ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part discusses the accountability of algorithms. It describes digital economies are rapidly adopting automated algorithms to manage transactions and to gather and analyse data. The types of threats that feature most predominantly for digital economies are identifying and locating potential defendants for breaches of contract and regulation in online business and data protection generally. Since the advent of the Internet, commercial and social processes have been migrating onto platforms. Information and communications technologies contribute to businesses in many ways. First, the rapid advances in the technology largely reduced the prices of computing hardware within a short timeframe. Second, a prominent trend in the digital economy is the sharing or ‘gig’ economy, which refers to collaborative consumption that involves the peer-to-peer sharing of goods and services. Social relationships of trust in business contracts were explored in the 1960s by Stewart Macaulay.
