Digital Reputation As A Labour Right: A Critical Legal Analysis Of Platform Ratings And Data Portability In India's Gig Economy
- IJLLR Journal
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Tanya Dhir, Assistant Professor of Law, SHEDS College of Law, Solan, Affiliated to Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India
ABSTRACT
The gig economy in India has rapidly expanded and transformed the nature of the labour markets in a fundamental way through new work models on platforms and technologies, algorithmic management, and rating systems driven by customer preferences and feedback. These platforms provide new forms of work flexibility but also (re)introduce new labour dependency, where workers' digital reputation is a valuable bankable asset that carry the conditions necessary to access jobs, income, incentives and to be hosted by the platform. While platform ratings are on the rise, there is a lack of rights protection in Indian labour laws for digital reputation and it doesn't offer ways to port reputation ratings across different digital platforms. This paper critically questions whether platform- generated ratings should be considered as a "proper" labour capital owned by workers instead of a "private" capital owned by only digital platforms. The study takes the method of analysis as Doctrine of Law and Comparative law and examines the Constitution of India, Code of social security, 2020, Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, Information Technology Act, 2000 and a few international developments in the field such as framework for data portability in the European Union and new rules for platform industries. The paper suggests that the lack of legal means to address digital reputation artificially reduces mobility options, increases economic dependency and helps enable opaque algorithmically-based decisions, such as near pound or unfair deactivation or discriminatory rating. It also envisions a framework of rules based on rights that emphasizes algorithms and algorithmic transparency, procedural fairness, and independent complaint means, in addition to recognizing that workers own their own reputation data and that of their workplace, and mandating data portability. The analysis of digital reputation as a labour right, instead of only being a data produced on platforms, enriches the ongoing discourse on governance of digital labour and has been used to formulate some policy suggestions to enhance the legal protections of digital labourers in the evolving platform economy in India, while ensuring innovation, competition, and workers' fundamental rights.
Keywords: Digital Reputation; Gig Economy; Labour Rights; Data Portability; Algorithmic Governance.
