Terms and Conditions

for Job Creators/Providers (hereafter called “Clients“) and Individual Job Performers (hereafter called “Workers”)

This document contains the standard form contract between us, namely the Crowdee GmbH (referred to as „us“, cf. our Impressum) and both the job provider of micro-jobs (referred to as „clients“) and job workers performing micro-jobs (referred to as „workers“) w.r.t terms and conditions of the contract when using our crowdsourcing micro-job distribution platform, be it by navigation to „Crowdee.com“ or by direct link referral. With “micro-jobs” we entitle the totality of tasks that can be worked at using our platform, e.g., scientific surveys, regular surveys, user-tests, labeling tasks, measurement campaigns, and knowledge exploration calls. With “platform” we entitle the totality of system components or interfaces, e.g., our mobile Apps, Websites, web-based platforms, and APIs. We object to any other version of Terms and Conditions with this document. Please note, Crowdee is currently available as beta-version and is still in test phase.

Crowdsourcing, being a modern business term, is defined as the process of fulfilling tasks and assignments (e.g. obtaining needed services, ideas, solution to tasks, co-work or content) by soliciting contributions from a large group of people outside an organization (so called “crowd”), and especially from online communities, rather than from traditional freelancers or suppliers. In the nature of crowdsourcing, do not guarantee for completeness nor feasibility of individual tasks by a specific crowd-worker in the sense that an identifiable individual can be guaranteed to work on any individual task. Rather, we mediate tasks to a certain group or subgroup of crowd-workers connected with an incentive or reward in order to motivate relevant sets of crowd-workers to work at a given task. Crowd-workers are free to choose if, when and where they participate in working at tasks at their own discretion. Further, no link nor obligations wrt labor-, tax-, or liability-related claims may raise on the level of identifiable individual crowd-worker. In accordance, direct connections between crowd-members and clients are explicitly excluded. Any personal data available to Crowdee (e.g. crowd-worker accounts, email addresses, phone numbers, locations addresses etc.) suitable for direct identification of or direct communication with the crowd-workers will not be disclosed to clients in any ways that permit for re-identification or direct communication.

In order to execute our services, we may sub-contract to third-party panels or external crowd-networks and platforms. The totality of all networks available spans a global crowd as source of approximately 1.4 million potential participants. In order to match client requirements, the selection of appropriate crowd sub-networks wrt. to our service offer will be made at our discretion exclusively incorporating aspects of both economy as well as quality of service.

1. Contractual Relationship and Service Offer

1.1 In order to be eligible for our job offers you have to accept this Terms and Conditions, which constitutes an agreement between you and us, cf. our Impressum, without any specific period of validity. The contract is bound to you and cannot be transferred or delegated. Crowdee provides a platform for creation, exchange, distribution, and performance of micro-jobs. Crowdee acts as a micro-job service platform. We collect, distribute and offer micro-jobs to crowd-workers for execution. No labor legislation-related or legal claims or obligations shall arise from our service. Crowd-workers perform the execution of micro-jobs under full self-control, meaning we do not order nor prescribe any work, working-time, working-hours or result to the crowd-workers. Crowd-workers are not employed with Crowdee and are not bound by our instructions or subject to accept jobs. Every micro-job is performed by means of free will, free selection, and free choice. We neither guarantee completeness nor feasibility connected to job characteristics or requirements of a job.

1.2 After agreeing to these terms and conditions clients are entitled to create and share micro-jobs, workers are entitled to perform micro-jobs. Any micro-job must be clearly stating the object and main characteristics of the job, e.g., the expected working time and the payment reward, all of which are clearly shown to workers before accepting the job. Upon acceptance of a job, workers accept all available characteristics of a micro-job and declare that they have read and fully understand these job characteristics. Accepting a job automatically effects an agreement between clients and workers, which terms and conditions are detailed in this document.

1.3 You can resign from these terms and conditions in 30 days notice. Please write an Email to our customer service requiring termination. Please make sure to regularly end all hitherto accepted micro-jobs by the day the termination becomes effective. No micro-jobs can be performed or created after that day. However, your right to terminate this contract for cause remains intact.

1.4 We preserve our right to instantaneously chancel any contract without previous notice when a continuation is judged unreasonable by us. This specifically applies in case of infringement of this Terms and Conditions or violation of applicable law. In addition, we reserve the right to regularly chancel this agreement on 30 days notice. Cancellation will be delivered via the email address you register and maintain with us in your profile data. Upon termination, all agreements on the usage of our service become void.

1.5 In case of agreement cancellation by us, you are only allowed to sign up to our service again after obtaining written explicit permission from our customer service. Active users are not allowed to provide access to our services to other users in any way. This specifically includes providing access to individuals whose contract was canceled by us.

2. Registering and Data Security

2.1 In order to use our services, you need to apply to establish a user account by signing up and registering a personal account on our platform. Each individual is only allowed to operate one account with Crowdee. Operating multiple accounts can lead to service exclusion and agreement cancellation. Framework contracts with any person or entity (regardless of legal form) are possible. Any such person or entity is entitled personally or through employees to use our services, provided such person or entity ensures that its individual employees may be definitively and discretely identified by Crowdee, e.g., by discrete, exclusive, anonymous pseudonyms (for example, “Company XYZ_Employee7”). Workers must be at least 18 years old. Workers have no legal entitlement to require acceptance of their applications to establish a user account, as Crowdee decides upon its sole and absolute discretion.

2.2 You are obligated to answer the profiling question and give personal information truly and accurately. This specifically includes data regarding your personal identity, address, email, qualifications, education, and expertise. The choice of user name may not infringe on any third party rights, cf. section 5. In order to process payout of rewards accumulated with your account, we may ask you for a bank account, upon request. We are entitled to request documents proving your personal data upon request also on short notice. Fraudulent, unlawful or malicious statements can lead to service exclusion.

2.3 You receive updates and information regarding this contract and our terms and conditions from time to time delivered to the email address you maintain with your profile. Therefore, it is very important to keep the email address always up to date and check your Emails not less than in 30 days intervals. You are required to update and maintain the accuracy of all data provided and to undertake any necessary changes immediately and without delay. Crowdee will not be responsible for its inability to contact workers or clients who fail to update their personal information.

2.4 Please choose a secure password upon registration. You are responsible for taking precautionary measures in order to keep the password safe and secret. Don’t share your password in any way. The Crowdee customer service team will NEVER ask you to reveal your password.

2.5 Your personal data is save with us, and will never be shared with any third party without your explicit permission or unless obligated elsewise by law. Crowdee uses your data internally in order to match jobs, maintain our services and process account balancing based on your data. Specific usage and context analyses are executed anonymously in order to improve our services. Internally our system uses secure connections and certified recipients only. Storage is done in German electronic data processing centers of high-security level. Please also refer to our Privacy Statement.

2.6 Please report immediately upon suspicion of abuse or malpractice. Upon reasonable suspicion or hacking of your account we are entitled to take necessary means to analyze the suspicion. Specifically, we are entitled to block or close your account temporarily or permanently. However, in case of abuse was caused by your own actual fault, you are liable for damages and emerging claims.

2.7 We will commence secure deletion of data upon a) your written request to do so via emails to our customer service, as well as your absence from our platform for a long time. In more detail, we will lock you’re your account upon 24 consecutive months of not logging in. You receive a notification of it. Upon further 24 consecutive months of not logging in we will proceed to delete your personal data permanently. Ultimately, you receive a notification shortly before.

2.8 Workers agree to keep confidential vis-a-vis any third parties all data related to the micro-jobs including any information connected to the performance of the job. Workers explicitly agree to perform the work in a manner such that third parties have no access to any data provided with the job. These confidentiality obligations shall survive contract cancellation or termination. Crowdee reserves the right to take action against workers that culpably violate these obligations.

2.9 Each worker unconditionally assigns to Crowdee the right to use all rights to the work and services performed and produced in order to complete the job without limitation as to time, geographic scope or content. This assignment of rights pertains to and encompasses without limitation all rights of authorship and copyright and trademark rights, and applies to all forms of use, including without limitation the rights to duplicate, disseminate, perform, reproduce in public and publish, work upon and amend or alter any applicable (if any) rights of authorship or other protective rights. Specifically, this includes without limitation the right of Crowdee to assign to third parties corresponding rights to the same extent so that the work performed can be made freely available to others. Workers hereby renounce any right to be publicly named or described as the author of any such work performed. Note, jobs may account for compensation in case of an assignment of the above rights with respect to work performed in specific cases.

3. Information, Communication

3.1 We inform about new micro-jobs user tests or scientific surveys or elsewise related topics on our webpage and by means of short notification messages using our Crowdee Apps. Detailed settings can be found on your mobile device. There you specify which notifications are displayed to you. In addition, we are entitled to contact you via your profile email.

3.2 System maintenance and updates may cause temporary unavailability of our system. Likewise this could also affect networks and devices not maintained by us. We apologize for potential inconveniences and service limitations.

3.3 In order to protect our system from abuse, spam or malware, we are eligible to commence precautionary measures including the application of anti-spam or anti-spy filters and software programs to an appropriate extent.

4. Crowdee Offers, Settlement, Payoff, Rewards

4.1 Rewards for performing micro-jobs are principally set by clients. Guiding these settings, we provide a set of principles the rewards should be related to, e.g. level of difficulty, work duration, expertise, education, and specific skills demanded. Ultimately, legitimate differences in payment given individual qualification levels may apply. Experienced users may be rewarded higher payment in some cases. With “experienced” we integrate actual experiences with micro-jobs of the same or similar type as well as the hitherto assessed quality of work. However, although there is no right to claim any reward, we always encourage our clients to follow these principles of merit and efficiency.

4.2 For actual money transfer we partner with professional payment providers like “Paypal”. Please provide all necessary information during the payout process to the payment provider. You are liable and responsible for any claims arising due to erroneous or incomplete information. Specifically, this includes additional expenditures or overdue charges for missing bank account or credit card information. More details on the Terms and Conditions of the payment providers can be found with the selected payment provider you chose during checkout. Before checking out money from Crowdee, we reserve the right to inspect suspicious transaction requests and require explanation and legal approval from 3rd parties.

4.3 Workers are fully and exclusively responsible for complying with all social security, social welfare, social insurance, and tax laws applicable in the jurisdiction in which he or she resides. In particular, each worker shall be responsible for paying taxes and deductions required in connection with our services.

4.4 The amount of reward and time duration w.r.t micro-job performance is clearly shown to the user before accepting the micro-job. Note, a reward of “0” (zero) is admissible. The reward is offered one-time only and is not extensible. Upon acceptance, workers agree to these characteristics and the respective amount of money is blocked from the client account and pre-allocated to the workers account for the given time period. Workers are strictly prohibited from subcontracting or outsourcing Crowdee micro-jobs to third parties unless this is expressly permitted by written approval in the characteristics of the micro-job or by Crowdee quality control team. Upon abortion of a job or expiry of the given time period, the pro-allocated money is de-allocated and charged back to the client account. In both cases, the incomplete micro-job will be available for other workers automatically and immediately. Upon completion of a job before expiry, the pre-allocated amount is credited to workers account only if the client approves within the given timeframe the performance to be successful and complete, i.e. when the work is done matches the task as explained in the task description in content and extent. Client approval can be done by the client him/herself or on behalf of him/her by Crowdee or a third party. Upon rejection of your performance we propose the following two-step arbitration, which can be invoked only one time for an individual job, and which’s lifetime exceeds the regular expiry date.

Step 1: Clients can ask workers to improve performance with respect to content or extent of a job. Improvement will be processed free of additional reward for the worker. The worker can now react in two ways: 1) withdraw from the reward in case the worker agrees to the client improvement request and by revision considers the request justified. In case the workers still judges the work to be appropriate he can ask the client for withdrawal from the improvement request, explaining the work done and how it matches the job description. In case of withdrawal of either workers or clients arbitration is settled without further charges and consequences. In case of no feedback from the worker upon an improvement request from a client, the worker is interpreted as implicitly withdrawing and arbitration automatically ends 48hours after the client has requested the improvements in the first place. 2) The worker can improve the performance and re-submit the improvement. Upon acceptance of improved performance, the original pre-allocation is credited to the worker’s account, arbitration is settled. No additional costs arise out of this Step 1 for the client or worker.

Step 2: Upon once again the rejection of the worker’s improved work the worker can again withdraw from the reward in case the worker agrees to the renewed client improvement request and by revision considers the request justified. In case the worker judges the client request for improvement to be unjustified arbitration is performed by Crowdee quality team at its own discretion. Cost for arbitration are: 50% of the reward pre-allocated plus arbitration processing fee of EUR 20 (twenty) to be withdrawn entirely or fractionally from the accounts of the client or workers involved, to an extent that the Crowdee arbitration team judges the parties to be causal of culpable mismatch between client and workers attitude of work or extent definition. Likewise, pre-allocated rewards disputed will be shared according to the causality of culpably mismatch. Crowdee arbitration team is now entitled to commence transfers with the positive and negative amount from or to the accounts of the involved parties. Arbitration decision is incontestable.

In case of re-occurring arbitration involvement w.r.t arbitration Step, 2 of either party Crowdee preserves the right to instantaneously lock user accounts or eventually chancel contracts without previous notice when a continuation is judged unreasonable by us. Please, not that this is to maintain high-quality service along with service satisfaction with our Crowdee platform.'

5. 3rd Party Content, IP, Copyright

5.1 Individual jobs or requested actions upon the performance of these jobs may include sensitive data such as text, images, or elsewise related copyrighted or personal data. In case of usage of copyrighted data on our platform, you are requested to provide written consent and permission to use these data upon request by Crowdee at any time. Copyright must be respected in any way of presentation or usage, e.g. by stating copyright information in the vicinity of the copyrighted content. You are obliged to respect copyright by law. Please check the individual licenses to find out about copying or editing conditions and limitations. Any violation of applicable law, including without limitation a violation of the rights of authorship, “personality rights” (including Section 823 Paragraph 1 of the German Civil Code – BGB), or other protective rights of third parties, are forbidden. Workers are required to reimburse and indemnify Crowdee for all costs and expenses incurred by Crowdee owing to claims asserted by third parties against Crowdee in connection these rights and the content or work performed. Crowdee does not assume liability for a correct and orderly usage of copyrighted content on our platform. Liability is assumed with the party that uses/ uploads the content to our platform. Each client and worker will thereof indemnify and hold Crowdee harmless from any third party rights relating to violations of name-rights, trademarks, rights of authorship or patent rights, insofar as this is legally permissible. Clients further indemnify Crowdee w.r.t. resulting costs and expenses, including without limitation attorneys and court costs, incurred by Crowdee in connection with legal actions carried out by third parties on account of data or content uploaded to our platform. Crowdee shall be liable only for damages resulting from willful misconduct and gross negligence. On simple negligence, Crowdee shall only be liable for damages relating to injury to life, bodily harm or health; damages relating to breach of a material contractual obligation (an obligation essential to the proper consummation of the contract and as to which a worker may, and reasonably does, rely); in such case, however, liability of Crowdee shall be limited to restitution of foreseeable, reasonably expected damages. Workers warrant to Crowdee that in performing jobs on the Crowdee platform, they are not undertaking any risks beyond the ordinary risks of life.

5.2 We reserve the right to block content we entertain suspicion to infringe copyright law. Reasonable suspicion may specifically arise when governmental investigation or prosecution is being realized. We further reserve the right to keep blocking accounts until suspicion is falsified. Further, we reserve the right to revisit the content for improvement or request improvement before unblocking accounts.

5.3 Our service can only be used in ways that do not violate the law, copyright law, or these Terms and Conditions. Please pay attention to the following:

1. It is forbidden to generate or distribute information that can harm the education or development of children and adolescent persons. Further, is it forbidden to breach human dignity or law in any way. You must not call out on infringements of law or instruct someone to break the law or distribute such instructions. Generation, usage or distribution of racism terms, pornographic content, content which glorifies or trivialize violence, as well as content against public policy.

2. All forms of defamation, libel, and slander, nuisance and harassment are forbidden.

3. Law related to copyright, brands, or elsewise property rights must not be infringed.

5.4 We specifically emphasize lawful limitation for combating irregular work. Jobs that aim to perform or call out on the performance of work restricted by such limitations are forbidden. Especially this is the case when accepting Crowdee jobs for performance other than on our website. Further, we emphasize, that certain work may be restricted by labor legislation regulations, e.g. performance of architects or engineering, and may thus not be negotiable in all job characteristics.

5.5 Upon infringement of the law or these Terms and Conditions, we reserve the right to act accordingly, including a span of actions ranging from notifications and improvement requests to account block and contract cancellation without prior notice. You are obliged to act considerately upon notice.

5.6 Each worker unconditionally assigns to Crowdee the right to use all rights to the work and services performed and produced in order to complete the job without limitation as to time, geographic scope or content. This assignment of rights pertains to and encompasses without limitation all rights of authorship and copyright and trademark rights, and applies to all forms of use, including without limitation the rights to duplicate, disseminate, perform, reproduce in public and publish, work upon and amend or alter any applicable (if any) rights of authorship or other protective rights. Specifically, this includes without limitation the right of Crowdee to assign to third parties corresponding rights to the same extent so that the work performed can be made freely available to others. Workers hereby renounce any right to be publicly named or described as the author of any such work performed. Note, jobs may account for compensation in case of an assignment of the above rights with respect to work performed in specific cases.

5.7 All information and data generated, collected or produced in other ways during the execution of a micro-job persists and remains sole and exclusive ownership to us including all rights of authorship or other protective rights until the process of accounting and payment has successfully been closed and approved by us. This explicitly excludes and private or commercial usage or exploitation of any data or results in any way during the lifetime of a running job and includes the time between termination of a job and full settlement of job-related accounting, invoicing and payment settlement.

6. Updates and Changes to these Terms and Conditions

6.1 We reserve the right to update and change our Terms and Conditions at any time. If so, we will notify you at least 3 (three) weeks in advance, meaning 3 (three) weeks ahead of the effective update or change application day. You can reject these updates and changes by writing to our customer service within 3 (three) weeks upon arrival of update notification. In these cases, individual examination of your case by our customer service will determine if you can stay with the original version or elsewise processing must be done. Upon no written rejection all updates and changes are applied and become legally binding on an effectual day. In any case, we will inform you about the update record, your right to reject these updates, the connected statutory period to do so, and consequences, in due time.

7. Jurisdiction

7.1 Place of jurisdiction on any conflicts wrt. the usage of our services is Berlin, Germany. The written and spoken language shall be German. To the extent legally permissible (in particular as to persons with no legal office in Germany), Berlin shall be the exclusive legal venue for all disputes arising out of the user relationship and these Terms and Conditions.

8. Severability Clause

8.1 The invalidity of individual provisions of these Terms and Conditions shall not affect the validity of the remaining provisions.