StreetLend

» see streetlend.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A ladder costs real money and gets used about twice a decade, so on any given street there is one ladder too many and several people who need one on a Saturday. StreetLend existed to close that gap. You listed the drill or the ladder or the wallpaper steamer, somebody nearby asked to borrow it, and the two of you sorted it out between yourselves. Nobody paid anybody.

Chris Beach built it in 2013 as a side project and ran it out of London for five years. The listings were concentrated there, in the hundreds rather than the thousands, and the site was deliberately pleasant to use: mobile-friendly, quick to sign into, with logins through Facebook or LinkedIn or a plain email address. It never made money. Beach has said plainly that running at a loss was fine, because his day job covered the bills.

Then in April 2018 he closed it, and the reason he gave started an argument that is still worth having.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the borrowing worked ~

The trust model was the interesting engineering. Landing on the site showed you the items near you, with your permission to use your location, and it surfaced things held by friends and by friends of friends ahead of strangers. That ordering came out of the social logins. It was doing the job a neighborhood noticeboard does, telling you how far from a stranger you actually are.

The money, such as it was, came from Amazon. Search StreetLend for a ladder and it showed you ladders to buy beside the ladders to borrow, and took a referral cut on anything bought. Beach was careful afterward to point out that no personal data went to Amazon in this, only the search term.

~ the law it would not risk ~

The closing notice is unusually direct about cause. GDPR, which took effect on 25 May 2018, "creates uncertainty and risk that are impossible to justify for small non-profit websites". It cited the headline penalty of four percent of turnover or twenty million euros, whichever is larger, and the exposure to what Beach called vexatious reporting. Young sites and non-profits cannot afford legal teams, he argued, so the risk was unacceptable, and the regulation would mainly entrench the companies big enough to absorb it.

Plenty of people disagreed, and the disagreement had substance. A site holding a few hundred lenders' names and rough locations had a modest compliance burden, and much of what GDPR demanded was already law in the United Kingdom under the Data Protection Act 1998. The counter-argument is that a one-person operation facing ambiguous rules does not get to be wrong cheaply. Both readings came out of that thread intact.

Turkey was having its own version of this conversation at the time. The personal data protection law, number 6698, passed in 2016 and was built closely on the European model, and for the two years that followed every small Turkish site I knew was asking the same questions. Who is the responsible party. What counts as consent. What happens to us if we have read this wrong. The difference in outcome is the part I find useful: most Turkish hobby sites carried on and hoped, and Beach did the arithmetic and switched his off.

~ the page that stayed up ~

streetlend.com still answers. It has been a memorial since 2018, and it does something generous with the form: underneath the explanation sits a full illustrated tour of how the site worked, screen by screen, so you can still see the product that was switched off. The Hacker News thread about the closure ran to 1,123 comments on 29 April 2018, a great deal of argument about a few hundred ladders.

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