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The tech companies behind the so-called “sharing economy” have drawn the ire of brick-and-mortar businesses and local governments across the country.
For example, take-out apps such as GrubHub and UberEats have grown into a hundred-billion-dollar industry over the past decade, and received a further boost as many sit-down restaurants converted to only take-out during the pandemic. Small businesses are upset, in part, that these companies are collecting and monetizing data about their customers.
Likewise, ride-sharing services have decimated the highly-regulated taxi industry, replacing it with a larger, more nebulous fleet of personal vehicles carrying passengers around major cities. This makes them harder to regulate and plan around than traditional taxis. Alarmed municipal transportation agencies feel that they do not have the tools they need to monitor and manage ride-sharing.
A common thread runs through these emerging industries: massive volumes of sensitive personal data. Yelp, Grubhub, Uber, Lyft, and many more new companies have inserted themselves in between customers and older, smaller businesses, or have replaced those businesses entirely. The new generation of tech companies collect more data about their users than traditional businesses ever did. A restaurant might know its regular customers, or keep track of its best-selling dishes, but Grubhub can track each user’s searches, devices, and meals at restaurants across the city. Likewise, while traditional taxi services may have logged trip times, origins, and destinations, Uber and Lyft can link each trip to a user’s real-world identity and track supply and demand in real time.
This data is attractive for several reasons. It can be monetized through targeted ads or sold directly to data brokers, and it gives larger companies a competitive advantage over their smaller, less information-hungry peers. It allows tech companies to observe market trends, informing decisions about pricing, worker pay, and wh
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Read the original article: Why Data-Sharing Mandates Are the Wrong Way To Regulate Tech