0

My question is exactly as the title says. I welcome answers for multiple jurisdictions, but I prefer there be some for any number of states in America, answers for countries in the EU in general, or country-specific ones like France, or the UK.

For some context, Fiverr recently started to show the amount of money each project of a freelancer has made them and time it took to complete the project for people to see publicly on their gig profile without the seller's consent, and released the update silently without any sort of notification as well. And the worse part is that they have not put in a feature for the sellers to disable this on their profile at all.

The page doesn't show the exact figure that was made on the project, but a very close range, such as, 100-150 USD when the project was done for say, 130 USD. If the law has any specification about exposing close ranges, as opposed to the exact figure, then you are welcome to specify them in your answer as well.

Here are some posts on the Fiverr community forum detailing the issue in case you are interested in more specifics:

Outraged by this as a Fiverr seller myself, I am wondering if this is even legal in most places. Because revealing someone's personal earnings that accurately without their consent doesn't sound like something that would be legal.

A Key Detail

I am adding this after my discussion with @Barmar in the comments. This update isn't something like a yelp review where buyers write the cost/duration of the project and tell if it was worth it or not. Fiverr automatically mentions the project costs in the seller profiles without BUYER consent as well.

For those of you who don't know how Fiverr works, Fiverr is an escrow system where buyers place projects/orders with sellers on an agreed upon price within the platform, and the buyer accepts the project after the seller delivers its files/relevant contents.

Afterwards, the money is transferred from Fiverr to the seller's paypal/bank. So if you are wondering how Fiverr gets the project's cost without the buyer telling them, this is how. They have it all go through within their system.

Edit: I already received an answer for the US, but still welcome more answers about it if someone has something new to add. For now though, I will prioritize answers based on European country laws even more as the existing answer by ohwilleke hints they might have something regarding it. I am also adding a bounty to this question as soon as I am able to so that it can get more attention and as many answers as possible to make the matter clear to me, perhaps Fiverr, and others form the Fiverr seller/buyer community visiting this in the future.

Final edit from me regarding the bounty: The bounty is still up and expires in 3 days. I will reward the bounty to the best answer after 2 days in case someone is still looking to post an answer.

Improve this question
9
  • Also, I am new to this StackExchange site and not very familiar with law, so I might have the wrong taggings. Feel free to correct them or let me know to correct them if that is the case.
    – Syed M. Sannan
    Commented Sep 10 at 18:20
  • It seems like this is like restaurant reviews having a number of $ to indicate how expensive the restaurant is.
    – Barmar
    Commented Sep 10 at 19:00
  • The whole point of the site is to match buyers and sellers. Isn't this a benefit to both, since sellers won't have to waste time with requests from buyers who can't afford their rates?
    – Barmar
    Commented Sep 10 at 19:03
  • @Barmar Well, there's no "buyer requests" feature on fiverr now, so it doesn't really "match" sellers in the way that they would have to go through a pile of relevant and irrelevant buyer requests. There's a "brief" system now, that uses an algorithm to determine if a buyer's project requirements suit you, and they send that right in your inbox with an ability for you to contact the buyer and give them a quote. So it's very unlikely nowadays that a seller receives a request from a buyer who can't afford them. Secondly, the gigs mention the service's price, but the reviews show each project's-
    – Syed M. Sannan
    Commented Sep 10 at 19:06
  • 1
    I didn't realize that, I was wondering how Fiverr knew the price without one of them providing it. Now it seems more suspicious.
    – Barmar
    Commented Sep 10 at 19:12

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
4
+100

This would be a matter of state law. Absent an agreement in a privacy policy or other contract to refrain from doing so, it is legal to do this in the United States under the laws of the vast majority of U.S. states, but there could be a handful of exceptions.

I am particularly unsure regarding the law of California, which tends to be an outlier with regard to U.S. privacy laws and has recently adopted an Internet privacy statute. California's law is important because many tech companies are based there.

Europe has much strong privacy protections than the United States. I don't know how this would be treated under the applicable European laws and regulations.

Improve this answer
6
  • Thank you for answering. I will wait for more answers before accepting. Once question though, since answers on this site can vary based on jurisdiction, is it just preferrable that I accept the answers based on the amount of detail they provide? Because, unless an answer is simply incorrect, all answers could be equally acceptable regardless of the jurisdiction they answer.
    – Syed M. Sannan
    Commented Sep 10 at 18:32
  • 1
    @SyedM.Sannan That's why it's often best to state a specific jurisdiction in the question. People can answer for other jurisdictions as FYI, but you would accept the best answer for your specific jurisdiction.
    – Barmar
    Commented Sep 10 at 19:01
  • @Barmar Yeah, perhaps I should have phrased it better in the tags. But I wanted this question to be helpful to the community of sellers on Fiverr as a whole so that they can see if their respective countries have anything against this. My country (Pakistan) pretty much functions like how a banana republic would regarding internet laws. If Fiverr solves this problem selectively for sellers of countries that don't potentially allow this, then my country is probably not one of them 😅.
    – Syed M. Sannan
    Commented Sep 10 at 19:15
  • 2
    It may be important to note that many protections apply differently in consumer vs business settings, so consumer privacy protections may not apply on Fiverr.
    – Ben Voigt
    Commented Sep 10 at 21:01
  • @BenVoigt Well, on Fiverr, there's this thing called a Fiverr "business client", where, it's a program that has people from businesses verified by Fiverr outsource certain things for their business on the site from its sellers. I have worked with quite a few Fiverr business buyers, and If I visit my gig profile, it shows what they payed as well. So consumers and real businesses don't really seem to be differentiated here. Also, the problem at hand is more of problem for service providers, but it does negatively effect some buyers as well like I mentioned in my comments above with Barmar.
    – Syed M. Sannan
    Commented Sep 10 at 21:17
2

Contract law is somewhat equal globally, and the general rule is, that many a right can be abridged by contract. Only relatively few rights can not be contracted away.

It's in the contract based on Fiverr's ToS

By using Fiverr, users give a wide latitude of rights to Fiverr. One such right is to use any material you create or upload to Fiverr for marketing and other uses. Any material includes the price you got for a specific gig, which is a number the users agreed to and created on Fiverr.

  1. Ownership

[...]

Furthermore, users (both Buyers and Sellers) agree that unless they explicitly indicate otherwise, the content users voluntarily create/upload to Fiverr, including Gig texts, photos, videos, usernames, user photos, user videos and any other information, including the display of delivered work, may be used by Fiverr for no consideration for marketing purposes and/or other purpose relevant for the operation and function of the Site.

under Art. 6, there are numerous prongs one can obtain the right to process data. Any single of the prongs suffices to be allowed to process the data in the fitting way. So one would need a prong that does cover displaying earnings, not just processing at all.

For example, 1b - a necessity for performance - is the prong with which a company working in escrow is allowed to handle the information needed for both receiving and distributing the money: you need bank numbers and amounts for that. This prong though should not cut it for displaying earnings, unless there's a convoluted reasoning .

It is unclear if the ToS contains a lawful clause to claim 1a - consent - for displaying earnings, especially since consent should be revokable. The displaying might be shoehorned into 1e - public interest - or 1f - legitimate interest - but I am not privy to the arguments that might be used there.

Improve this answer
4
  • I do not buy the "consent" prong. "Marketing purposes" does not seem specific enough to satisfy the GPDR requirements that the purposes of processing be explicitly agreed to (see article 5, 1(b); article 6, 1(a)). "Legitimate interest" may or may not apply; that sounds sketchy to me, but I am no expert in that area.
    – UJM
    Commented Sep 13 at 9:31
  • @UJM I do not incorporate GDPR in the answer, because it is shakey - and while i am well enough familiar with it to avoid obvious pitfalls, this is a highly tricky case. I said can because I have seen cases where ToS were sufficient for consent, while in others they were not. Can is the mere possibility, not an estimate if it suffice in this case. Legitimate interest would be just the next closest prong available, but by far isn't the only one.
    – Trish
    Commented Sep 13 at 9:55
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat.
    – Trish
    Commented Sep 13 at 13:14
  • 1
    Hey, I awarded the bounty to ohwilleke's answer but it was a tough choice since both of the answers are of good quality. However, since ohwilleke's answer catered more to the law of a specific jurisdiction, while yours was a more generalized one and contains just a hint regarding GDPR, I decided to accept their answer.
    – Syed M. Sannan
    Commented Sep 18 at 6:36

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .