MoveDefense wiki
Gig work comes with its own vocabulary, and most of it only matters on the day something goes wrong: a dispute, a deactivation, an audit. This page defines the terms drivers run into most, in plain language. Almost every one of them comes down to the same question: can you show what actually happened?
In gig and delivery work, a driver is anyone paid to move something — a person, a package, an order, or freight — using their own or a company vehicle. That covers W-2 employee drivers, app-based gig drivers, and self-employed owner-operators. The classification matters because it decides who is responsible for keeping trip and expense records: an employer, or the driver.
A gig driver works through an app-based platform — Walmart Spark, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Instacart, Amazon Flex, Shipt, Grubhub, and similar services — on a per-delivery or per-trip basis instead of a fixed schedule. Gig drivers are almost always classified as independent contractors, not employees, which means the platform does not track mileage or keep dispute records on the driver's behalf.
A Spark driver delivers for Walmart's Spark Driver platform, picking up grocery and retail orders and dropping them off with customers. (Spark here means the delivery platform, not an ignition part.) Like most gig platforms, Spark rates drivers on delivery performance and can restrict or deactivate an account after complaints, low ratings, or policy flags, often with limited detail about what triggered the review.
A dispute is a disagreement between a driver and a platform, or a driver and a customer, over what happened on a delivery or trip: a missing item, a late arrival, a wrong address, a damaged order, or an incorrect pay adjustment. Platforms usually resolve disputes with their own data first. A driver's best leverage is an independent record — times, photos, mileage, and notes — that doesn't depend on what the platform chooses to share back. See the delivery driver dispute packet guide.
Account deactivation is when a platform suspends or permanently closes a driver's account, cutting off the ability to work. Drivers often describe this as getting "deactivated," "deleted," or "banned." It can follow a pattern of low ratings, a customer complaint, a contract violation, or sometimes a single serious flag. Appeals typically ask the driver to explain their side, which is hard to do convincingly without a record of the stop, delivery, or trip in question. See account ban protection.
Miles, in a driver's records, means the distance driven for business purposes: to a pickup, between stops, or on a delivery route. Miles matter for two separate reasons — they can be the basis of a mileage-rate tax deduction for self-employed drivers, and they can be what a platform or customer disputes when pay or a delivery claim looks wrong. Trip-by-trip mileage tied to odometer readings holds up better than a single end-of-day estimate.
A driver log, or trip log, is a chronological record of a driver's stops, times, mileage, and related details — pickup, drop-off, gas stop, and notes, in the order they happened. A log is not the same thing as an Electronic Logging Device (ELD). An ELD is a regulated Hours-of-Service compliance tool for certain commercial drivers; a driver log in this sense is simply a personal or business record of the day.
A spreadsheet is the default way many self-employed drivers try to track mileage and expenses: a manually typed row per trip. It's better than nothing, but it has real weaknesses as a record. A spreadsheet can be edited or backfilled after the fact, it has no timestamp tied to the actual drive, it holds no photos or receipts, and it depends entirely on the driver remembering to fill it in the same day. Those weaknesses don't matter until the log gets questioned, by a platform or by the IRS.
A 1099, specifically Form 1099-NEC, is the tax form a company issues to a worker it classifies as an independent contractor rather than an employee — the standard classification for gig drivers and most owner-operators. Getting a 1099 means no taxes are withheld and no employer is tracking business expenses on the driver's behalf; the driver is solely responsible for their own mileage and expense records. If the IRS ever questions a mileage deduction, the burden of proof is on the driver, and it has to be a contemporaneous record kept at or near the time of the trip, not one rebuilt from memory afterward.
An owner-operator is a self-employed driver who operates their own vehicle as a business, rather than driving one owned by an employer. Owner-operators are usually 1099 independent contractors, responsible for their own fuel, maintenance, mileage records, and taxes. Because there's no employer keeping records in the background, an owner-operator's dispute protection and audit protection come from the same place: whatever they wrote down or photographed themselves, that day.
A platform dispute, a deactivation appeal, and an IRS mileage question all ask the same thing: what actually happened, and can you show it? MoveDefense, a product of BIBBS TECHNOLOGY LLC, is a driver log app that records stops, mileage, gas receipts, and delivery photos as the day happens, so the record already exists instead of getting rebuilt from memory later. It doesn't guarantee an account outcome or replace a tax professional's advice — it just means a driver isn't starting from a blank spreadsheet when something gets questioned. Open MoveDefense, read the dispute packet guide or account ban protection pages, or check the FAQ.