Preventing the Sharing Economy From Abusing Your Data

Imagine that you have just arrived in an unfamiliar city and need to get to your hotel downtown. Your phone’s battery is dying, so you would do almost anything to get there and recharge it. Would it be wrong for your Uber app to recognize your phone’s low battery level and inflate the price of a car ride downtown? It would, according to a recent paper highlighting the potential for firms like Uber or Lyft to abuse consumer data. Ryan Calo, a professor at Washington University School of Law, and Alex Rosenblat, a scholar at the Data & Society Research Institute, argue that this potential stems from imbalances in power and information that firms in the “sharing economy”—a growing market of transactions between strangers using a digital platform—can leverage to their benefit. The authors argue that consumer protection laws, which have combatted such imbalances since the early 20th century, present the right framework for solving this kind of…

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