9 ms·

Uber Doesn’t Want to Give NYC (or Anyone) More Data

76 points by artsandsci 10y ago

brndnmtthws 10y ago
Good. I'd prefer that my private data remain private, and private companies like Uber have a responsibility to protect that data.
- aetherson 10y ago
  You know, it's possible to simultaneously be critical of the government request for data, and the very real concerns that of course they won't successfully anonymize location data, and also have a realistic view that Uber wants to "sell" your data, not "protect" it.
  - skybrian 10y ago
    I don't know about this: "of course they won't successfully anonymize location data". Yes, it's well known that they screwed this up. But that doesn't mean that we should therefore distrust them forever. Although it's tricky, figuring out the right level of granularity for revealing taxi ride data to the public seems doable, and we shouldn't let cynicism prevent all attempts at a compromise.
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      The fact that they screwed it up in the past means they demonstrated a lack of ability to get it right. Unless we have strong evidence that they've fixed that deficiency, it seems unwise to repeat the same mistake. Better safe than sorry seems like the right heuristic here given that once private data is released in the wild, it will remain public forever [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/28ialf/173_million_2013_nyc_taxi_rides_shared_on_bigquery/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/28ialf/173_millio...
      - anigbrowl 10y ago
        Yeah, and companies in the private sector screw up n similar fashion on a regular basis. What strong evidence do you want that they've fixed the deficiency? Government is about as open organizationally as any entity - you can serve FOIA requests asking what government has done to mitigate some past screwup and get back reams of documentation, which is more than you can say for private entities. I seem to remember Uber having its own history of privacy violations.
        smallnamespace 10y ago
        Easy - propose a process for releasing data, and get it publicly vetted by privacy/security researchers. I'm pretty sure anyone who understands basic crypto would know that MD5 hashing low-entropy text fields is problematic. The fact that they missed this means they just handed this procedure off to a random coder who didn't know any better. That doesn't sound like at all like a sane process for releasing gigabytes of highly personal data. Private companies have their own issues, obviously, but just because A is bad doesn't mean we should lower our standards for B. Also, private companies have your data because consumers interact with them directly, so at least there is some implicit consent involved. But I'm less convinced that they should be forced to hand that data over to public agencies that have only a very tangential relationship with the user. If I take an NYC cab ride, why should the city government get to see that, especially if I don't live there?
        anigbrowl 10y ago
        As for your cab ride, because the government of NYC is who people turn to when they have problems with their cab ride and don't get satisfaction from the cab company. Honestly, talking to some people it's like they were living in some free market garden of Eden one day and then government came along and ruined everything. People institute governments to 'secure their rights'; it's your choice to take an oppositional attitude rather than a participative one towards government. You are the one saying you want certitude about the security of information held by government; why not propose your preferred standard for how data should be released, maybe get some peer security experts to refine it or agree on a suitable candidate, and then promote its adoption by government with an economic argument? It seems not to have crossed your mind that government failure is often the result of past policy decisions imposed by representatives or the voters themselves on how things should be done, and that they're often mandatory for the people who work in government. They may know a policy or procedure or person's performance is flawed, but lack the legal or budgetary authority to do anything about it. Sometimes inefficient policies are in place as a political payoff to a corporation, union, or individual - corruption is a problem, and legislatures are essentially political marketplaces, and subject to certain failures of markets. Other times inefficiencies are just unintended consequences of well-intended legislation that was poorly crafted, or outlived its usefulness, or conflicting imperatives that lead to legal race conditions. Try thinking of government as the operating system (or platform if you prefer) of society. It's buggy, bloated, nominally open but actually with a bunch of closed-source stuff in it, some people mine it for exploits or sneakily implement their own, and so on. You have this huge codebase written in multiple languages running on all sorts of legacy institutional hardware, all strung together in a giant embedded system that is supposed to operate 24-7, often under difficult conditions. Oh, and there's bitter disagreement between two factions of developers with radically different ideas about, well, everything. Refactoring this isn't an easy undertaking. I suggest to you that the problems of government are similar to the problems of a large software project, and involve many of the same sort of trust problems that operating systems do. Consider that there is a relatively small number of successful operating systems/platforms, none of them were built overnight, and they all suffer from various faults and have interoperability issues - some by design, some by oversight. Your black-box approach to government is of limited utility because it's not like you can easily swap it out for a better one.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    With a private business I can always decide to stop using their services. The problem with government is there is no legal way to escape it.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- mhurron 10y ago
  'Responsibility' without any repercussions for not protecting it. Who still really believes that private companies are any better or have more responsibility to protect your data. You want to protect your data, don't give it out.
  - raiyu 10y ago
    Consumers vote with their wallet and if the transgression is large enough the company feels it. It's easy to get lost in the tech echo chamber where we take security seriously, but many average consumers don't. So we incorrectly associate our priorities with theres. Just take a look at Chipotle for evidence of this with the average consumer. A number of incidents of e. coli outbreaks led to sales plummeting and wiped away nearly 50% of their equity in the ensuing troubles. Though same store sales have rebounded considerably they are still off 50% and questions continue to remain. So trust me, when the consumer is affected directly in a way that they prioritize they take action and the company is definitely affected. Unfortunately many security related incidents never trickle down to the consumer in the way that an E.coli outbreak did. Just compare what happened to Chipotle for a handful of E.coli cases versus Yahoo being compromised for 1 billion users data.
    - mhurron 10y ago
      > Consumers vote with their wallet Evidence shows that in the vast majority of cases (home depot, target, psn, jp morgan etc) they do no such thing. Chipotle is getting people sick, people don't like to be sick. Uber, the above mentioned breaches, and the GP were talking about their data. People don't care about that, hence companies face no real penalty for not protecting data.
      - raiyu 10y ago
        That's the point I was making. That for most consumers a security breach isn't viewed the same as an E.Coli outbreak. Although the likelihood of you catching E.Coli is less than 1% the resulting impact was huge. Meanwhile like you mentioned there have been a number of large retailers where your likelihood of having your data compromised was well over 50% and people didn't react at all.
- tomcam 10y ago
  Do their terms of service indicate they protect it?
LordKano 10y ago
They shouldn't want to. They only want the data to see if more money can wrung from the service or its customers.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  FTA: Taxis already share all the data the commission is requesting from Uber. Same rules for everyone.
  - LordKano 10y ago
    In that case, I'd rather see the rules eased for everyone. It's absolutely absurd that it costs over $400,000 for a cab medallion in NYC.
minimaxir 10y ago
Relevant additional context: the Uber data was released to the public after FiveThirtyEight filed a FOIA request to the NYC TLC after they got the data: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/uber-tlc-foil-response https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/uber-tlc-foil-response Additionally, the data is anonymized; the original taxi dataset mentioned in the article had poorly-hashed Taxi ID numbers which is how privacy was compromised. Subsequent TLC datasets lacked that field completely.
caseysoftware 10y ago
Does FedEx/UPS have to share package pickup/dropoff data with local governments? After all, it is a direct competitor to the US Postal Service.
- knz 10y ago
  Great point but there are some legitimate reasons that the city may want ride data especially if Uber wants to replace multiple forms of transportation (taxis, personal vehicles, frieght delivery, ride services for the elderly/disabled etc). There are also other municipal needs like collecting utility information from radio systems or pavement management surveys that cities often drive around to collect - Uber could potentially be utilized for data gathering if it was determined that they had sufficient coverage etc. Every GIS nerd would love a data set like the Uber tracks for analysis and to see what else they could be used for (Uber for mass license plate collection is like something from Black Mirror).
  - lightbyte 10y ago
    This data could be extremely helpful to planning out public transportation. You would be able to determine the most common areas people go to, where they come from, when they typically go there, etc. All would help in planning bus routes/subway lines/etc.
    - scirocco 10y ago
      Thus improving public transport and make people less dependent on Uber :)
      - Fricken 10y ago
        They're not in competition with one another. Together they are both in competition with privately owned cars. A transportation system effective enough to compel people to give their cars up is good for both of them. Uber alone is too expensive, and public transit alone can't provide service everywhere all the time cost effectively.
ThePhysicist 10y ago
I work as a data scientist and often talk to unions and people in the public administration about data, and I agree that data which companies like Uber, Airbnb or Fedex generate can be very interesting for things like optimizing public infrastructure or salary negotiations. I can perfectly understand why companies don't want to publish this data (as it's a valuable asset and contains a lot of potentially sensitive insights about the company), but you have to weigh this against the benefit to the public that the data could generate. I think it's not unlikely that we will see new legislation soon which will oblige companies to make some of their data available to the public or at least public organizations so that they can be used for public good. In fact this wouldn't be unprecedented, and nothing that would be (IMHO) very detrimental to these companies.
- chrishacken 10y ago
  I don't disagree that this data would be beneficial to the public, but I don't think government should have the right to tell a private organization that they need to hand out their data to whoever wants it. Over regulation kills business; maybe not companies like Uber, but smaller companies that are still trying to get off the ground. This is a slippery slope.
  - ThePhysicist 10y ago
    I'm not saying that they should be obliged to hand out all their data, just some of it. Example: We obviously wouldn't want the public to have access to personally identifiable data like GPS movements captured by phones, as this kind of data is highly sensitive. But having access to aggregated, (properly) anonymized data would be sufficient for many things, e.g. to see where local traffic hot spots are and how people commute to work. Giving out this data does not compromise privacy (if done right) and has a very little risk of harming the company that generated it.
    - DINKDINK 10y ago
      The problem though is that people are effectively made to work for free if the government can order any organization to publish their private information. The government is forcing socialism on the upside and capitalism on the downside. Almost all information/research would serve a "public good" if it was converted from private to public. If the government forced an investment firm to reveal which companies they thought were the most undervalued in a market, many people would benefit from that knowledge. The question is, what right and what incentive structure promotes the generation of that knowledge. Theft is certainly not a structure that generates it long term.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 10y ago
It's really premature for Uber to claim to be public transportation so the entire premise of the argument that they should do it is faulty imo.
- tomcam 10y ago
  Where do they claim that?
  - fullshark 10y ago
    The sub-headline: > Ride-hailing companies aspire to be something akin to public transportation, but that doesn’t extend to sharing data with governments. So this is supposedly noteworthy for that reason.
    - snrplfth 10y ago
      I think what tomcam was wondering was where Uber specifically claimed to be public transportation.
      - fullshark 10y ago
        Yeah I worded that poorly, I didn't mean to state that Uber was claiming that, merely that the article seemed built on a faulty premise. Uber could very well be considered public transportation at some point in the future and they may claim it to get tax breaks / infrastructure spending etc, but that's way way way out in the future if at all.
        snrplfth 10y ago
        Oh okay, that makes sense.
    - citruspi 10y ago
      Per your quote, they _aspire_ to be similar to public transportation, they don't claim to be public transportation - it isn't premature for them to claim to be public transportation because they don't [claim to be].
samfisher83 10y ago
I thought this was a key take away from the article: >Taxis already share all the data the commission is requesting from Uber. If Taxis are required to give this data why should Uber be different?
- TAForObvReasons 10y ago
  ... because Uber is a special snowflake, haven't you heard? /s Uber is trying to differentiate itself from the standard taxi companies in order to avoid the same level of regulations and issues. To do that, you can't concede on any front no matter how trivial or reasonable it sounds.
  - warcher 10y ago
    Yeah, and it's virtually inevitable that city hall catches up with them eventually somewhere. They have to win all the city hall fights everywhere. Also Lyft does too-- if Lyft ever capitulates in exchange for licensure, Uber has to as well, lest they be out in the cold. Sooner or later somebody is gonna get one of them, and then all the other cities are going to say "Hey, if Los Angeles gets your ride data, then why can't Topeka?"
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  I tell Uber the exact address at which I should be picked up and dropped off. Taxis don't get nearly that much granularity. Furthermore, one can pay for taxis with cash.
  - dublinben 10y ago
    You can (any probably should) slightly fuzz the addresses you're providing Uber. They're tracking you with GPS before and after your rides anyway, but you might as well make it a little harder for them to track you.
CodeSheikh 10y ago
Yellow cabs work when you hail it at point A and get dropped off at point B. Addresses are recorded but not the identity. Uber cabs work when you request it at point A and get dropped off at point B. Addresses are recorded and the identity. Yellow cabs share its data. All journeys along with their start, end coordinates. No identity issues as their platform could not record it. Say if Uber cabs could share its data. All journeys along with their start, end coordinates. No need to share identity of the person associated with that journey. Using Yellow cabs data set, if I have an address of my friend's place then I can figure out his journeys pattern when I see a frequency of his apartment address (minus the home number) either by data crunching around his address or the nearest corner intersection where he can potentially hail a cab. I really don't see what's a huge deal here, unless Uber really does not want to expose its $ amount for a variety of reasons that I don't want to get into. Uber can strip off identity data, they can even strip off building numbers by normalizing pinpointed building numbers to nearest intersections. Sure every place can not have a nearest intersection. In that case, provide macro geo-information for the neighborhood. Trust me, every address has a nearby intersection in the city of New York. Edit 1: spellings
oli5679 10y ago
The area where I'm really interested in obligatory publishing of data is financial data from stock exchanges. How great would it be if Google or someone from the next batch of HN was free to make a superior, cheaper versions of Bloomberg/Reuters? Would save so much time and money within the financial world.
jdavis703 10y ago
I don't want the government knowing this much information about me. But I see how it would benefit transit planners and regulators to have this data. Can they just blur it out to coordinates with a 100-foot radius or something similar?
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  The problem is given enough data it is possible to unblur the data.

76 points by artsandsci 10y ago

Good. I'd prefer that my private data remain private, and private companies like Uber have a responsibility to protect that data.

aetherson 10y ago
You know, it's possible to simultaneously be critical of the government request for data, and the very real concerns that of course they won't successfully anonymize location data, and also have a realistic view that Uber wants to "sell" your data, not "protect" it.
- skybrian 10y ago
  I don't know about this: "of course they won't successfully anonymize location data". Yes, it's well known that they screwed this up. But that doesn't mean that we should therefore distrust them forever. Although it's tricky, figuring out the right level of granularity for revealing taxi ride data to the public seems doable, and we shouldn't let cynicism prevent all attempts at a compromise.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    The fact that they screwed it up in the past means they demonstrated a lack of ability to get it right. Unless we have strong evidence that they've fixed that deficiency, it seems unwise to repeat the same mistake. Better safe than sorry seems like the right heuristic here given that once private data is released in the wild, it will remain public forever [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/28ialf/173_million_2013_nyc_taxi_rides_shared_on_bigquery/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/28ialf/173_millio...
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      Yeah, and companies in the private sector screw up n similar fashion on a regular basis. What strong evidence do you want that they've fixed the deficiency? Government is about as open organizationally as any entity - you can serve FOIA requests asking what government has done to mitigate some past screwup and get back reams of documentation, which is more than you can say for private entities. I seem to remember Uber having its own history of privacy violations.
      - smallnamespace 10y ago
        Easy - propose a process for releasing data, and get it publicly vetted by privacy/security researchers. I'm pretty sure anyone who understands basic crypto would know that MD5 hashing low-entropy text fields is problematic. The fact that they missed this means they just handed this procedure off to a random coder who didn't know any better. That doesn't sound like at all like a sane process for releasing gigabytes of highly personal data. Private companies have their own issues, obviously, but just because A is bad doesn't mean we should lower our standards for B. Also, private companies have your data because consumers interact with them directly, so at least there is some implicit consent involved. But I'm less convinced that they should be forced to hand that data over to public agencies that have only a very tangential relationship with the user. If I take an NYC cab ride, why should the city government get to see that, especially if I don't live there?
        anigbrowl 10y ago
        As for your cab ride, because the government of NYC is who people turn to when they have problems with their cab ride and don't get satisfaction from the cab company. Honestly, talking to some people it's like they were living in some free market garden of Eden one day and then government came along and ruined everything. People institute governments to 'secure their rights'; it's your choice to take an oppositional attitude rather than a participative one towards government. You are the one saying you want certitude about the security of information held by government; why not propose your preferred standard for how data should be released, maybe get some peer security experts to refine it or agree on a suitable candidate, and then promote its adoption by government with an economic argument? It seems not to have crossed your mind that government failure is often the result of past policy decisions imposed by representatives or the voters themselves on how things should be done, and that they're often mandatory for the people who work in government. They may know a policy or procedure or person's performance is flawed, but lack the legal or budgetary authority to do anything about it. Sometimes inefficient policies are in place as a political payoff to a corporation, union, or individual - corruption is a problem, and legislatures are essentially political marketplaces, and subject to certain failures of markets. Other times inefficiencies are just unintended consequences of well-intended legislation that was poorly crafted, or outlived its usefulness, or conflicting imperatives that lead to legal race conditions. Try thinking of government as the operating system (or platform if you prefer) of society. It's buggy, bloated, nominally open but actually with a bunch of closed-source stuff in it, some people mine it for exploits or sneakily implement their own, and so on. You have this huge codebase written in multiple languages running on all sorts of legacy institutional hardware, all strung together in a giant embedded system that is supposed to operate 24-7, often under difficult conditions. Oh, and there's bitter disagreement between two factions of developers with radically different ideas about, well, everything. Refactoring this isn't an easy undertaking. I suggest to you that the problems of government are similar to the problems of a large software project, and involve many of the same sort of trust problems that operating systems do. Consider that there is a relatively small number of successful operating systems/platforms, none of them were built overnight, and they all suffer from various faults and have interoperability issues - some by design, some by oversight. Your black-box approach to government is of limited utility because it's not like you can easily swap it out for a better one.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  With a private business I can always decide to stop using their services. The problem with government is there is no legal way to escape it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
mhurron 10y ago
'Responsibility' without any repercussions for not protecting it. Who still really believes that private companies are any better or have more responsibility to protect your data. You want to protect your data, don't give it out.
- raiyu 10y ago
  Consumers vote with their wallet and if the transgression is large enough the company feels it. It's easy to get lost in the tech echo chamber where we take security seriously, but many average consumers don't. So we incorrectly associate our priorities with theres. Just take a look at Chipotle for evidence of this with the average consumer. A number of incidents of e. coli outbreaks led to sales plummeting and wiped away nearly 50% of their equity in the ensuing troubles. Though same store sales have rebounded considerably they are still off 50% and questions continue to remain. So trust me, when the consumer is affected directly in a way that they prioritize they take action and the company is definitely affected. Unfortunately many security related incidents never trickle down to the consumer in the way that an E.coli outbreak did. Just compare what happened to Chipotle for a handful of E.coli cases versus Yahoo being compromised for 1 billion users data.
  - mhurron 10y ago
    > Consumers vote with their wallet Evidence shows that in the vast majority of cases (home depot, target, psn, jp morgan etc) they do no such thing. Chipotle is getting people sick, people don't like to be sick. Uber, the above mentioned breaches, and the GP were talking about their data. People don't care about that, hence companies face no real penalty for not protecting data.
    - raiyu 10y ago
      That's the point I was making. That for most consumers a security breach isn't viewed the same as an E.Coli outbreak. Although the likelihood of you catching E.Coli is less than 1% the resulting impact was huge. Meanwhile like you mentioned there have been a number of large retailers where your likelihood of having your data compromised was well over 50% and people didn't react at all.
tomcam 10y ago
Do their terms of service indicate they protect it?

LordKano 10y ago

They shouldn't want to. They only want the data to see if more money can wrung from the service or its customers.

anigbrowl 10y ago
FTA: Taxis already share all the data the commission is requesting from Uber. Same rules for everyone.
- LordKano 10y ago
  In that case, I'd rather see the rules eased for everyone. It's absolutely absurd that it costs over $400,000 for a cab medallion in NYC.

minimaxir 10y ago

Relevant additional context: the Uber data was released to the public after FiveThirtyEight filed a FOIA request to the NYC TLC after they got the data: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/uber-tlc-foil-response https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/uber-tlc-foil-response Additionally, the data is anonymized; the original taxi dataset mentioned in the article had poorly-hashed Taxi ID numbers which is how privacy was compromised. Subsequent TLC datasets lacked that field completely.

caseysoftware 10y ago

Does FedEx/UPS have to share package pickup/dropoff data with local governments? After all, it is a direct competitor to the US Postal Service.

knz 10y ago
Great point but there are some legitimate reasons that the city may want ride data especially if Uber wants to replace multiple forms of transportation (taxis, personal vehicles, frieght delivery, ride services for the elderly/disabled etc). There are also other municipal needs like collecting utility information from radio systems or pavement management surveys that cities often drive around to collect - Uber could potentially be utilized for data gathering if it was determined that they had sufficient coverage etc. Every GIS nerd would love a data set like the Uber tracks for analysis and to see what else they could be used for (Uber for mass license plate collection is like something from Black Mirror).
- lightbyte 10y ago
  This data could be extremely helpful to planning out public transportation. You would be able to determine the most common areas people go to, where they come from, when they typically go there, etc. All would help in planning bus routes/subway lines/etc.
  - scirocco 10y ago
    Thus improving public transport and make people less dependent on Uber :)
    - Fricken 10y ago
      They're not in competition with one another. Together they are both in competition with privately owned cars. A transportation system effective enough to compel people to give their cars up is good for both of them. Uber alone is too expensive, and public transit alone can't provide service everywhere all the time cost effectively.

ThePhysicist 10y ago

I work as a data scientist and often talk to unions and people in the public administration about data, and I agree that data which companies like Uber, Airbnb or Fedex generate can be very interesting for things like optimizing public infrastructure or salary negotiations. I can perfectly understand why companies don't want to publish this data (as it's a valuable asset and contains a lot of potentially sensitive insights about the company), but you have to weigh this against the benefit to the public that the data could generate. I think it's not unlikely that we will see new legislation soon which will oblige companies to make some of their data available to the public or at least public organizations so that they can be used for public good. In fact this wouldn't be unprecedented, and nothing that would be (IMHO) very detrimental to these companies.

chrishacken 10y ago
I don't disagree that this data would be beneficial to the public, but I don't think government should have the right to tell a private organization that they need to hand out their data to whoever wants it. Over regulation kills business; maybe not companies like Uber, but smaller companies that are still trying to get off the ground. This is a slippery slope.
- ThePhysicist 10y ago
  I'm not saying that they should be obliged to hand out all their data, just some of it. Example: We obviously wouldn't want the public to have access to personally identifiable data like GPS movements captured by phones, as this kind of data is highly sensitive. But having access to aggregated, (properly) anonymized data would be sufficient for many things, e.g. to see where local traffic hot spots are and how people commute to work. Giving out this data does not compromise privacy (if done right) and has a very little risk of harming the company that generated it.
  - DINKDINK 10y ago
    The problem though is that people are effectively made to work for free if the government can order any organization to publish their private information. The government is forcing socialism on the upside and capitalism on the downside. Almost all information/research would serve a "public good" if it was converted from private to public. If the government forced an investment firm to reveal which companies they thought were the most undervalued in a market, many people would benefit from that knowledge. The question is, what right and what incentive structure promotes the generation of that knowledge. Theft is certainly not a structure that generates it long term.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

fullshark 10y ago

It's really premature for Uber to claim to be public transportation so the entire premise of the argument that they should do it is faulty imo.

tomcam 10y ago
Where do they claim that?
- fullshark 10y ago
  The sub-headline: > Ride-hailing companies aspire to be something akin to public transportation, but that doesn’t extend to sharing data with governments. So this is supposedly noteworthy for that reason.
  - snrplfth 10y ago
    I think what tomcam was wondering was where Uber specifically claimed to be public transportation.
    - fullshark 10y ago
      Yeah I worded that poorly, I didn't mean to state that Uber was claiming that, merely that the article seemed built on a faulty premise. Uber could very well be considered public transportation at some point in the future and they may claim it to get tax breaks / infrastructure spending etc, but that's way way way out in the future if at all.
      - snrplfth 10y ago
        Oh okay, that makes sense.
  - citruspi 10y ago
    Per your quote, they _aspire_ to be similar to public transportation, they don't claim to be public transportation - it isn't premature for them to claim to be public transportation because they don't [claim to be].

samfisher83 10y ago

I thought this was a key take away from the article: >Taxis already share all the data the commission is requesting from Uber. If Taxis are required to give this data why should Uber be different?

TAForObvReasons 10y ago
... because Uber is a special snowflake, haven't you heard? /s Uber is trying to differentiate itself from the standard taxi companies in order to avoid the same level of regulations and issues. To do that, you can't concede on any front no matter how trivial or reasonable it sounds.
- warcher 10y ago
  Yeah, and it's virtually inevitable that city hall catches up with them eventually somewhere. They have to win all the city hall fights everywhere. Also Lyft does too-- if Lyft ever capitulates in exchange for licensure, Uber has to as well, lest they be out in the cold. Sooner or later somebody is gonna get one of them, and then all the other cities are going to say "Hey, if Los Angeles gets your ride data, then why can't Topeka?"
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
I tell Uber the exact address at which I should be picked up and dropped off. Taxis don't get nearly that much granularity. Furthermore, one can pay for taxis with cash.
- dublinben 10y ago
  You can (any probably should) slightly fuzz the addresses you're providing Uber. They're tracking you with GPS before and after your rides anyway, but you might as well make it a little harder for them to track you.

CodeSheikh 10y ago

Yellow cabs work when you hail it at point A and get dropped off at point B. Addresses are recorded but not the identity. Uber cabs work when you request it at point A and get dropped off at point B. Addresses are recorded and the identity. Yellow cabs share its data. All journeys along with their start, end coordinates. No identity issues as their platform could not record it. Say if Uber cabs could share its data. All journeys along with their start, end coordinates. No need to share identity of the person associated with that journey. Using Yellow cabs data set, if I have an address of my friend's place then I can figure out his journeys pattern when I see a frequency of his apartment address (minus the home number) either by data crunching around his address or the nearest corner intersection where he can potentially hail a cab. I really don't see what's a huge deal here, unless Uber really does not want to expose its $ amount for a variety of reasons that I don't want to get into. Uber can strip off identity data, they can even strip off building numbers by normalizing pinpointed building numbers to nearest intersections. Sure every place can not have a nearest intersection. In that case, provide macro geo-information for the neighborhood. Trust me, every address has a nearby intersection in the city of New York. Edit 1: spellings

oli5679 10y ago

The area where I'm really interested in obligatory publishing of data is financial data from stock exchanges. How great would it be if Google or someone from the next batch of HN was free to make a superior, cheaper versions of Bloomberg/Reuters? Would save so much time and money within the financial world.

jdavis703 10y ago

I don't want the government knowing this much information about me. But I see how it would benefit transit planners and regulators to have this data. Can they just blur it out to coordinates with a 100-foot radius or something similar?

maverick_iceman 10y ago
The problem is given enough data it is possible to unblur the data.