms of regulation, and lawand economics theories. 

Dr. Yayun Yang completed her PhD at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bremen in June 2021. Previously, she received a master’s degree in economic law from the China University of Political Science (CUPL) and the master of European and international Law (LL.M.), which was awarded by the University of Hamburg in 2016 under the double master program at the China-EU School of Law of the CUPL. In 2022, Yayun Yang became a lecturer at the Faculty of Economic Law of the Southwest University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing, China. Her research interests include labor law, gender equality law, and data protection law.