12 ms·

Uber Movement

307 points by ndirish1842 10y ago

jakozaur 10y ago
My quess would be that Uber use it as a carrot for cities. Let Uber operate and we will give city official data and city planning tools for free.
- gulperxcx 10y ago
  Lol, nice guess
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- thinkloop 10y ago
  Possibly also better overall driving experiences are good for long term business. In the same neighborhood as Facebook working to increase access to internet world-wide, or Google Fiber forcing telcos to increase speeds and drop costs. Basically encourage others to improve the infrastructure on which you rely.
- kirykl 10y ago
  A win win for everyone but the drivers. Sure they can quit but doesn't excuse Uber from using its negotiating power against exploiting them wherever possible.
  - zeroer 10y ago
    Don't worry. Having drivers is not the long term plan anyways.
    - jayajay 10y ago
      This. People who drive automobiles for a living should start investing in new skills now.
      - pyrale 10y ago
        They aren't paid enough to invest, though.
    - pyrale 10y ago
      The more I hear this, the more i see it as a ploy to drown the working conditions complaint. I do not believe Uber invests nearly as much in autonomous cars as it invests in challenging the law and making PR about their lobbying being a civic fight.
  - synicalx 10y ago
    I think there's enough readily available information on how Uber operates for want-to-be drivers to make an informed decision on whether or not they should 'work' for Uber.
    - wpietri 10y ago
      Try talking to some ex-Uber drivers. I don't think I've spoke with one that felt adequately informed by Uber. There may be adequate information now, but only because enough people bought in to Uber's marketing had poor experiences, and have talked about them. I also don't think "enough readily available information" is a good standard to judge commerce by. There's enough readily available information out there for sufficiently prepared people to not get sucked into, say, a Ponzi scheme. But that does not absolve somebody running a scam, because they are doing their best to find people not yet prepared and then energetically deceive them. My standard is more like, "Does the entity with more power use that power in a way that the entity with less power later comes to find harmful?" By that metric, I don't think Uber scores particularly well.
      - synicalx 10y ago
        A ponzi scheme is completely different to Uber so comparing the two isn't helpful. Uber is comparable to working as an freelance/indy contractor, in fact it's almost exactly the same. Uber has always been clear about how it works for the drivers, and not reading/understanding terms and conditions isn't an excuse for not taking responsibility for yourself. Their early marketing quite literally spelled out that this is something you can do with your own pre-existing car to make a bit of extra cash on the side. In fact this is STILL the prevailing message you get from their website, let me quote a few lines at you; "Got a car? Turn it into a money machine. The city is buzzing and Uber makes it easy for you to cash in on the action. Plus, you've already got everything you need to get started." "Need something outside the 9 to 5? As an independent contractor with Uber, you’ve got freedom and flexibility to drive whenever you have time." Somehow, and I really cannot fathom how, some people have interpreted this as "Go out and buy/lease a car, we'll give you a full time job".
        10y ago
  - fsaneq2 10y ago
    Which is a problem why? Uber is not a charity.
- pdog 10y ago
  It's win–win–win. If cities make improvements to their transportation infrastructure based on this data, ultimately it helps Uber deliver better service to its customers.
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    Well except for the drivers that get paid less and less now. I mean we'll forget about all that once their self-driving vehicles start being deployed, right? Well until they kill people. I mean don't get me wrong, the data is valuable. But this is a company that constantly says "fuck you" to the law and fair work practices. Let's keep that in mind.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      I mean, don't get me wrong, this civil rights movement is valuable. But this is a movement that constantly says "fuck you" to the law (c.f. Rosa Parks) and fair work practices (the civil rights movement favored a "race to the bottom" between white and negro workers). Uber is engaged in civil disobedience against unjust laws that exist to protect political insiders. When did this become a bad thing?
      - lgas 10y ago
        I think part of the problem is that the parallels between Rosa Parks and Travis Kalanick are not as obvious to everyone as they are to you.
        yummyfajitas 10y ago
        What I'm pointing out is not some moral parallel between Rosa Parks and Travis Kalanick. I'm pointing out that if djsumdog's argument is valid, it applies equally well to the civil rights movement. This is a strong indication that his argument is invalid, nothing more.
        chiaro 10y ago
- nnain 10y ago
  This NYT article (titled, "Uber Extends an Olive Branch to Local Governments") is mostly about this sentiment - http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/technology/uber-movement-traffic-data.html http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/technology/uber-movement-t...
edgyswingset 10y ago
> We believe that breakthrough insights and ideas can come from anywhere. In the coming months, we’ll be making this data open to all. I genuinely do not believe this. If they intended on making anonymized data open, they wouldn't have a marketing site up already.
- obmelvin 10y ago
  I don't understand why those have to be mutually exclusive. It's possible that they haven't finished cleaning the data for public use, but the data is ready for 'trusted' city planners.
  - edgyswingset 10y ago
    I don't think it's mutually exclusive - I simply don't trust Uber to act in good faith for anything they do. They've yet to demonstrate that they're deserving of trust that they're going to make that data open.
- taneq 10y ago
  Maybe they plan - for the right price - to make identifiable trip data available?
mklarmann 10y ago
And I do wonder why google maps with much more data hasn't done this...
- jamesrom 10y ago
  Google's trip data is an ingredient in their secret sauce.
- xfs 10y ago
  1. Privacy 2. Google doesn't have the same incentive to release data to local governments as Uber does (to improve regulatory relationships).
  - daenney 10y ago
    How so privacy? This data is anonymised, they could do the same.
    - dj-wonk 10y ago
      Provable privacy based on 'anonymized' published data sets that resists third-party information and linkage is really hard -- arguably impossible in general. When people claim 'anonymized' data, I tend to not be fully convinced.
      - positr0n 10y ago
        I completely agree with you on the difficulty of truly anonymizing data. I do wonder if there any holes in this idea though: What if they released the data the number of cars per hour per segment of road (a segment meaning a continuous piece of road between two intersections) rounded to the nearest multiple of 10?
    - maverick_iceman 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#Motivation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#Motivatio...
jamesrom 10y ago
How does Uber anonymize the data? Does it only use subset of a trip? If you can see where and when a trip started or finished, it's definitely not anonymous enough.
- cicero19 10y ago
  Certainly, this data can be identifiable.
- mortehu 10y ago
  From the FAQ: "All data is anonymized and aggregated to ensure no personally identifiable information or user behavior can be surfaced through the Movement tool" Aggregation is a common method for anonymization. One approach is to only display trips that were made by at least 15 different people in a day.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Maybe they could randomize the pickup / dropoff points within a small radius, say 1/4 mile.
- notliketherest 10y ago
  Yeah one scenario I was thinking of was the case of a rural home that's isolated from other buildings. It's plainly obvious that any data coming to and from that building is the occupants. There probably has to be some threshold of users (say, > 100 users taking a route) before it's exposed through this service.
- peatmoss 10y ago
  Watch the video again--geographic aggregation. Summary stats from geo-to-geo. EDIT: I think in the video they showed census tracts, which is one of many geographic units they could choose from.
  - cowsandmilk 10y ago
    In their trial with Boston, it was limited to zip codes[1]. Cross my finger for census tracts as that would be far more useful. [1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber-partnership-has-not-lived-up-to-promise https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber...
Paul-ish 10y ago
I'm curious what techniques they will use to anonymize the data. I would guess some sort of differential privacy technique.
- dj-wonk 10y ago
  I hope so, but I would be a little surprised if they used DP. I am more inclined to think they will take a 'traditional' (weaker in terms of provable privacy protection) approach.
  - frankmcsherry 10y ago
    It's totally reasonable to consider doing something like this with differential privacy. The techniques exist, but it would still be pretty brave of them. They are certainly aware of DP. Example technique: if you treat each record as a (src,dst) pair of (lat,lon) pairs or somesuch, you can then build a 4d grid whose cells you populate with (Laplace) noisy counts. This provides eps-differential privacy when the noise is roughly 1/eps. Whenever counts are sufficiently large, you can refine the contents of the cell and ask again. If you do the refinement at most k times, you get k*eps-differential privacy. There are smarter ways that work even better. These provide "trip privacy", meaning they mask the presence/absence of individual trips. Uber presumably has user identifiers, and could group all trips by one user together, and do the same counting where the weight of each trip is scaled down so that they sum to at most one for each user. This would then give "user privacy", meaning it masks the presence/absence of individual users.
NicoJuicy 10y ago
This won't help in Belgium, where Trucks need to pay "road taxes" and have a device installed for that. They can also get the data for tracking vehicles and they won't need Uber. Good idea though, but not applicable everywhere
- dllthomas 10y ago
  Knowing "N people wanted to go from roughly here to roughly there enough to pay Uber for the ride" is information that wouldn't show up in "my truck moved from X to Y" data, and which is potentially hugely valuable to those adjusting public transit.
- kabes 10y ago
  This is focused on urban traffic. That may be totally different from truck traffic, which avoids (or even isn't allowed in) urban areas.
politician 10y ago
Having read no further than the headline, I really wanted this article to be about on-demand piggyback rides.
bonyt 10y ago
This is cool. NYC already releases this information for taxis. It might even include Uber rides since they all have TLC plates, though I'm not sure. http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtm...
- WillEngler 10y ago
  Chicago also released their taxi trips dataset recently: http://digital.cityofchicago.org/index.php/chicago-taxi-data-released/ http://digital.cityofchicago.org/index.php/chicago-taxi-data...
tedmiston 10y ago
From the FAQ: > What are the licensing terms? > Movement makes all insights available under the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial license. Now, that's pretty interesting. I wonder if we'll have API level access in a way that we can build tools on this data.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
kosei 10y ago
Hope this is as fantastic as this sounds. Many cities are starting to make this data publicly available, and the potential impact to urban planning, traffic reduction, parking and more is enormous. That said, what's Uber's commercial angle? Licensing fees? "Movement makes all insights available under the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial license."
- peatmoss 10y ago
  Making friends. Uber is quite aware that their reputation within cities hasn't been the best. Internally, there is a loose federation of people who genuinely want to improve cities, and people who recognize the business value in not continuing to piss cities off.
  - WillEngler 10y ago
    Yep. Conversely, it's interesting to see some urban planning folks warm up to ride sharing as a way to extend the reach of existing transit networks. But still a lot of hostility, to be sure.
    - peatmoss 10y ago
      I think urban planning folks have been, in principle, favorable to new mobility options that don't involve private vehicle ownership. I think some folks in the cities have been conflicted about some of Uber's lawlessness / relationship to labor.
- cowsandmilk 10y ago
  > Hope this is as fantastic as this sounds The experience in Boston was that Uber anonymized the data too much for it to be useful[1]. I would be very skeptical of this as it seems to be a program publicly touted as useful, but the e-mails obtained via FOIA requests show it to not be. I'm not sure what the solution is since privacy should be a concern. [1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber-partnership-has-not-lived-up-to-promise https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber...
sebleon 10y ago
This is awesome, really happy to see them release such valuable data!
bogomipz 10y ago
Doesn't this run contra to another recent story about Uber being against giving cities this data? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/uber-doesn-t-want-to-give-nyc-or-anyone-more-data https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/uber-does...
- bastawhiz 10y ago
  In that case, NYC is asking for addresses and timestamps. The data provided by Movement is aggregate. In other words, cities like NYC want Movement but without the anonymization.
- fourthark 10y ago
  This is probably their reaction to the government requests for data. They want to define the terms under which they share data, and "volunteering" is the way to do that.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    This makes sense. I bet if anything the the NYC issue may have just hastened the release of this.
return0 10y ago
Uber however caters to a specific class of people and they don't seem to be the people who can only afford public transport. This may not be an issue in America, but i think if cities change their public transit planning to accomodate the class of people who can afford uber, they will be disadvantaging those who really need it.
- usmeteora 10y ago
  I don't know about that. Computers and Tvs and cellphones used to be only for rich elite businessmen, now, not everyone can afford to have one, but even lower middle class people can pick up a $200 chromebook, or finance a phone and the technology they have access to for the same or very similiar prices gets better every year. There are actually very few things in life in which the quality and amount of it that can be afforded for the same price each year increase so much annually for someone with stagnant wages and little economic mobility, as hardware and software technology, and services that optimize their efficiency and prices based on it. In general, the expanded use of something, especially with realistic competitors such as Lyft, results in the cost goes down and becomes more affordable over time. Most new technology and services related to it are expensive in the beginning and become more affordable and common over time. Right now, a VR headset from Oculus Rift is expensive for most people and usually only tech geeks who work in the industry can afford the toys they make, but over time, everyone who has a tv will have it at an affordable price, and everyone will laugh at how expensive it use to be for such bad graphics compared to what they have access to in 40years. If more Ubers, Lyft and other ride sharing organizations and companies are on the road but less cars overall because they solve traffic problems: a. competition for price goes up, cost goes down b. Traffic and therefore commute times and cost of fuel goes down, which also aids in driving price down. This is the same thing for technology hardware manufactoring, if anything, Samsung is struggling not to go out of business in certain areas because the cost of a TV is so cheap now, and they actually make ridiculously expensive and luxurious tvs now to cater to the wealthy to help keep that sector afloat. Cellphones now are in remote places in Africa, allowing farmers to develop their own trading systems via communication they never had before and an entire internal market for crop trading and development and business is now viable for people in third world countries because they have access to affordable phones now. That would have never happened though if the first phone had to be affordable for everyone. The first time someone does something, theres a lot of R&D time, waste inefficiency, testing cycles and messy feedback from customers through first iterations. The first time someone learns how to sew, they may waste lots of cloth trying to make a dress that is nice enough someone will pay for, and probably sell an ok dress for a price that does not exceed the amount of time and effort they put in, but it will still only be for rich women. It was very rare back in the late 1890's that someone could afford to buy premade clothing, and everyone had to learn how to sew their own clothes because it was too expensive. But its a good thing that very expensive market was sustained and not ousted just because only rich people could afford to buy a premade dress. Looking back, its clearly inefficient and a loss of time and money for everyone to have to be educated at that skill, the same way we will look back and find it particularly wasteful for anyone who spends the majority of their life in urban areas to have their own car and have to waste time navigating their own transportation, and if they need to venture out of the city for a day or the weekend, rental hubs will abound at the outskirts as they already do in NYC and other areas, for rental for an hour, 4hours or a day or more. This is kind of the cycle of development. It's a good thing computers arent the size of small rooms or even small houses anymore or even that a small one cost an arm and a leg, we would all feel that to be ridiculous. in my mind, I think its ridiculous that families both rich and lower middle class are obligated to maintain 1-2 cars, usually two if both parents work, and then kids who get jobs before they move out and need to navigate themselves after school, have to invest thousands and thousands of dollars. If you are poor its even worse because you will have to buy a used car, and spend more time and money fixing your car when it breaks down, but in unpredictable spurts that costs anywhere from hundreds or thousands of dollars, making it even more chaotic for poor families to navigate through life. As far as America's bus transportation in most cities. Give me a break. Barely anyone who is not on welfare uses my cities transportation, and its a 45minute ride minimum to get to the poorest area to the closest sector that offers them jobs. That's a lot of time each way minimum for a single working mother on welfare trying to get herself out of a bad situation, struggling between spending hours on a bus for a ten minute ride in a car for a better salary and affording rent. I find usually liberal elite trying to make arguments for the lower working class and people struggling to get out of welfare usually end up shooting not themselves but the people they claim to be speaking for in the foot. Not surprisingly, in my area people on welfare are some of the largest and loudest demographics wanting Uber, because they lost all hope in their own public transportation system years ago. It's not just bad, its disgraceful, and when I find myself trying to schedule a cab (yes in my city you have to schedule and theres usually a 45minute wait minimum but thats rarely accurate) in person, which hopefully saves you bit more than calling, its crowded with people on welfare trying to get cabs with children in tow, and being robbed blind based on arbitrary taxi prices. This may not be the case in the city, but actually rural poor and isolated economically struggling cities like Detroit and upstate NY who don't have subways can benefit greatly from Uber, much more so than the middle class. Is there any product or service that has ever existed involving technology that was affordable for everyone the very first release of it?
losvedir 10y ago
Very interesting. I worry about a selection bias, though. Uber riders are wealthier than average, so the trips won't necessarily reflect all the commutes of those in the city. I hope this doesn't lead to just an improvement in bus routes, road construction, traffic, etc. between nicer sections of the city.
- gedrap 10y ago
  Well, you are right that uber users is not a representative sample of the city population. Biased data is not inherently bad, it's just that you need to be aware of biases.
- dtnewman 10y ago
  Not just wealthier [1], but also younger and more urban. People who have 25 mile commutes from the suburbs--even very wealthy suburbs--are more likely to own cars and less likely to use Uber. [1] In cities with good public transit (e.g., Boston, NYC), uber can seem more like a luxury but in cities that are very car centric (e.g., Detroit, Miami), Uber is actually cheaper than owning a car for many people. I live in Miami and use UberPool all the time and I meet people from all walks of life. Car insurance here is very expensive, so for a lot of people, using Uber saves them money.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    Even in San Francisco I have forgo car in favor of Uber. Using Uber is far cheaper and convenient than having a car.
    - zxcvb 10y ago
      I prefer having a car - I can put my surfboard on the roof, I can put my bikes on the back. I can always have the boot / trunk full of camping and beach stuff. It's far more convenient than relying on taxis and hire cars. Really helps when you have kids too. The convenience of hire cars and Uber covers a limited scope.
    - justinc8687 10y ago
nerdponx 10y ago
NYC has been asking for this, and Uber has been pushing back. It'll be interesting to see how this differs from what the city was asking for.
aceperry 10y ago
Amazing stuff. Looks like Uber is really making the most of their data. I hope this is a easily accessible and useful.
dx034 10y ago
You would think that with the amount of cash they burn through on a daily basis, they'd use data to make some money with it. I guess you could get a decent amount of money by cities by licensing it. I'm personally very excited to get access and love that it's free, but cannot understand it from a business perspective.
- gedrap 10y ago
  >>> cannot understand it from a business perspective This seems like a good move from the PR perspective.

307 points by ndirish1842 10y ago

My quess would be that Uber use it as a carrot for cities. Let Uber operate and we will give city official data and city planning tools for free.

gulperxcx 10y ago
Lol, nice guess
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
thinkloop 10y ago
Possibly also better overall driving experiences are good for long term business. In the same neighborhood as Facebook working to increase access to internet world-wide, or Google Fiber forcing telcos to increase speeds and drop costs. Basically encourage others to improve the infrastructure on which you rely.
kirykl 10y ago
A win win for everyone but the drivers. Sure they can quit but doesn't excuse Uber from using its negotiating power against exploiting them wherever possible.
- zeroer 10y ago
  Don't worry. Having drivers is not the long term plan anyways.
  - jayajay 10y ago
    This. People who drive automobiles for a living should start investing in new skills now.
    - pyrale 10y ago
      They aren't paid enough to invest, though.
  - pyrale 10y ago
    The more I hear this, the more i see it as a ploy to drown the working conditions complaint. I do not believe Uber invests nearly as much in autonomous cars as it invests in challenging the law and making PR about their lobbying being a civic fight.
- synicalx 10y ago
  I think there's enough readily available information on how Uber operates for want-to-be drivers to make an informed decision on whether or not they should 'work' for Uber.
  - wpietri 10y ago
    Try talking to some ex-Uber drivers. I don't think I've spoke with one that felt adequately informed by Uber. There may be adequate information now, but only because enough people bought in to Uber's marketing had poor experiences, and have talked about them. I also don't think "enough readily available information" is a good standard to judge commerce by. There's enough readily available information out there for sufficiently prepared people to not get sucked into, say, a Ponzi scheme. But that does not absolve somebody running a scam, because they are doing their best to find people not yet prepared and then energetically deceive them. My standard is more like, "Does the entity with more power use that power in a way that the entity with less power later comes to find harmful?" By that metric, I don't think Uber scores particularly well.
    - synicalx 10y ago
      A ponzi scheme is completely different to Uber so comparing the two isn't helpful. Uber is comparable to working as an freelance/indy contractor, in fact it's almost exactly the same. Uber has always been clear about how it works for the drivers, and not reading/understanding terms and conditions isn't an excuse for not taking responsibility for yourself. Their early marketing quite literally spelled out that this is something you can do with your own pre-existing car to make a bit of extra cash on the side. In fact this is STILL the prevailing message you get from their website, let me quote a few lines at you; "Got a car? Turn it into a money machine. The city is buzzing and Uber makes it easy for you to cash in on the action. Plus, you've already got everything you need to get started." "Need something outside the 9 to 5? As an independent contractor with Uber, you’ve got freedom and flexibility to drive whenever you have time." Somehow, and I really cannot fathom how, some people have interpreted this as "Go out and buy/lease a car, we'll give you a full time job".
      - 10y ago
- fsaneq2 10y ago
  Which is a problem why? Uber is not a charity.
pdog 10y ago
It's win–win–win. If cities make improvements to their transportation infrastructure based on this data, ultimately it helps Uber deliver better service to its customers.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Well except for the drivers that get paid less and less now. I mean we'll forget about all that once their self-driving vehicles start being deployed, right? Well until they kill people. I mean don't get me wrong, the data is valuable. But this is a company that constantly says "fuck you" to the law and fair work practices. Let's keep that in mind.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    I mean, don't get me wrong, this civil rights movement is valuable. But this is a movement that constantly says "fuck you" to the law (c.f. Rosa Parks) and fair work practices (the civil rights movement favored a "race to the bottom" between white and negro workers). Uber is engaged in civil disobedience against unjust laws that exist to protect political insiders. When did this become a bad thing?
    - lgas 10y ago
      I think part of the problem is that the parallels between Rosa Parks and Travis Kalanick are not as obvious to everyone as they are to you.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        What I'm pointing out is not some moral parallel between Rosa Parks and Travis Kalanick. I'm pointing out that if djsumdog's argument is valid, it applies equally well to the civil rights movement. This is a strong indication that his argument is invalid, nothing more.
        chiaro 10y ago
nnain 10y ago
This NYT article (titled, "Uber Extends an Olive Branch to Local Governments") is mostly about this sentiment - http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/technology/uber-movement-traffic-data.html http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/technology/uber-movement-t...

edgyswingset 10y ago

> We believe that breakthrough insights and ideas can come from anywhere. In the coming months, we’ll be making this data open to all. I genuinely do not believe this. If they intended on making anonymized data open, they wouldn't have a marketing site up already.

obmelvin 10y ago
I don't understand why those have to be mutually exclusive. It's possible that they haven't finished cleaning the data for public use, but the data is ready for 'trusted' city planners.
- edgyswingset 10y ago
  I don't think it's mutually exclusive - I simply don't trust Uber to act in good faith for anything they do. They've yet to demonstrate that they're deserving of trust that they're going to make that data open.
taneq 10y ago
Maybe they plan - for the right price - to make identifiable trip data available?

mklarmann 10y ago

And I do wonder why google maps with much more data hasn't done this...

jamesrom 10y ago
Google's trip data is an ingredient in their secret sauce.
xfs 10y ago
1. Privacy 2. Google doesn't have the same incentive to release data to local governments as Uber does (to improve regulatory relationships).
- daenney 10y ago
  How so privacy? This data is anonymised, they could do the same.
  - dj-wonk 10y ago
    Provable privacy based on 'anonymized' published data sets that resists third-party information and linkage is really hard -- arguably impossible in general. When people claim 'anonymized' data, I tend to not be fully convinced.
    - positr0n 10y ago
      I completely agree with you on the difficulty of truly anonymizing data. I do wonder if there any holes in this idea though: What if they released the data the number of cars per hour per segment of road (a segment meaning a continuous piece of road between two intersections) rounded to the nearest multiple of 10?
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#Motivation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#Motivatio...

jamesrom 10y ago

How does Uber anonymize the data? Does it only use subset of a trip? If you can see where and when a trip started or finished, it's definitely not anonymous enough.

cicero19 10y ago
Certainly, this data can be identifiable.
mortehu 10y ago
From the FAQ: "All data is anonymized and aggregated to ensure no personally identifiable information or user behavior can be surfaced through the Movement tool" Aggregation is a common method for anonymization. One approach is to only display trips that were made by at least 15 different people in a day.
tedmiston 10y ago
Maybe they could randomize the pickup / dropoff points within a small radius, say 1/4 mile.
notliketherest 10y ago
Yeah one scenario I was thinking of was the case of a rural home that's isolated from other buildings. It's plainly obvious that any data coming to and from that building is the occupants. There probably has to be some threshold of users (say, > 100 users taking a route) before it's exposed through this service.
peatmoss 10y ago
Watch the video again--geographic aggregation. Summary stats from geo-to-geo. EDIT: I think in the video they showed census tracts, which is one of many geographic units they could choose from.
- cowsandmilk 10y ago
  In their trial with Boston, it was limited to zip codes[1]. Cross my finger for census tracts as that would be far more useful. [1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber-partnership-has-not-lived-up-to-promise https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber...

Paul-ish 10y ago

I'm curious what techniques they will use to anonymize the data. I would guess some sort of differential privacy technique.

dj-wonk 10y ago
I hope so, but I would be a little surprised if they used DP. I am more inclined to think they will take a 'traditional' (weaker in terms of provable privacy protection) approach.
- frankmcsherry 10y ago
  It's totally reasonable to consider doing something like this with differential privacy. The techniques exist, but it would still be pretty brave of them. They are certainly aware of DP. Example technique: if you treat each record as a (src,dst) pair of (lat,lon) pairs or somesuch, you can then build a 4d grid whose cells you populate with (Laplace) noisy counts. This provides eps-differential privacy when the noise is roughly 1/eps. Whenever counts are sufficiently large, you can refine the contents of the cell and ask again. If you do the refinement at most k times, you get k*eps-differential privacy. There are smarter ways that work even better. These provide "trip privacy", meaning they mask the presence/absence of individual trips. Uber presumably has user identifiers, and could group all trips by one user together, and do the same counting where the weight of each trip is scaled down so that they sum to at most one for each user. This would then give "user privacy", meaning it masks the presence/absence of individual users.

NicoJuicy 10y ago

This won't help in Belgium, where Trucks need to pay "road taxes" and have a device installed for that. They can also get the data for tracking vehicles and they won't need Uber. Good idea though, but not applicable everywhere

dllthomas 10y ago
Knowing "N people wanted to go from roughly here to roughly there enough to pay Uber for the ride" is information that wouldn't show up in "my truck moved from X to Y" data, and which is potentially hugely valuable to those adjusting public transit.
kabes 10y ago
This is focused on urban traffic. That may be totally different from truck traffic, which avoids (or even isn't allowed in) urban areas.

politician 10y ago

Having read no further than the headline, I really wanted this article to be about on-demand piggyback rides.

bonyt 10y ago

This is cool. NYC already releases this information for taxis. It might even include Uber rides since they all have TLC plates, though I'm not sure. http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtm...

WillEngler 10y ago
Chicago also released their taxi trips dataset recently: http://digital.cityofchicago.org/index.php/chicago-taxi-data-released/ http://digital.cityofchicago.org/index.php/chicago-taxi-data...

tedmiston 10y ago

From the FAQ: > What are the licensing terms? > Movement makes all insights available under the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial license. Now, that's pretty interesting. I wonder if we'll have API level access in a way that we can build tools on this data.

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kosei 10y ago

Hope this is as fantastic as this sounds. Many cities are starting to make this data publicly available, and the potential impact to urban planning, traffic reduction, parking and more is enormous. That said, what's Uber's commercial angle? Licensing fees? "Movement makes all insights available under the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial license."

peatmoss 10y ago
Making friends. Uber is quite aware that their reputation within cities hasn't been the best. Internally, there is a loose federation of people who genuinely want to improve cities, and people who recognize the business value in not continuing to piss cities off.
- WillEngler 10y ago
  Yep. Conversely, it's interesting to see some urban planning folks warm up to ride sharing as a way to extend the reach of existing transit networks. But still a lot of hostility, to be sure.
  - peatmoss 10y ago
    I think urban planning folks have been, in principle, favorable to new mobility options that don't involve private vehicle ownership. I think some folks in the cities have been conflicted about some of Uber's lawlessness / relationship to labor.
cowsandmilk 10y ago
> Hope this is as fantastic as this sounds The experience in Boston was that Uber anonymized the data too much for it to be useful[1]. I would be very skeptical of this as it seems to be a program publicly touted as useful, but the e-mails obtained via FOIA requests show it to not be. I'm not sure what the solution is since privacy should be a concern. [1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber-partnership-has-not-lived-up-to-promise https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber...

sebleon 10y ago

This is awesome, really happy to see them release such valuable data!

bogomipz 10y ago

Doesn't this run contra to another recent story about Uber being against giving cities this data? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/uber-doesn-t-want-to-give-nyc-or-anyone-more-data https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/uber-does...

bastawhiz 10y ago
In that case, NYC is asking for addresses and timestamps. The data provided by Movement is aggregate. In other words, cities like NYC want Movement but without the anonymization.
fourthark 10y ago
This is probably their reaction to the government requests for data. They want to define the terms under which they share data, and "volunteering" is the way to do that.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  This makes sense. I bet if anything the the NYC issue may have just hastened the release of this.

return0 10y ago

Uber however caters to a specific class of people and they don't seem to be the people who can only afford public transport. This may not be an issue in America, but i think if cities change their public transit planning to accomodate the class of people who can afford uber, they will be disadvantaging those who really need it.

usmeteora 10y ago
I don't know about that. Computers and Tvs and cellphones used to be only for rich elite businessmen, now, not everyone can afford to have one, but even lower middle class people can pick up a $200 chromebook, or finance a phone and the technology they have access to for the same or very similiar prices gets better every year. There are actually very few things in life in which the quality and amount of it that can be afforded for the same price each year increase so much annually for someone with stagnant wages and little economic mobility, as hardware and software technology, and services that optimize their efficiency and prices based on it. In general, the expanded use of something, especially with realistic competitors such as Lyft, results in the cost goes down and becomes more affordable over time. Most new technology and services related to it are expensive in the beginning and become more affordable and common over time. Right now, a VR headset from Oculus Rift is expensive for most people and usually only tech geeks who work in the industry can afford the toys they make, but over time, everyone who has a tv will have it at an affordable price, and everyone will laugh at how expensive it use to be for such bad graphics compared to what they have access to in 40years. If more Ubers, Lyft and other ride sharing organizations and companies are on the road but less cars overall because they solve traffic problems: a. competition for price goes up, cost goes down b. Traffic and therefore commute times and cost of fuel goes down, which also aids in driving price down. This is the same thing for technology hardware manufactoring, if anything, Samsung is struggling not to go out of business in certain areas because the cost of a TV is so cheap now, and they actually make ridiculously expensive and luxurious tvs now to cater to the wealthy to help keep that sector afloat. Cellphones now are in remote places in Africa, allowing farmers to develop their own trading systems via communication they never had before and an entire internal market for crop trading and development and business is now viable for people in third world countries because they have access to affordable phones now. That would have never happened though if the first phone had to be affordable for everyone. The first time someone does something, theres a lot of R&D time, waste inefficiency, testing cycles and messy feedback from customers through first iterations. The first time someone learns how to sew, they may waste lots of cloth trying to make a dress that is nice enough someone will pay for, and probably sell an ok dress for a price that does not exceed the amount of time and effort they put in, but it will still only be for rich women. It was very rare back in the late 1890's that someone could afford to buy premade clothing, and everyone had to learn how to sew their own clothes because it was too expensive. But its a good thing that very expensive market was sustained and not ousted just because only rich people could afford to buy a premade dress. Looking back, its clearly inefficient and a loss of time and money for everyone to have to be educated at that skill, the same way we will look back and find it particularly wasteful for anyone who spends the majority of their life in urban areas to have their own car and have to waste time navigating their own transportation, and if they need to venture out of the city for a day or the weekend, rental hubs will abound at the outskirts as they already do in NYC and other areas, for rental for an hour, 4hours or a day or more. This is kind of the cycle of development. It's a good thing computers arent the size of small rooms or even small houses anymore or even that a small one cost an arm and a leg, we would all feel that to be ridiculous. in my mind, I think its ridiculous that families both rich and lower middle class are obligated to maintain 1-2 cars, usually two if both parents work, and then kids who get jobs before they move out and need to navigate themselves after school, have to invest thousands and thousands of dollars. If you are poor its even worse because you will have to buy a used car, and spend more time and money fixing your car when it breaks down, but in unpredictable spurts that costs anywhere from hundreds or thousands of dollars, making it even more chaotic for poor families to navigate through life. As far as America's bus transportation in most cities. Give me a break. Barely anyone who is not on welfare uses my cities transportation, and its a 45minute ride minimum to get to the poorest area to the closest sector that offers them jobs. That's a lot of time each way minimum for a single working mother on welfare trying to get herself out of a bad situation, struggling between spending hours on a bus for a ten minute ride in a car for a better salary and affording rent. I find usually liberal elite trying to make arguments for the lower working class and people struggling to get out of welfare usually end up shooting not themselves but the people they claim to be speaking for in the foot. Not surprisingly, in my area people on welfare are some of the largest and loudest demographics wanting Uber, because they lost all hope in their own public transportation system years ago. It's not just bad, its disgraceful, and when I find myself trying to schedule a cab (yes in my city you have to schedule and theres usually a 45minute wait minimum but thats rarely accurate) in person, which hopefully saves you bit more than calling, its crowded with people on welfare trying to get cabs with children in tow, and being robbed blind based on arbitrary taxi prices. This may not be the case in the city, but actually rural poor and isolated economically struggling cities like Detroit and upstate NY who don't have subways can benefit greatly from Uber, much more so than the middle class. Is there any product or service that has ever existed involving technology that was affordable for everyone the very first release of it?

losvedir 10y ago

Very interesting. I worry about a selection bias, though. Uber riders are wealthier than average, so the trips won't necessarily reflect all the commutes of those in the city. I hope this doesn't lead to just an improvement in bus routes, road construction, traffic, etc. between nicer sections of the city.

gedrap 10y ago
Well, you are right that uber users is not a representative sample of the city population. Biased data is not inherently bad, it's just that you need to be aware of biases.
dtnewman 10y ago
Not just wealthier [1], but also younger and more urban. People who have 25 mile commutes from the suburbs--even very wealthy suburbs--are more likely to own cars and less likely to use Uber. [1] In cities with good public transit (e.g., Boston, NYC), uber can seem more like a luxury but in cities that are very car centric (e.g., Detroit, Miami), Uber is actually cheaper than owning a car for many people. I live in Miami and use UberPool all the time and I meet people from all walks of life. Car insurance here is very expensive, so for a lot of people, using Uber saves them money.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Even in San Francisco I have forgo car in favor of Uber. Using Uber is far cheaper and convenient than having a car.
  - zxcvb 10y ago
    I prefer having a car - I can put my surfboard on the roof, I can put my bikes on the back. I can always have the boot / trunk full of camping and beach stuff. It's far more convenient than relying on taxis and hire cars. Really helps when you have kids too. The convenience of hire cars and Uber covers a limited scope.
  - justinc8687 10y ago

nerdponx 10y ago

NYC has been asking for this, and Uber has been pushing back. It'll be interesting to see how this differs from what the city was asking for.

aceperry 10y ago

Amazing stuff. Looks like Uber is really making the most of their data. I hope this is a easily accessible and useful.

dx034 10y ago

You would think that with the amount of cash they burn through on a daily basis, they'd use data to make some money with it. I guess you could get a decent amount of money by cities by licensing it. I'm personally very excited to get access and love that it's free, but cannot understand it from a business perspective.

gedrap 10y ago
>>> cannot understand it from a business perspective This seems like a good move from the PR perspective.