The Sharing Economy and Our Privacy

I don't understand what the definition of the "sharing economy" is here. If you had been writing about free software, creative commons, the "user-generated content" approach to media construction, bittorrent uses of bandwidth, etc., I would be able to locate the "sharing." Here you are not even talking about disintermediation, but rather forms of new intermediation for selling transport and short-term lodging services while undermining regulated markets. If there is sharing as opposed to owning going on, the essay does not identify what it is.

Privacy, on the other hand, the essay is about, but it's not clear what, on this subject, the point is. Uber is a system of sensors, operated by owners who pay for the sensing gear and 35% of their operating revenue, in order to produce vast quantities of real-time location data (the most valuable personal information there is, right now) for an unscrupulous operator. But you describe only one small, not particularly important, aspect of the consequences of this business, and one administrative measure involved in that peripheral aspect of the service's "business model." Joined to a quite run-of-the-mill administrative subpoena for business records of an intermediary for unregulated lodging services, the only common point we can say the essay conveys is "you should be careful about your data." This is true, but not exactly worth all the words spent getting there.

The routes to improvement seem to me to be:

1. Deciding whether the "sharing economy" is part of the subject, and if so writing about it; and
2. Distilling the point you want to make about privacy into a brief statement of thesis, and putting that proposition at the front of the essay. You can then explicate that thesis, using these two and perhaps other brief illustrations in the body of the essay, setting up a conclusion in which you go beyond the thesis from which you began, to ask a question or offer a consequence that the reader can explore on her own.