Why portable data can build a better gig economy and reign in Facebook
This week, Mark Zuckerberg dominated the headlines by testifying before congress about Facebook’s privacy policies and Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections. The part that caught our attention, however, was when Zuckerberg was asked whether Facebook is a monopoly, which is hard to dispute.
Discussing the issue in Techcrunch, Josh Constine points out that “Facebook has relentlessly sought to acquire or co-opt the features of its competitors. That’s why any valuable regulation will require Congress to prioritize competition. That means either breaking up Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; avoiding rules that are easy for Facebook to comply with but prohibitively expensive for potential rivals to manage; or ensuring data portability that allows users to choose where to take their content and personal information.”
This idea of data portability is worth exploring, since it’s proven increasingly problematic in the growing gig economy.
What is data portability and why does it matter to the gig economy?
The idea behind data portability is that you should be able to easily move your data from one service to another. Within the context of social media, this would mean being able to seamlessly move your photos and other content from one social network to another. For instance, if Instagram were to release new privacy policies that you don’t agree with, you would be able to simply port all your photos over to Snapchat, or vice versa.
This is important to the gig economy because a growing number of independent workers and freelancers use online work platforms, such as Uber, Taskrabbit, and Upwork to connect with clients and find gigs. Almost all of these platforms let clients leave ratings and reviews, which show up on a worker’s profile along with the total number of jobs they’ve completed on the platform. This profile serves as a type of digital CV, a growing testament to the quality of their work that helps them secure new clients.
Imagine, for example, that you’re trying to hire a handyman on TaskRabbit. Would you go with Jake, who has zero reviews or work history? Or John, who has completed 30 handyman gigs, has a 5-star rating, and has more than 15 glowing reviews? Personally, I’d hire John — even if he charges an extra $15 an hour.
This demonstrates the power of reputation in the gig economy. While it’s often hard to get that first gig and start building a reputation, once established, it can help workers win more gigs and increase their rates over time.
Now imagine another worker, let’s call her Erin, has built up a strong reputation on Platform A by consistently doing great work over the course of three years. All of a sudden, and without warning, Platform A triples their fees. What should Erin do? Sure, she could abandon Platform A for Platform B, but this would require her to abandon the online reputation that she’s spent so long building, and start fresh as a totally unknown and unproven worker on a new platform. More likely than not, Erin will simply accept the higher fee structure, and either make up the difference by working more hours, or simply take home less money at the end of the day.
This demonstrates how a lack of portable data dramatically shifts the balance of power in favor of online work platforms, creating an environment ripe for worker-hostile policies.
Let’s Race to the Top, Not the Bottom
Ultimately, the lack of portable data reveals the power dynamics that underpin the relationships between workers and the platforms they depend on. Currently, workers’ reputations are held hostage, allowing platforms to coerce them into accepting higher fees, stricter quotas, and a host of other hostile policies.
But what would happen if gig workers had true data portability that enabled them to take their work history, reviews, and ratings with them to a competing platform?
This would help create a free market for gig workers, enabling them to shop around for the best platform deal they can find, dramatically shifting the power dynamic in favor of workers. Instead of a race to the bottom in terms of wages and conditions, this might encourage a race to the top with platforms competing to offer the most worker-friendly policies possible in order to attract the best talent.
The Gig Economy Needs a Social Contract
Data portability is about establishing a new social contract for the gig work era. The basic premise is this: Gig work platforms have a right to profit off of workers and clients as a market-maker and service provider, but in exchange, gig workers have a right to take their online reputation with them.
This would bring the reputation portability of gig workers more in line with that of traditional workers, who can bring their reputations with them through personal references and resumes. For gig workers, whose work history has been atomized into discrete tasks, asking for references often isn’t an option. Data portability would solve this issue, and lay the foundation for an inclusive gig economy that helps workers thrive and build a better life for themselves.
Looking at You, Congress
If the idea of data portability sounds naive and infeasible, you might be surprised to learn that the European Union has already taken concrete steps to lay the foundation for data portability through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which are set to take effect at the end of May. While some data privacy advocates are already calling it a false promise, others think it could provide a positive first step towards more user-centric interoperability of digital services. We’ll likely have to wait for some court challenges to understand how the GDPR will play out, but it’s a promising sign that lawmakers are starting to recognize data portability as a serious need.
In the U.S. we need to learn from the GDPR, and push Congress to adopt similar legislation. If nothing else, the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal is an opportunity to push data portability into the public consciousness and onto the Congressional agenda.
