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Features

That’s not a ‘sharing economy’: that’s an invitation to sell your whole life

Uber and Airbnb are brilliant at cosy rhetoric, but they’re helping to create a world in which we’re all less secure

28 March 2015

9:00 AM

28 March 2015

9:00 AM

Technology businesses have a genius for inflicting indignities on us and spinning them as virtues. When they don’t want to respect copyright, they talk about the ‘democratisation of content’. When they want to truffle through our contact lists and browsing histories, they talk about ‘openness’ and ‘personalisation’. A hundred years ago, when a widow had to take in lodgers to pay the bills, it was called misfortune.

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