Analysis of Non-Discrimination Policies in the Sharing Economy

Recent research has exposed a serious discrimination problem affecting applications of the Digital Sharing Economy (DSE), such as Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit. To control for this problem, several DSE apps have crafted a new form of usage policies, known as non-discrimination policies (NDPs). These policies are intended to outline end-users' rights of equal treatment and describe how acts of bias and discrimination over DSE apps are identified and prevented. However, there is still a major knowledge gap in how such non-code artifacts can be formulated, structured, and evolved. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we introduce a first-of-its-kind framework for analyzing and evaluating the content of NDPs in the DSE market. Our analysis is conducted using a dataset of 108 DSE apps, sampled from a broad range of application domains. Our results show that, a) most DSE apps do not provide a separate NDP, b) the majority of existing policies are either extremely brief or combined as sub-statements of other usage policies, and c) most apps do not provide a clear statement of how their NDPs are enforced. Our analysis in this paper is intended to assist DSE app developers with drafting and evolving more comprehensive NDPs as well as help end-users of these apps to make more informed socioeconomic decisions in one of the fastest growing software ecosystems in the world.