Amazon Updated Amazon Mechanical Turk Terms — What’s Changed

[electrolyte]

Apologies for the late response, I'm in catch-up mode.

About these - If they're now TOS violations, how are we going to report them to Amazon? Right now there's a way to report currently posted hits (on both the current and new sites), but hits that have already been returned/submitted/rejected are past that point. Yes, we could add that to TO reviews but that's not going to get back to Amazon; contacting the requester is very likely to have no effect; and messaging Amazon about requester issues usually just produces the "we don't get involved with those" response. I like that Amazon is finally trying to address this but they need to come up with a way to do that because, as "catnapped" said, this will be tested.

For the first part, I think it's more of a tactic to help us communicate when we get rejections and say to requesters, "Hey, you can't just reject this for no valid reason and here's the link to the TOS that says that and you're violating the agreement." I do agree that it'd be good if Amazon had a way to report HITs that were no longer available/posted, though.

For the second part, you can still report a HIT that you've accepted and been told to return, or you haven't accepted but see in the HIT instructions that this is part of the HIT design. Just use the report thingy in the bottom right corner of the HIT page.

 

[catnapped]

http://amazonmechanicalturkworkaround.blogspot.com/2015/07/workaround-for-increased-amazon.html

So surveys without "no retake disquals" are also against the TOS now?

 

[electrolyte]

http://amazonmechanicalturkworkaround.blogspot.com/2015/07/workaround-for-increased-amazon.html

So surveys without "no retake disquals" are also against the TOS now?

No. I think what that blog post is trying to say is that you cannot require a worker to accept a HIT, have them do a qualification check to see if they've participated before or not, and then tell them to return the HIT if the checker shows they have participated in the past (so the requester doesn't get duplicate work). So the post is recommending you use a qualification system to prevent repeat workers instead.

What I expect we'll see from requesters who are trying to conform to the new TOS is an uptick in them suggesting workers do the qualification check before accepting the HIT.