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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 person

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.
- schwap 10y ago
  > The problem though is that people are effectively made to work for free How so? Sharing this information is a condition of operating in an area. If that is unprofitable, Uber won't operate there.
- kafkaesq 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. But they're not doing that work for "free". They're doing in exchange for the privilege of being able to run a large-scale business on one of the most highly-trafficked street grids on the planet. Which in turn certainly doesn't exactly come for "free" (and in fact costs many billions of dollars per year to run, involving thousands and thousands of people who certainly don't work for fee either), now does it. So Uber says they don't want to pay for that privilege? That they'd rather not have to comply with regulations (like every other business operator in any other damn category you can think of) because they're... special? That's fine, of course -- they just don't have to do business in NYC, then.
xkcd-sucks 10y ago
If they don't want to share sensitive data such as GPS tracks they oughtn't to store it. From the end user's perspective, the stored data is still available via subpoena, leaks etc
- MiddleEndian 10y ago
  From a user's perspective, data showing me traveling to and from my home directly is not very anonymous.
  - dublinben 10y ago
    Maybe that should make you think twice about using a private third party which records that data for your transportation needs.
    - MiddleEndian 10y ago
      Perhaps, but currently such services do not make that data available to the general public and users have been operating with that knowledge. If that gets retroactively changed by a local government, I'd say that government is the most at fault.

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.

schwap 10y ago
> The problem though is that people are effectively made to work for free How so? Sharing this information is a condition of operating in an area. If that is unprofitable, Uber won't operate there.
kafkaesq 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. But they're not doing that work for "free". They're doing in exchange for the privilege of being able to run a large-scale business on one of the most highly-trafficked street grids on the planet. Which in turn certainly doesn't exactly come for "free" (and in fact costs many billions of dollars per year to run, involving thousands and thousands of people who certainly don't work for fee either), now does it. So Uber says they don't want to pay for that privilege? That they'd rather not have to comply with regulations (like every other business operator in any other damn category you can think of) because they're... special? That's fine, of course -- they just don't have to do business in NYC, then.

xkcd-sucks 10y ago

If they don't want to share sensitive data such as GPS tracks they oughtn't to store it. From the end user's perspective, the stored data is still available via subpoena, leaks etc

MiddleEndian 10y ago
From a user's perspective, data showing me traveling to and from my home directly is not very anonymous.
- dublinben 10y ago
  Maybe that should make you think twice about using a private third party which records that data for your transportation needs.
  - MiddleEndian 10y ago
    Perhaps, but currently such services do not make that data available to the general public and users have been operating with that knowledge. If that gets retroactively changed by a local government, I'd say that government is the most at fault.