Uber and Legal Liability

Uber and the Sharing Economy Last night 40,000 people rented accommodation from a service that offers 250,000 rooms in 30,000 cities in 192 countries and they chose their rooms and paid for everything online via AirBnb (The Economist, 2013). The sharing economy is one of the trends that is likely to expand quickly into many different industries. People are now able to rent out their homes or apartments to other individuals through AirBnB and has impacted the hotel industry worldwide.

The central concept is that technology has allowed people to share their things to gain extra income. The same can be said of the taxi industry and the introduction of Uber and similar services. In this service, people not only share their stuff (cars) but they also share their time and labor. Uber allows for a platform that allows people to drive other people around for money. These services are heavily technology driven.

In the sharing economy, with Uber in particular, the technological platform is critical because it allows for users of the service to access it from mobile platforms. For example, instead of having to call for a cab, you can use the Uber app from your smartphone to see what drivers are available who are close by, it even provides a map view of its available drivers.

You can even see the picture and reviews for the available drivers so that you can gain insights into the level of service in which you can expect from the Uber driver. Therefore, Uber has a technological advantage over more traditional modes of transportation and can be more convenient to use in many situations. Uber has leveraged technology in a way that provides quantities of scale. However, the sharing economy has also blurred the lines in many traditional concepts including things such as employment, ownership, and liabilities.

Many of these issues are currently taken for granted however they will become more salient as the sharing economy continues to grow in popularity. Uber has especially become a deeply debated political issue because it has challenged the taxi industry and has been met with opposition from the taxi labor union. "Even at a national level, politicians can't keep Uber's name out of their mouths. Uber has somehow already become the hot-button tech company of the 2016 presidential election.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton weighed in with concerns about the 1099 economy and worker misclassification, which some saw as a dig at Uber. Republican Jeb Bush made a show of taking an Uber while visiting San Francisco earlier this month. (Kosoff, 2015)" The company's Uber drivers, are similar to employees in several ways, but enjoy the advantages of being independent contractors which has challenged the traditional notions of employment. Liability and the screening of the independent contractors has been an issue as well.

There was one story that appeared in the media about a man who rented an AirBnB property for the weekend and broke his neck and was killed after swinging on a tree swing on the property; Uber has also had similar publicity and one Uber driver killed an eight-year-old girl who was crossing the street (Kokalitcheva, 2015). Such situations challenge the liability that the sharing economy platforms have to people who get injured or experience losses in other respects. Although these services act more as a platform that.