Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, and many other sharing-economy services have started occupying the markets of the Western World recently. These services are often providing cheaper, efficient, and reliable services to their customers. However, these services have also raised a lot of criticisms around them regarding labor exploitation, surveillance, and unemployment. Furthermore, when these services started expanding over the low-resource countries, a whole new world of potential, opportunities, concerns, and challenges appeared. However, this area has received little focus in HCI scholarship until very recently.

To this end, with Microsoft Research, I conducted an ethnography with the auto-rickshaw drivers in Bangalore, India in the Summer of 2015. Ola, a ride-sharing mobile phone application was expanding over the local transportation business at that time. Through our in-depth ethnomethodological study, and ethnographic understanding, we found how the marginalized auto-rickshaw drivers were struggling against this new technology. Not only many of them were struggling to get as many customers as they used to get, they also felt their driving skills devalued by the rise of the algorithmic search. This work has opened up a new research area that calls for conceptualizing "sharing" and its political economy from a contextualized perspective.