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But almost entirely overlooked amid the public outrage is the massive pool of low-wage workers – especially in the sharing economy – who are vulnerable to a wide range of abuses on the job because they lack basic labor rights.

“We have to talk about this as a problem these platforms have created,” said Mary Anne Franks, a University of Miami law professor who studies online abuse. “[If you’re] going to set up a platform to make it possible for people to instantaneously communicate with people they don’t know ... you know full well it’s going to be abused and weaponized.”

The success of many on-demand companies like DoorDash depends on hiring a large, cheap workforce of contract employees who have no benefits or job security.

mechanism by which this shift in power from institutions to individuals would take place. We now know that mechanism is pull.

Pull allows each of us to find and access people and resources when we need them, while attracting to us the people and resources that are relevant and valuable

Employers that fail to provide sufficient professional development opportunities for their employees. These companies will lose their most talented workers to more magnetic organizations that provide better chances for learning and growth.

There are more platforms, more websites, more pat solutions to serious problems — here’s an app that can fix drug addiction! promote fiscal responsibility! advance childhood literacy!

The doors to start-up-dom have been thrown wide open. At Harvard, enrollment in the introductory computer-science course, CS50, has soared. Last semester, 39 percent of the students in the class were women, and 73 percent had never coded before.

I protested: “What about Facebook?” He looked at me, and I thought about it. No doubt, Facebook has changed the world. Facebook has made it easier to communicate, participate, pontificate, track down new contacts and vet romantic prospects. But in other moments, it has also made me nauseatingly jealous of my friends, even as I’m aware of its unreality. Everything on Facebook, like an Instagram photo, is experienced through a soft-glow filter. And for all the noise, the pinging notifications and flashing lights, you never really feel productive on Facebook.

A membership site is not a money-machine. The clue is in the name: membership site. It is a collection of people. You don’t just set it up, take people’s money, give them some content and walk away. They are there for an experience. They want something, and you have a duty of care to give it to them. Back when I first set up my Spirit Authors site, I attended a training session with the developers of WishList Member. The one thing they said repeatedly to our group was: ‘People COME to your site for the content, but they STAY for the community.’

The bottom line is this: a membership site is not a product; it’s a business. As such, it doesn’t just need good content; it needs a business model, a marketing plan and a team of people who know what they need to do and how to do it.

“We talk to community managers all the time and we ask ‘What’s the thing you didn’t think was going to be part of your role? What’s the one component you were surprised how much time you were spending on it?’ It’s almost always evangelism and coaching,” said Jim Storer, principal and cofounder of The Community Roundtable, during a webinar earlier this month cohosted with community platform provider Higher Logic. Storer’s colleague and TheCR cofounder Rachel Happe added that the organization created a working group on the role of “becoming an internal consultant,” just to help TheCR members excel in that role.

TheCR report also notes that “best-in-class” online communities are more often managed by a staff team, rather than by a single person.

“Given what we now know about the complexity of—and potential for—sustained and productive engagement, the notion that a lone community manager can address all the strategic, operational, and tactical responsibilities is quickly fading,” the report states. “Implementing many of the processes and programs that are markers of maturity generally requires more resources, and best-in-class communities with bigger teams are able to prioritize community programming, advocacy programs, community management training, and other key community elements.”

This isn’t the first time this has happened, that big data sets full of personal information – supposedly obscured, or de-identified, as the process is called – have been reverse engineered to reveal some or even all of the identities contained within. It makes you wonder: Is there really such a thing as a truly anonymous data set in the age of big data?

That might sound like a bore, but think about it this way: there’s more than taxi cab data at stake here. Pretty much everything you do on the Internet these days is a potential data set. And data has value. The posts you like on Facebook, your spending habits as tracked by Mint, the searches you make on Google – the argument goes that the social, economic and academic potential of sharing these immensely detailed so-called “high dimensional” data sets with third parties is too great to ignore.

University of Colorado Law School associate professor Paul Ohm’s 2009 paper on the topic made the bold claim that “data can be either useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.”

but we do know that third-party data brokers sell all manner of information to businesses, including “police officers’ home addresses, rape sufferers, and genetic disease sufferers” as well as suspected alcoholics and cancer and HIV/AIDS patients.

The first is that almost everything is personal. In the words of computer scientists Arvind Narayanan (Princeton

this model simply doesn’t reflect the reality of the deeply unequal situation we now face. Those who wield the tools of data tracking and analytics have far more power than those who don’t.