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Comment by letsgetphysITal | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. The turkers don't need to know that they're extracting the "country, state (or equivalent), city," from a list of adult store customers in order to extract that data. Sharing the context is superfluous to requirements in this instance, so likely is not included in the task mandate.

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That information wouldn't be directly included, but some account has to post the hit. That account is either associated with some company or some person who works for some company.

Why would Amazon pass that information to turkers?

"Find city, county, state in this list and post in the three boxes "City" "County" "State" in the web form." is literally all the information required for this task. All of the rest can be handled by Amazon's staff, or more likely automated processes. The turker need not know for whom they do the work, or why. They could be processing marketing communications, or census returns, or credit card applications, or literally anything else where an address may be used.

mTurkers get to pick and choose which hits they want to work on. They see a list of available hits, and each has a title, description, submitter, estimated time, and reward. The submitter matters to mTurkers because this allows them to see the hit acceptance rate (how often the submitter pays out on submissions, or how often they reject submissions).

So it's simply a fact of the platform that mTurkers know who they are working for.

Does the submitter have to use their or their company's real name? As long as it does the job of a name (stable, recognizable) it could be any name and still accomplish the goal of letting the MT worker sift through hits.

I don't think there is any requirement to use real names.

Did not know that. Seems... Weird. Thanks.

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