Computer scientist Jaron Lanier, in the books You are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future, argues that the open source approach contributed to the social stratification and widening of the gaps between rich and the poor, the rich being the major stakeholders in digital companies, who own the content of the content creators.
It follows the development of Internet access and the spread of mobile devices, which allow almost everyone to be in touch with this kind of platform, including children and teenagers.
Such platforms cover a large field of domains: rental (Airbnb, Booking.com), travel (trivago, tripadvisor), food delivery (Uber Eats, Grub Hub, and Postmates), transportation (Uber, Taxify, Lyft), home services (Task Rabbit, Helpling), education (Udemy, Coursera), etc.
Digital Labor™ tasks are tracked, counted and purchased from Saile by companies ranging from the Fortune 500 to small businesses.
[7] This included scholarship like, "What the MySpace generation should know about working for free" (Trebor Scholz), and "From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City" (2010).
Microwork tasks can be completed before using the platform, which indirectly trains algorithms (such as text or image recognition when creating an account).
Proponents argue that exploitation occurs as typical social media users do not receive any monetary compensation for their digital content, while companies are able to take advantage of this freely accessible information to generate revenues.
[10] Studies of social media sites such as YouTube have analyzed their business models and found that user-generated digital labor is being monetized through ads and other methods to create company profit.
[12] Due to the lack of regulation, the issue of digital labor worker rights has been raised by some activists and scholars.
[17] Women tend to be centered around digital roles that conform to patterns in the traditional labor market and economy such as freelancing and on-location services provided by care work platforms.
[17] The participation of women in digital work platforms tends to be more concentered on traditionally female gender rolled tasks.
[18] Over the last two decades, there has been a steady decline in the gender-based wage gap in the United Kingdom largely caused by strict national labor relation anti-discrimination legislation.
[19] In the UK and most of Europe, many women find digital labor employment through remote crowd-work platforms (also known as part of the "Gig-economy") like Upwork, TaskRabbit, etc.
[22] It is found that there are several gender inequalities due to education, socioeconomic status, domesticity, and traditionalism which creates disparity in the ICT access and usage.