The emergence of innovative platforms has extended the notion of online sharing to the vibrant new domain of sharing of material goods and services. The so called sharing economy has promised to provide more inclusive business opportunities for individuals of various skills levels and resource endowment. However, the public rhetoric of chances, growth, and inclusion frequently contrasts with the risks, concerns, disadvantages, and exclusion in the experiences of a variety of users. These platforms, extending into the private and physical realm of their users, also create compound privacy risks and increase the potential for exclusion and discrimination. In the face of ongoing growth across the sector, Europe is presented with a variety of challenges which need to be addressed in order to have a fair and inclusive sharing economy.
As such, the key objective of the Ps2Share project, ‘Participation, Privacy, and Power in the Sharing Economy’ was to identify key challenges of the sharing economy in Europe and improve Europe’s digital services through providing data-driven recommendations to the broad range of stakeholders involved. Our driving objective was therefore to conduct a thorough investigation into how issues of participation, privacy, and power interacted with the European sharing economy. To accomplish this objective, the consortium accordingly focused on three aspects in parallel, ensuring mutual collaboration and interaction: Participation, Privacy, and Power.
For participation, we aimed to investigate the social structuration of internet-mediated sharing and explore the social profiles of sharers and non-sharers. In addition, we wanted to look at obstacles to participation in terms of exclusion and discrimination, as well as the motives for non-sharing. We aimed to analyze current participation divides and make conclusions on how to create a more level playing field in the European sharing economy. For privacy, we wanted to explore the key opportunities and challenges of the sharing economy for consumers and their data. The sharing of personal data can leave users vulnerable to different harms, and high user privacy concerns are a barrier for participation. Since sharing comes with compounded privacy risks, extending beyond the informational into the physical realm, privacy risks are extensive. For power, one of our key objectives was to analyze the different forms of influencing and shaping occurring in the sharing economy and provide measures to ameliorate their negative effects. In particular, we aimed to look at the concepts of empowerment and disempowerment.
As a secondary objective, the consortium also wanted to provide a holistic overview of the sharing economy which took into account the role of platforms and the opportunities for designing a fairer, more empowered, and inclusive sharing economy. As such, the consortium aimed to enquire into the role of platforms in terms of participation, privacy, and power. Our goal was to assess whether platforms are designed inclusively and intuitively understandable, and whether they implicitly or explicitly discriminates against certain user groups. As such, we aimed to communicate design patterns that could be applied for a responsible design of sharing services.
