The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power
ESSAY THE TAKING ECONOMY: UBER, INFORMATION, AND POWER Ryan Calo∗ & Alex Rosenblat∗∗ Sharing economy firms such as Uber and Airbnb facilitate trusted transactions between strangers on digital platforms. This creates eco- nomic and other value but raises concerns around racial bias, safety, and fairness to competitors and workers that legal scholarship has begun to address. Missing from the literature, however, is a fundamen- tal critique of the sharing economy grounded in asymmetries of infor- mation and power. This Essay, coauthored by a law professor and a technology ethnographer who studies work, labor, and technology, furnishes such a critique and proposes a meaningful response through updates to consumer protection law. ∗. Lane Powell and D. Wayne Gittinger Assistant Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law. ∗∗. Researcher and Technical Writer, Data & Society Research Institute. The authors would like to thank Christo Wilson, Yan Shvartzshnaider, and Michelle Miller at Coworker.org; Nayantara Mehta and Rebecca Smith at the National Employment Law Project; participants in the Berkeley Law Privacy Law Scholars Conference; participants in the Loyola Law School faculty workshop; participants in the University of Pennsylvania IP colloquium; and danah boyd, Stacy Abder, Shana Kimball, Janet Haven, Julia Ticona, Alexandra Mateescu, Caroline Jack, and Shannon McCormack for thoughtful insights, comments, and feedback. The Uber Policy Team also provided helpful comments, which we try to address throughout the paper. Madeline Lamo, the librarians at Gallagher Law Library, and Patrick Davidson provided excellent research and editing. Rosenblat’s ongoing qualitative research on ride-hail drivers from 2014–2017 is vari- ously funded by Microsoft Research (FUSE grant–Peer Economy, 2014); the MacArthur Foundation (Intelligent & Autonomy Grant, 2014–2016); Open Society Foundations (Future of Work, 2014); and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (Mapping Inequalities in the On-Demand Economy, 2017–2018).
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