The rise of the collaborative economy raises important issues in the field of social protection, both for the workers concerned, who are inadequately protected, as well as for traditional companies employing wage earners, who denounce unfair competition. The development of new forms of work in France has revived the debate over the creation of an intermediate status between employees and self-employed workers and on the implementation of an official status of all “economically active persons”. However, analysis of the social protection of platform workers confronts the conceptual vagueness surrounding the rise of these new productive models: there is to date no consensus and agreed definition of the collaborative or platform economy. However, these terms combine an extremely heterogeneous reality, which is a brake on the development of operational regulations. As a prerequisite for analysis of the social protection of platform workers, we therefore propose improving our understanding of this diversity by analysing the different productive models and the working relationships which arise from them. We propose minimal criteria to assess the dependence of platform workers, aiming at a clearer focus on platforms at the heart of social protection issues.