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Not to dispute you primary point (auction of personal data for someone else's gains)... I don't think this will work for gas stations. The margins are too thin
by rbobby 8y ago
Not to dispute you primary point (auction of personal data for someone else's gains)...
I don't think this will work for gas stations. The margins are too thin to support discounts large enough to attract customers.
It might work for oil change places... but then GM would be competing with it's own dealership service centers... which it wouldn't do.
I'd be much more worried about detailed ride data being shared with insurance companies. I'm pretty sure insurance companies could figure out from the data whether someone is a safe driver (or not). Or at least they would convince themselves that they could. Might even work. But it would be a hell of a privacy invasion. And imagine the crossover uses for medical insurance... regular visits to drug areas, bam that's a price increase on you health insurance. Same for regularly being parked near bars... chance of drunk driving goes way up.
- kbob 8y ago> The margins are too thin. But if you're known to buy a large Squishee and a copy of Radioactive Man 73% of the time when you fill up between 1:00 and 3:00 PM, the margins look a little better.
- whoopdedo 8y agoBut marketers will quickly see the opportunity not to offer discounts but rather to target the sale to maximize the margin. Uber already does this by increasing fares when it detects a phone battery is dying. Someone will raise their prices at night then buy ads for drivers who are running low on fuel during that time.
- AgentOrange1234 8y agoDo folks really get critically low on gas that often? Your phone battery lasts a day and can get drained easily in unexpected ways, so the Uber thing probably has a lot of chances to kick in. But your car holds so much gas, and gas stations are so close together, that it’s hard to see how they would actually “trap” anyone. I usually can plan a few days in advance when I am going to fill up next.
- cascom 8y agoI think it’s less of an issue for local drivers, but if you are in an unfamiliar area - or more likely going on a trip, there is a ~30 min period during which you will NEED to get gas no matter what...
- wlll 8y ago> Uber already does this by increasing fares when it detects a phone battery is dying. Holy crap, everything I read about Uber just makes it seem worse and worse.
- Silhouette 8y agoOf course, the next question we should all be asking is why your own phone is betraying you to a commercial service by providing that information to their app in the first place.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoWell the idea was that an app might be able to adjust what it did to help preserve battery life. The reality is "woohoo, free money." #enable price_gouging.
- Silhouette 8y agoWell the idea was that an app might be able to adjust what it did to help preserve battery life. That argument never really made much sense, though. Battery life is an issue with any mobile device, so if you could do something more efficiently in your app, why wouldn't you be doing it all the time anyway? I could see an argument for some sort of critical "this device is about to shut down" notification, but there's no reason that couldn't require explicit permission when an app asks to use it, and in any case it's much less subject to abuse than a general indicator of battery remaining.
- lallysingh 8y agoTradeoffs. Fewer animations, lower frame rate in videos or games, etc.
- maxerickson 8y agoCould implement those as a permission or setting, I wouldn't mind the Uber app being in low power mode all the time.