A euphemism is a polite way of obscuring an uncomfortable or unpleasant truth. So pornography becomes adult entertainment, genocide becomes ethnic cleansing, sacking someone becomes letting him (or her) go. People pass away rather than die; toilets become rest rooms; CCTV cameras monitor public and private spaces for our comfort and safety; and shell shock evolved into battle fatigue before finally winding up as post-traumatic stress disorder – which is really a way of disguising the awkward fact that killing people in cold blood can do very bad things to your psyche.

The tech industry is also addicted to euphemism. Thus the ubiquitous, unfair, grotesquely unbalanced contract which gives an internet corporation all the rights and the user almost none is called an end-user licence agreement. Computers that have been illegally hacked are “pwned”. The wholesale hoovering-up of personal data by internet companies (and the state) is never called by its real name, which is surveillance. And so on.

The rise of platforms like eBay, Justpark and Airbnb is a positive development but we need an honest term to describe it

But the word that is most subverted by the tech industry is share. Everywhere you go on the web you find injunctions to share whatever it is that you’ve found. Buttons provide a one-click way of sharing via email, Twitter, Facebook – which of course gives the companies an efficient way of surveilling not just your browsing habits, but also your online relationships.

And then there’s the sharing economy which, on closer inspection, seems to be mostly about selling rather than sharing. The poster-children of this euphemism are the cab-hailing app Uber and Airbnb, the platform that enables you to rent someone’s spare room for a night or two at much cheaper rates than a hotel chain could offer. But there are lots of others. There’s Justpark, which lets you rent out your driveway, or Urban Massage which will enable you to book a massage from a peripatetic practitioner in the comfort (and, presumably, security) of your own home. Without a trace of irony, one survey says that “Britain is Europe’s sharing economy capital” and then invites us to “meet the companies behind this booming £500m industry”.

Illustration by Matt Murphy.

Whatever else it is, this ain’t sharing. Instead, it’s a perfectly intelligent way of using the internet as a way of putting buyers and sellers in touch with one another. It’s just the contemporary embodiment of what eBay started all those years ago. And that’s fine. In fact, on a bigger scale it could be one way of reducing the colossal wastefulness of modern industrial society. Why should every household have to own things that spend most of their time idle? We could, of course, just use the net to coordinate the lending of these things to one another. But in general that’s just too much hassle in an urbanised society. So the rise of platforms like eBay, Justpark and Airbnb is a positive development. We just need an honest term to describe it.

In that context, Airbnb is particularly intriguing. It already operates on a global scale (190+ countries), and claims to coordinate rentals of more than 800,000 rooms as well as 3,000 castles, 17,000 villas and even 1,400 boats. On the room-rental side, therefore, it has become a serious rival to even the international hotel chains. People I know who use it regularly report favourably on the experience, and most will now look first for an Airbnb rental rather than a hotel when going abroad.

A glance at insideairbnb.com, a useful site that does data analytics on Airbnb properties in various locations, shows why property owners like “sharing” – and why the hotel chains should be worried. There’s a “large garden flat” in the Primrose Hill area of London, for example, available for £100 per night (two-night minimum booking). The site estimates that the flat, which is available for only 150 days a year, is probably rented for 22 nights a year, which means an annual income of £2,200. Not a lot, by London standards, but still a way of defraying some of the cost of maintaining a pied-à-terre in a nice part of town.

Anything as disruptive to the established order as Airbnb cannot expect a uniformly easy ride (though it has faced much less resistance than Uber). The hotel sector in many countries is heavily regulated but most Airbnb “hosts” probably slip under regulatory radars and this troubles local authorities: there are concerns about visitor (and host) safety and security, for example. Municipalities also worry that entrepreneurial property owners are effectively running covert hotels under the Airbnb flag. And tax authorities everywhere harbour dark suspicions that some hosts don’t declare their earnings from rentals. And they’re probably right: after all, it’s just “sharing”, innit.