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L.A. temporarily suspends Uber’s permit to rent out electric scooters and bikes

261 points by ilamont 7y ago

tyxodiwktis 7y ago
The core issue is that ridership data is a key piece the cities need to craft a tax on ride-sharing, and to tailor the tax to help their financially challenged public transit entities. Uber knows that if they give up scooter use data the city will immediately request it for ride sharing as well. The privacy question conveniently aligns with Uber’s position, but I doubt that this is Uber’s core concern vs avoiding every major city banging on the rideshare piñata to fund the gigantic debt service payments and generous benefit programs for their underutilized public transit systems.
- spenrose 7y ago
  You have the dynamic correct but the values backwards. Cities are defined by their physical and social density and their long-term investments in physical capital. Uber lacks a sustainable business model. Transportation within a city features many "natural" monopolies (i.e. train tracks), and the promise of an emergent overarching monopoly: providing one-App entry into multi-modal transportation. If Uber can capture those monopoly rents it has a chance to survive as a permanent parasite. If it doesn't, it's doomed.
  - angleofrepose 7y ago
    > Transportation within a city features many "natural" monopolies (i.e. train tracks), and the promise of an emergent overarching monopoly: providing one-App entry into multi-modal transportation. I don't understand what you are saying here, can you elaborate? What are you saying about Uber / monopolistic rideshare companies? Related, I don't understand why cities/governments allow Uber to exist considering the reality that, as you point out, "Uber lacks a sustainable business model". Is it not transparent to all relevant parties that Uber could not and cannot maintain the price it has set to gain market share, and that down the line it had a clear goal of building monopolistic market share in order to effectively price fix against the interest of the consumers? I don't know enough to reflect on public transport and taxi companies of old, but how did we get to present day without consumer protection regulations sorting things out? I see parallels with Amazon, and I have the same questions. Why are they entertained in this destruction of local economies by the entities which should protect those economies (in the US, local and state gov)? I wonder if Barnes and Nobel's effect destruction of local book stores had a period of growth with lower prices then settled down and raised prices? If so, is this not against the interest of the consumer? If not, well I'm not sure. Maybe Barnes and Nobel is not comparable to these internet based companies.
    - bluehatchurn 7y ago
      As I understand it they are predicting that a single app will come to be used for all public transit in a major city or on a larger level. If Uber is able to play a role in this project they can have a income stream that doesn't require heavy subsidization. Without that they will at some point fail as they require more input value then output value is produced.
- snagglegaggle 7y ago
  I can't really tell your opinion, so I guess this is for other readers: the government can be entitled to regulate an activity but at the same time not be entitled to any means of actually enforcing that regulation. A prime example is anti-sodomy laws.† In the earlier US laws would be enforcement tested and disposed of if they were intractable to actually implement; unfortunately now it seems like laws are made, and a regression of rights is accepted so that the laws may be enforced. The intent of the constitution was the exact opposite. † You can argue private sexual relations (in general) are not an appropriate target of regulation and you would be right. However accepting this argument in every case means many things can not be regulated. Perhaps this was the original intent.
  - chance_state 7y ago
    Can someone downvoting this person's post explain why?
    - snagglegaggle 7y ago
      At some point it looked like people were following my account and downvoting it. Everything I'd post would get to -2 or so. I think it stopped? Apparently some twitter uses do not like HN, it is/was not just myself, someone else told me about it.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  I believe that Uber and Lyft already share data for car rides with the city of LA. Edit: I've been trying to find a source and can't, so that may not be true. They only share detailed data with a few places, like NYC. LA only gets data on regular taxi rides, and it isn't realtime.
  - morganherlocker 7y ago
    The collection in LA does include some car services, although not necessarily ride share yet. The collection protocol is designed for multimodal surveillance beyond scooters.
- dwild 7y ago
  > The core issue is that ridership data is a key piece the cities need to craft a tax on ride-sharing, Can you explain how the real time data can be used for that and why not some aggregated anonymized data, or data gathered by the government observation themselves?
- stefan_ 7y ago
  You are talking about the city that has half its space dedicated to free street parking and a bunch of highways cutting through it as if it's some sort of modern mobility policy paragon just trying to correctly price out externalities. No, whatever Ubers goal in not doing this, I'm sure the motivations of local L.A. politicians are forever more twisted. These people wouldn't know public transport if a bus ran them over. Which is unlikely to happen, given their average speed of 9 mph.
  - asdff 7y ago
    1.2 million ride LA metro a day.
    - sieabahlpark 7y ago
      And many many many more don't. It's the second largest city in the US.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
the-dude 7y ago
Headline misleads, L.A. intends to suspend Jump, an Uber subsidary. They have time to appeal until Friday.
- choppaface 7y ago
  But apparently it’s Uber who wants to sue the city.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  Yeah, I was picturing the chaos if the UBER app suddenly stopped working all of a sudden.
michaelt 7y ago
I guess I don't see any way a dockless bike/scooter rental scheme can be compatible with privacy. Their need to know where available bikes are, and to be able to detect thefts makes it hard to imagine they could work without GPS tracking. And as soon as you know who rented what bike when, and where each bike went, you're going to start knowing customers' homes, workplaces and places of worship. Although the government and uber knowing this data is less private than uber alone knowing, we all know uber doesn't give a shit about customer privacy. Personally I'd be much more worried about uber having the data in the first place than about the government also having the data.
- not_a_cop75 7y ago
  Almost every possible transportation service is like this. If you really need privacy, don't use public or paid transport.
- pasiaj 7y ago
  I expect Uber to care a lot about privacy. They’ve burned themselves badly before disrespecting privacy and I assume they’ve improved in that area immensely. Uber’s and their employees’ own interests are aligned with strong data privacy. The same cannot be said for the government.
  - shakna 7y ago
    > I assume they’ve improved in that area immensely. Why would you assume that without significant reason? This is a company that has, as you said, had problems with privacy. 2015, tracking concerns hit the news. [0] 2017, there's a class action. [1] And FTC auditing. [2] 2018, there's massive fines. [3] We're in 2019, years on from actual problems being raised, and then being forced to confronted. How are Uber doing on that front? > By focusing on global hiring, you will have people on the ground in other regions who can better understand the local laws, better understand the culture that drove the laws and how a new law is likely to be enforced, and build better relationships with regulators and other influencers. Sounds more like they're interested in controlling the laws, not actually improving themselves overall. (And none of this is to suggest the government is any way a better caretaker - they're worse in almost every way.) [0] https://www.wired.com/insights/2015/01/uber-privacy-woes-cautionary-tale/ https://www.wired.com/insights/2015/01/uber-privacy-woes-cau... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/24/uber-hell-program-driver-privacy-lyft-spying https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/24/uber-hell... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/technology/uber-agrees-to-privacy-audits-in-settlement-with-ftc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/technology/uber-agrees-to... [3] https://techwireasia.com/2019/08/uber-chief-privacy-officer-advises-on-building-strong-compliance-teams/ https://techwireasia.com/2019/08/uber-chief-privacy-officer-...
karlerss 7y ago
> data are necessary to figure out which companies are flouting the permit program’s rules Sending all ride data seems excessive. A few photographs taken by city officials showing scooters in wrong places should do the trick.
- dannyr 7y ago
  There's a cap on number of scooters and bikes each company can deploy. That's what LA is trying to enforce by asking for data. FTA "Los Angeles officials have said the data are necessary to figure out which companies are flouting the permit program’s rules, including caps on the number of vehicles and bans on riding in certain areas. They have also argued that the companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves."
  - malandrew 7y ago
    Require hard to counterfeit licensing stickers for each vehicle that need to be re-applied to each scooter yearly. Sell a limited number of numbered stickers. If you find a vehicle without a sticker, you know they aren't following the requirements. To prevent sticker tampering, stickers can be placed behind a transparent piece of tempered glass or forego stickers entirely and use bolted on metal plaques.
- dpratt 7y ago
  If you present a problem to a government official that can be solved in a simple fashion or by a complex scheme that also grants them more power, they will go for the power every single time. From their perspective, it’s just a bonus that they can cloud it in the sophistry of “its for public safety”.
badrabbit 7y ago
Why GPS? Why not low tech transponders? They're precise enough to help you locate a scooter but too imprecise for navigation or tracking the exact path someone took. Especially if they don't ping frequently.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  Partly because some cities have no-ride zones where scooters and bikes are banned outright or supposed to be speed limited. The boardwalks in some CA cities fall into this category. You can ride in the street parallel at whatever speed you want. But on the boardwalk, you're capped at X mph (usually <10mph, if I'm remembering correctly). Yes, the city could just use traffic enforcement to issue tickets. But, I'm inclined to have software enforcement and not hire more traffic cops.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    > But, I'm inclined to have software enforcement and not hire more traffic cops. I can contest what a police officer is claiming in a court. With automated systems? Good luck. If society wants to enforce traffic laws, it should hire more cops, not hackable AI blackboxes.
    - alistairSH 7y ago
      The software doesn't issue you a ticket, so there's nothing to contest. It simple slows the scooter down in the restricted zone. And if the software is wrong, you stop using the system, and move to a vendor that makes it work. Anyway, not claiming this is ideal. Just sounds (without much thought) like a better solution than traffic cops.
      - hombre_fatal 7y ago
        Maybe if we're going to go down this route, we should have these systems in our cars, too.
bransonf 7y ago
The thing is, these scooter APIs are getting reverse engineered pretty often. (I contribute to a github repo[0]) So Uber can’t really hide the data if they’re in noncompliance. St Louis has this clause written in their scooter legislation that a certain number of scooters must be in certain regions for the purpose of equity. I’ll tell you it’s a damn lie as far as the data is concerned. No one seems to care though. It was written in so politicians could advertise it as a good thing, but they refuse to enforce it because of the little revenue or attention the scooters bring. I don’t really care where they put the scooters, but it still pisses me off both that scooter companies are seemingly above the law and that some politicians are lazy cheats. [0] https://github.com/ubahnverleih/WoBike https://github.com/ubahnverleih/WoBike
- black_puppydog 7y ago
  Wanted to say thanks for WoBike. I use it in a crown job to monitor the local bike pool's (pityful) offering.
- dschep 7y ago
  WoBike is great, and I've contributed to that repo too, but that data is quite different from data in question in this article. Unless I'm mistaken, most of the reverse engineered APIs (and public ones in municipalities that mandate them) are for _available_ scooters. This article is about scooter location while it's being ridden around by a renter.
  - bransonf 7y ago
    In the linked article, which I'm assuming this refers to: > The city will require companies to share information on the start point, end point and travel time of each bike or scooter trip within 24 hours after it ends, and whether the vehicle entered zones where riding or parking are restricted. I know for at least all of the scooters I've tracked, you can identify each scooter by a unique ID. Assuming you pull your data on a minute-by-minute basis, you can retrace the start and end of a scooter ride. For example, Scooter 123 is available at x,y at 12:05, It's not available from 12:06 to 12:15. It becomes available at 12:16 at x,y. The ride was approximately 11 minutes and started and ended at those two points. I don't think the city wants real-time data, and frankly I don't think these companies would be willing or even capable of producing it.
sailfast 7y ago
This article is positioned like Uber / Jump can argue the matter and/or have leverage. Additional comments here act like Uber should be able to operate as they want. They do not and cannot. In order to operate legally as a business in a locality, you have to obey the law. If that law is sharing your data, you've gotta figure out a way to do that, or not operate. Figure out a privacy notice for your LA Riders and add it to your EULA - lord knows they've done this for less worthwhile purposes before. In this case, this is about sharing competitive information with the city that others might see. This is not a choice. Any language of upset from the company seems like hyperbole and not to be taken seriously. If you think this is crazy, I'd ask you to take a look at liquor boards throughout the US. This data sharing agreement seems paltry to comply with by comparison.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  I’ve never heard of a liquor board that required stores to deliver to the government a real time feed of who’s buying what liquor. If such a policy were created, and BevMo announced they refuse to comply, I’d be fully in support of that despite my normal concerns about companies ignoring regulations. It’s not about the general principle here. If Uber’s claim about deanonymization is accurate, this specific policy is PRISM level bad.
  - sailfast 7y ago
    Agreed, and I don’t necessarily agree with the real-time requirement as the best way to regulate. That said, while the data providing burden is certainly more than the liquor store must provide, it doesn’t seem like they’ve delayed permitting for months, requiring public notice, checking to ensure named individuals are at work, etc (not to mention some of the graft that has been associated with liquor licenses in other cities). They have a data requirement. It is not new, the company is not responding. Don’t they already do this with ride data from Uber? EDIT: Looks like they don't do this for rides yet, and may be using this as a trial balloon for greater data access? (based on this article from May, if accurate?) https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/tech/uber-lyft-cities-data/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/tech/uber-lyft-cities-data/in... EDIT2: DC has been doing this with car / ride-sharing agencies for awhile but I don't believe it's published. Not sure of the status of SharedStreets: https://www.wired.com/story/uber-nacto-data-sharing/ https://www.wired.com/story/uber-nacto-data-sharing/
robomartin 7y ago
This is preposterous. Imagine government requiring any business to delivery real time data on customer behavior, from doctors to restaurants, Walmart to dispensaries. The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution is about privacy FROM GOVERNMENT INTRUSION, which is precisely what this is, an intrusive act on the part of government. Why don't they devote their time and effort to actually fixing the crumbling infrastructure here? It's a joke. There are third world countries that have better streets and highways than we have in certain parts of Los Angeles.
- scelerat 7y ago
  Fourth amendment deals with "unreasonable" search and seizure. It could be argued that municipalities requesting data on usage of infrastructure they must maintain, fund and plan for is not unreasonable.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    By that metric, requiring that all cars report their location live to the municipal government would be OK - after all, that car is using the roads they maintain. For that matter, why limit it to cars? Require that every citizen report their GPS location 24/7 - if you're out of the house you're using their roads or sidewalks, and if you're in the house you're using city water/power/sewer.
    - scelerat 7y ago
      Indeed, I don't entirely disagree.
  - robomartin 7y ago
    If you consider yourself to be a free person, almost everything government wants to know about you falls under the category of unreasonable. If people are free, government is entitled to knowing very little about them. Their function isn't to keep tabs on us, to keep a database of every single action we take. That is NOT what they are elected to do. Freedom is a very fragile construct. If we don't hold our government to the bounds they are supposed to occupy what is at risk is, without a doubt, freedom, by a thousand cuts.
testfoobar 7y ago
Of all the public-goods usurped for private profit companies recently, I find the scooters to be the most intrusive. Scooters on sidewalks are dangerous and should be banned. We have explicit laws against skateboarding and riding bicycles on sidewalks in most communities. For bicyclists in San Francisco: "It’s illegal to ride on the sidewalk if you are over the age of 13. (SF Transportation Code Sec. 7.2.12)" https://sfbike.org/resources/bicycle-law/rules-of-the-road/ https://sfbike.org/resources/bicycle-law/rules-of-the-road/ Yet, everyday you can find scooters on sidewalks wherever scooters are available. Toddlers use sidewalks - they walk in a random walk. Hearing impaired, sight-impaired, mobility-impaired people use sidewalks. Seniors use sidewalks. These people do not expect 180lb adults riding at 5 to 10mph right in their face. The kinetic energy and momentum at 10mph of an adult is considerable. Falls for anybody can lead to bone fractures. Even more so for seniors. Hip fractures in particular can be fatal for seniors. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-hip-fractures-elderly-death-sentence.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-hip-fractures-elderly... Scooters should not be allowed on sidewalks.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  A similar argument could be made for banning running on sidewalks. In fact a runner could exceed the maximum electric speed of these scooters. It is ultimately up to the rider to assure safe operating regardless of mode of transport (feed, skateboard, scooter, etc). The fact that skateboards were widely banned due to a moral panic (largely around culture, not safety), isn't in itself a very strong argument since I'd point out that that ban lacks good justification within itself. I might agree more if there were safe cycle paths that skateboarders, scooter users, and similar could use but there aren't. Their choices are the sidewalk, where there's a risk of minor injury or the street where there's a risk of death. For now, the sidewalk is the "least bad" alternative until a better one is built.
  - testfoobar 7y ago
    Runners and scooter riders are not the same thing at all. Runners, and specifically regular runners, are by definition self-trained to hit both higher speeds and frequency of runs. The average adult just can't get up and run at 10mph for 10 minutes without training. The average adult probably couldn't do 6mph for 2 minutes. Yet this same average adult, without training, can get on a scooter and move at 5-10mph down a sidewalk. Second, runners do not run everyday, multiple times for every trip and errand. You can grab a scooter for lunch, for an errand, etc multiple times a day. Scooter trips are more frequent, done by everyday people and should be banned on sidewalks. Lastly, it is not the job of pedestrians to accommodate scooters because there is no better alternative yet. That is not how laws and regulations work.
jevans22 7y ago
Uber doesn't really have a say though, right? If the law says they need to provide the data, they need to provide the data.
salawat 7y ago
Don't taxi, bus, and trucking companies do this? I always thought any public transit actor had to do this to provide data to be used by DoT for traffic engineering. Like I know that traffic engineers tweak limits of public transport asset density as part of planning traffic flows. I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is just Uber getting rolled into the infrastructure they should have been participating in anyway. I'm not terribly thrilled about the implications; but it's also not surprising at all that a transit service provider would have to guarantee to a locality that they can locate their assets.
- malandrew 7y ago
  > it's also not surprising at all that a transit service provider would have to guarantee to a locality that they can locate their assets. That requirement can easily be met by occasional random spot checks a few times a month. There's no need for realtime reporting.
- arbie 7y ago
  Public transit exposes everyone's full routes, anyway. Metrocards can lead back to the payment card used for the purchase, and buses (which also record passenger ingress/egress) can remember all swiped Metrocards.
justinzollars 7y ago
LA should focus on its massive homeless problem. 50,000 people sleep on the streets every night in LA.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Remarkably, a government of the size and complexity of Los Angeles is able to do more than one thing at a time.
  - justinzollars 7y ago
    ah right. They can simultaneously fail business and the homeless. #concurrency
- bsder 7y ago
  You say that like "homelessness" is some super easy problem to solve if we just wave our hands and throw money at it. This isn't China. Governments in the US are not allowed to simply round up people and put them somewhere without permission and/or due process.
angleofrepose 7y ago
The general conversation of the comments here is confusing. > Companies are required to transmit real-time data on all trips made within the city, including the start point, end point and travel time. This is not "real-time rider information" as mentioned by many comments, this is 'real-time scooter information'. > Uber has resisted the rule for months, arguing, with the backing of several data privacy organizations, that the city’s policy constitutes government surveillance. With minimal analysis, they say, the information could easily reveal where people live, work, socialize or worship. I don't understand. The city should know where you live, you pay taxes and utilities and I'm sure there is a whole mess of bureaucracy that knows where individual names live for different reasons. Are we worried about specific elements within the bureaucracy knowing certain information? Is this information only accessible by monitoring scooters and not available to said entity by getting it through other means (school district zoning and so on)? > Los Angeles officials have said the data are necessary to figure out which companies are flouting the permit program’s rules, including caps on the number of vehicles and bans on riding in certain areas. They have also argued that the companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. This makes sense, no one would expect a regulation with no ability for the enforcing agent to monitor to be followed. > Companies such as Uber “generate and collect massive amounts of personal and financial data,” while the city “does not collect information specific to individual riders beyond trip information,” said Marcel Porras, the Transportation Department’s chief sustainability officer, in a letter to Uber last week. Yeah, that's pretty much what I expect from this situation, the whole dog and pony show that these rideshare companies put on seems like a farce. I'm not happy with municipalities for a whole load of reasons, LA especially has an awful history in many domains. But there is no world in which I trust these rideshare companies MORE than I trust municipalities. EDIT: I should add I'm sad that Uber(Jump) get to redefine the data privacy debate via their spokesperson and this journalist. I don't blame the writer, but it is absurd to validate claims like my second except above. I think this is gaslighting? If not, then related. Some PR moves to seed public expectation in this matter. They are implicitly defining this issue as something that is fundamentally different when the data is stored and collected by a corporation (them) to be sold and used however they desire vs utilization by entities in the public sector. I am happy to point people to a fantastic conversation on the "two" definitions of data privacy here: https://idlewords.com/talks/senate_testimony.2019.5.htm#two_views https://idlewords.com/talks/senate_testimony.2019.5.htm#two_...
mentat 7y ago
Feels like the buried lede is that all the other companies already sold out all the private information of their riders.
notpeter 7y ago
In case folks are curious about the underlying technical details, LADOT along with the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) built the Mobility Data Specification (MDS) which are "RESTful APIs used to specify the digital relationship between mobility as a service Providers and the Agencies that regulate them." API Spec: https://github.com/CityOfLosAngeles/mobility-data-specification/tree/dev/agency https://github.com/CityOfLosAngeles/mobility-data-specificat... Uber, as they do, is refusing to comply with laws/provide data that would enable local governments to actually regulate them. As I understand it, the pilot phase was for Bikes/Scooters, but the intention is to require use of similar APIs by car based rideshare companies in the future. Which explains some of Uber's resistance despite this only currently covering JUMP Bike Share. There's a number of other cities (NYC, Miami, Philly, SF, SJ, SEA, etc) involved with OMF/MDS. LADOT is one of the first implementations but they aren't doing it all in house. Much of the design/development of the mobility API spec and open source implementation[2] has been contracted out to Lacuna.ai (via Ellis & Associates, a wholly owned subsidiary)[3]. [2]: https://github.com/CityOfLosAngeles/mds-core https://github.com/CityOfLosAngeles/mds-core [3]: http://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinecontracts/2019/C-130956_c_7-26-19.pdf#page=10 http://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinecontracts/2019/C-130956_c_7-2...
Mikeb85 7y ago
Uber doesn't really have a leg to stand on. Cities use traffic data to determine things like traffic light synchronisation, where to build or expand roads, speed limits, etc... In this case, they're allowing electric personal vehicles on city sidewalks, information would be useful to determine if they should create bike lanes, change traffic signal patterns, etc... Not to mention, at the end of the day, cities do have control over what drives where, how fast, etc...

261 points by ilamont 7y ago

The core issue is that ridership data is a key piece the cities need to craft a tax on ride-sharing, and to tailor the tax to help their financially challenged public transit entities. Uber knows that if they give up scooter use data the city will immediately request it for ride sharing as well. The privacy question conveniently aligns with Uber’s position, but I doubt that this is Uber’s core concern vs avoiding every major city banging on the rideshare piñata to fund the gigantic debt service payments and generous benefit programs for their underutilized public transit systems.

spenrose 7y ago
You have the dynamic correct but the values backwards. Cities are defined by their physical and social density and their long-term investments in physical capital. Uber lacks a sustainable business model. Transportation within a city features many "natural" monopolies (i.e. train tracks), and the promise of an emergent overarching monopoly: providing one-App entry into multi-modal transportation. If Uber can capture those monopoly rents it has a chance to survive as a permanent parasite. If it doesn't, it's doomed.
- angleofrepose 7y ago
  > Transportation within a city features many "natural" monopolies (i.e. train tracks), and the promise of an emergent overarching monopoly: providing one-App entry into multi-modal transportation. I don't understand what you are saying here, can you elaborate? What are you saying about Uber / monopolistic rideshare companies? Related, I don't understand why cities/governments allow Uber to exist considering the reality that, as you point out, "Uber lacks a sustainable business model". Is it not transparent to all relevant parties that Uber could not and cannot maintain the price it has set to gain market share, and that down the line it had a clear goal of building monopolistic market share in order to effectively price fix against the interest of the consumers? I don't know enough to reflect on public transport and taxi companies of old, but how did we get to present day without consumer protection regulations sorting things out? I see parallels with Amazon, and I have the same questions. Why are they entertained in this destruction of local economies by the entities which should protect those economies (in the US, local and state gov)? I wonder if Barnes and Nobel's effect destruction of local book stores had a period of growth with lower prices then settled down and raised prices? If so, is this not against the interest of the consumer? If not, well I'm not sure. Maybe Barnes and Nobel is not comparable to these internet based companies.
  - bluehatchurn 7y ago
    As I understand it they are predicting that a single app will come to be used for all public transit in a major city or on a larger level. If Uber is able to play a role in this project they can have a income stream that doesn't require heavy subsidization. Without that they will at some point fail as they require more input value then output value is produced.
snagglegaggle 7y ago
I can't really tell your opinion, so I guess this is for other readers: the government can be entitled to regulate an activity but at the same time not be entitled to any means of actually enforcing that regulation. A prime example is anti-sodomy laws.† In the earlier US laws would be enforcement tested and disposed of if they were intractable to actually implement; unfortunately now it seems like laws are made, and a regression of rights is accepted so that the laws may be enforced. The intent of the constitution was the exact opposite. † You can argue private sexual relations (in general) are not an appropriate target of regulation and you would be right. However accepting this argument in every case means many things can not be regulated. Perhaps this was the original intent.
- chance_state 7y ago
  Can someone downvoting this person's post explain why?
  - snagglegaggle 7y ago
    At some point it looked like people were following my account and downvoting it. Everything I'd post would get to -2 or so. I think it stopped? Apparently some twitter uses do not like HN, it is/was not just myself, someone else told me about it.
Rebelgecko 7y ago
I believe that Uber and Lyft already share data for car rides with the city of LA. Edit: I've been trying to find a source and can't, so that may not be true. They only share detailed data with a few places, like NYC. LA only gets data on regular taxi rides, and it isn't realtime.
- morganherlocker 7y ago
  The collection in LA does include some car services, although not necessarily ride share yet. The collection protocol is designed for multimodal surveillance beyond scooters.
dwild 7y ago
> The core issue is that ridership data is a key piece the cities need to craft a tax on ride-sharing, Can you explain how the real time data can be used for that and why not some aggregated anonymized data, or data gathered by the government observation themselves?
stefan_ 7y ago
You are talking about the city that has half its space dedicated to free street parking and a bunch of highways cutting through it as if it's some sort of modern mobility policy paragon just trying to correctly price out externalities. No, whatever Ubers goal in not doing this, I'm sure the motivations of local L.A. politicians are forever more twisted. These people wouldn't know public transport if a bus ran them over. Which is unlikely to happen, given their average speed of 9 mph.
- asdff 7y ago
  1.2 million ride LA metro a day.
  - sieabahlpark 7y ago
    And many many many more don't. It's the second largest city in the US.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

the-dude 7y ago

Headline misleads, L.A. intends to suspend Jump, an Uber subsidary. They have time to appeal until Friday.

choppaface 7y ago
But apparently it’s Uber who wants to sue the city.
jobigoud 7y ago
Yeah, I was picturing the chaos if the UBER app suddenly stopped working all of a sudden.

michaelt 7y ago

I guess I don't see any way a dockless bike/scooter rental scheme can be compatible with privacy. Their need to know where available bikes are, and to be able to detect thefts makes it hard to imagine they could work without GPS tracking. And as soon as you know who rented what bike when, and where each bike went, you're going to start knowing customers' homes, workplaces and places of worship. Although the government and uber knowing this data is less private than uber alone knowing, we all know uber doesn't give a shit about customer privacy. Personally I'd be much more worried about uber having the data in the first place than about the government also having the data.

not_a_cop75 7y ago
Almost every possible transportation service is like this. If you really need privacy, don't use public or paid transport.
pasiaj 7y ago
I expect Uber to care a lot about privacy. They’ve burned themselves badly before disrespecting privacy and I assume they’ve improved in that area immensely. Uber’s and their employees’ own interests are aligned with strong data privacy. The same cannot be said for the government.
- shakna 7y ago
  > I assume they’ve improved in that area immensely. Why would you assume that without significant reason? This is a company that has, as you said, had problems with privacy. 2015, tracking concerns hit the news. [0] 2017, there's a class action. [1] And FTC auditing. [2] 2018, there's massive fines. [3] We're in 2019, years on from actual problems being raised, and then being forced to confronted. How are Uber doing on that front? > By focusing on global hiring, you will have people on the ground in other regions who can better understand the local laws, better understand the culture that drove the laws and how a new law is likely to be enforced, and build better relationships with regulators and other influencers. Sounds more like they're interested in controlling the laws, not actually improving themselves overall. (And none of this is to suggest the government is any way a better caretaker - they're worse in almost every way.) [0] https://www.wired.com/insights/2015/01/uber-privacy-woes-cautionary-tale/ https://www.wired.com/insights/2015/01/uber-privacy-woes-cau... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/24/uber-hell-program-driver-privacy-lyft-spying https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/24/uber-hell... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/technology/uber-agrees-to-privacy-audits-in-settlement-with-ftc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/technology/uber-agrees-to... [3] https://techwireasia.com/2019/08/uber-chief-privacy-officer-advises-on-building-strong-compliance-teams/ https://techwireasia.com/2019/08/uber-chief-privacy-officer-...

karlerss 7y ago

> data are necessary to figure out which companies are flouting the permit program’s rules Sending all ride data seems excessive. A few photographs taken by city officials showing scooters in wrong places should do the trick.

dannyr 7y ago
There's a cap on number of scooters and bikes each company can deploy. That's what LA is trying to enforce by asking for data. FTA "Los Angeles officials have said the data are necessary to figure out which companies are flouting the permit program’s rules, including caps on the number of vehicles and bans on riding in certain areas. They have also argued that the companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves."
- malandrew 7y ago
  Require hard to counterfeit licensing stickers for each vehicle that need to be re-applied to each scooter yearly. Sell a limited number of numbered stickers. If you find a vehicle without a sticker, you know they aren't following the requirements. To prevent sticker tampering, stickers can be placed behind a transparent piece of tempered glass or forego stickers entirely and use bolted on metal plaques.
dpratt 7y ago
If you present a problem to a government official that can be solved in a simple fashion or by a complex scheme that also grants them more power, they will go for the power every single time. From their perspective, it’s just a bonus that they can cloud it in the sophistry of “its for public safety”.

badrabbit 7y ago

Why GPS? Why not low tech transponders? They're precise enough to help you locate a scooter but too imprecise for navigation or tracking the exact path someone took. Especially if they don't ping frequently.

alistairSH 7y ago
Partly because some cities have no-ride zones where scooters and bikes are banned outright or supposed to be speed limited. The boardwalks in some CA cities fall into this category. You can ride in the street parallel at whatever speed you want. But on the boardwalk, you're capped at X mph (usually <10mph, if I'm remembering correctly). Yes, the city could just use traffic enforcement to issue tickets. But, I'm inclined to have software enforcement and not hire more traffic cops.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  > But, I'm inclined to have software enforcement and not hire more traffic cops. I can contest what a police officer is claiming in a court. With automated systems? Good luck. If society wants to enforce traffic laws, it should hire more cops, not hackable AI blackboxes.
  - alistairSH 7y ago
    The software doesn't issue you a ticket, so there's nothing to contest. It simple slows the scooter down in the restricted zone. And if the software is wrong, you stop using the system, and move to a vendor that makes it work. Anyway, not claiming this is ideal. Just sounds (without much thought) like a better solution than traffic cops.
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Maybe if we're going to go down this route, we should have these systems in our cars, too.

bransonf 7y ago

The thing is, these scooter APIs are getting reverse engineered pretty often. (I contribute to a github repo[0]) So Uber can’t really hide the data if they’re in noncompliance. St Louis has this clause written in their scooter legislation that a certain number of scooters must be in certain regions for the purpose of equity. I’ll tell you it’s a damn lie as far as the data is concerned. No one seems to care though. It was written in so politicians could advertise it as a good thing, but they refuse to enforce it because of the little revenue or attention the scooters bring. I don’t really care where they put the scooters, but it still pisses me off both that scooter companies are seemingly above the law and that some politicians are lazy cheats. [0] https://github.com/ubahnverleih/WoBike https://github.com/ubahnverleih/WoBike

black_puppydog 7y ago
Wanted to say thanks for WoBike. I use it in a crown job to monitor the local bike pool's (pityful) offering.
dschep 7y ago
WoBike is great, and I've contributed to that repo too, but that data is quite different from data in question in this article. Unless I'm mistaken, most of the reverse engineered APIs (and public ones in municipalities that mandate them) are for _available_ scooters. This article is about scooter location while it's being ridden around by a renter.
- bransonf 7y ago
  In the linked article, which I'm assuming this refers to: > The city will require companies to share information on the start point, end point and travel time of each bike or scooter trip within 24 hours after it ends, and whether the vehicle entered zones where riding or parking are restricted. I know for at least all of the scooters I've tracked, you can identify each scooter by a unique ID. Assuming you pull your data on a minute-by-minute basis, you can retrace the start and end of a scooter ride. For example, Scooter 123 is available at x,y at 12:05, It's not available from 12:06 to 12:15. It becomes available at 12:16 at x,y. The ride was approximately 11 minutes and started and ended at those two points. I don't think the city wants real-time data, and frankly I don't think these companies would be willing or even capable of producing it.

sailfast 7y ago

This article is positioned like Uber / Jump can argue the matter and/or have leverage. Additional comments here act like Uber should be able to operate as they want. They do not and cannot. In order to operate legally as a business in a locality, you have to obey the law. If that law is sharing your data, you've gotta figure out a way to do that, or not operate. Figure out a privacy notice for your LA Riders and add it to your EULA - lord knows they've done this for less worthwhile purposes before. In this case, this is about sharing competitive information with the city that others might see. This is not a choice. Any language of upset from the company seems like hyperbole and not to be taken seriously. If you think this is crazy, I'd ask you to take a look at liquor boards throughout the US. This data sharing agreement seems paltry to comply with by comparison.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I’ve never heard of a liquor board that required stores to deliver to the government a real time feed of who’s buying what liquor. If such a policy were created, and BevMo announced they refuse to comply, I’d be fully in support of that despite my normal concerns about companies ignoring regulations. It’s not about the general principle here. If Uber’s claim about deanonymization is accurate, this specific policy is PRISM level bad.
- sailfast 7y ago
  Agreed, and I don’t necessarily agree with the real-time requirement as the best way to regulate. That said, while the data providing burden is certainly more than the liquor store must provide, it doesn’t seem like they’ve delayed permitting for months, requiring public notice, checking to ensure named individuals are at work, etc (not to mention some of the graft that has been associated with liquor licenses in other cities). They have a data requirement. It is not new, the company is not responding. Don’t they already do this with ride data from Uber? EDIT: Looks like they don't do this for rides yet, and may be using this as a trial balloon for greater data access? (based on this article from May, if accurate?) https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/tech/uber-lyft-cities-data/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/tech/uber-lyft-cities-data/in... EDIT2: DC has been doing this with car / ride-sharing agencies for awhile but I don't believe it's published. Not sure of the status of SharedStreets: https://www.wired.com/story/uber-nacto-data-sharing/ https://www.wired.com/story/uber-nacto-data-sharing/

robomartin 7y ago

This is preposterous. Imagine government requiring any business to delivery real time data on customer behavior, from doctors to restaurants, Walmart to dispensaries. The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution is about privacy FROM GOVERNMENT INTRUSION, which is precisely what this is, an intrusive act on the part of government. Why don't they devote their time and effort to actually fixing the crumbling infrastructure here? It's a joke. There are third world countries that have better streets and highways than we have in certain parts of Los Angeles.

scelerat 7y ago
Fourth amendment deals with "unreasonable" search and seizure. It could be argued that municipalities requesting data on usage of infrastructure they must maintain, fund and plan for is not unreasonable.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  By that metric, requiring that all cars report their location live to the municipal government would be OK - after all, that car is using the roads they maintain. For that matter, why limit it to cars? Require that every citizen report their GPS location 24/7 - if you're out of the house you're using their roads or sidewalks, and if you're in the house you're using city water/power/sewer.
  - scelerat 7y ago
    Indeed, I don't entirely disagree.
- robomartin 7y ago
  If you consider yourself to be a free person, almost everything government wants to know about you falls under the category of unreasonable. If people are free, government is entitled to knowing very little about them. Their function isn't to keep tabs on us, to keep a database of every single action we take. That is NOT what they are elected to do. Freedom is a very fragile construct. If we don't hold our government to the bounds they are supposed to occupy what is at risk is, without a doubt, freedom, by a thousand cuts.

testfoobar 7y ago

Of all the public-goods usurped for private profit companies recently, I find the scooters to be the most intrusive. Scooters on sidewalks are dangerous and should be banned. We have explicit laws against skateboarding and riding bicycles on sidewalks in most communities. For bicyclists in San Francisco: "It’s illegal to ride on the sidewalk if you are over the age of 13. (SF Transportation Code Sec. 7.2.12)" https://sfbike.org/resources/bicycle-law/rules-of-the-road/ https://sfbike.org/resources/bicycle-law/rules-of-the-road/ Yet, everyday you can find scooters on sidewalks wherever scooters are available. Toddlers use sidewalks - they walk in a random walk. Hearing impaired, sight-impaired, mobility-impaired people use sidewalks. Seniors use sidewalks. These people do not expect 180lb adults riding at 5 to 10mph right in their face. The kinetic energy and momentum at 10mph of an adult is considerable. Falls for anybody can lead to bone fractures. Even more so for seniors. Hip fractures in particular can be fatal for seniors. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-hip-fractures-elderly-death-sentence.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-hip-fractures-elderly... Scooters should not be allowed on sidewalks.

Someone1234 7y ago
A similar argument could be made for banning running on sidewalks. In fact a runner could exceed the maximum electric speed of these scooters. It is ultimately up to the rider to assure safe operating regardless of mode of transport (feed, skateboard, scooter, etc). The fact that skateboards were widely banned due to a moral panic (largely around culture, not safety), isn't in itself a very strong argument since I'd point out that that ban lacks good justification within itself. I might agree more if there were safe cycle paths that skateboarders, scooter users, and similar could use but there aren't. Their choices are the sidewalk, where there's a risk of minor injury or the street where there's a risk of death. For now, the sidewalk is the "least bad" alternative until a better one is built.
- testfoobar 7y ago
  Runners and scooter riders are not the same thing at all. Runners, and specifically regular runners, are by definition self-trained to hit both higher speeds and frequency of runs. The average adult just can't get up and run at 10mph for 10 minutes without training. The average adult probably couldn't do 6mph for 2 minutes. Yet this same average adult, without training, can get on a scooter and move at 5-10mph down a sidewalk. Second, runners do not run everyday, multiple times for every trip and errand. You can grab a scooter for lunch, for an errand, etc multiple times a day. Scooter trips are more frequent, done by everyday people and should be banned on sidewalks. Lastly, it is not the job of pedestrians to accommodate scooters because there is no better alternative yet. That is not how laws and regulations work.

jevans22 7y ago

Uber doesn't really have a say though, right? If the law says they need to provide the data, they need to provide the data.

salawat 7y ago

Don't taxi, bus, and trucking companies do this? I always thought any public transit actor had to do this to provide data to be used by DoT for traffic engineering. Like I know that traffic engineers tweak limits of public transport asset density as part of planning traffic flows. I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is just Uber getting rolled into the infrastructure they should have been participating in anyway. I'm not terribly thrilled about the implications; but it's also not surprising at all that a transit service provider would have to guarantee to a locality that they can locate their assets.

malandrew 7y ago
> it's also not surprising at all that a transit service provider would have to guarantee to a locality that they can locate their assets. That requirement can easily be met by occasional random spot checks a few times a month. There's no need for realtime reporting.
arbie 7y ago
Public transit exposes everyone's full routes, anyway. Metrocards can lead back to the payment card used for the purchase, and buses (which also record passenger ingress/egress) can remember all swiped Metrocards.

justinzollars 7y ago

LA should focus on its massive homeless problem. 50,000 people sleep on the streets every night in LA.

reaperducer 7y ago
Remarkably, a government of the size and complexity of Los Angeles is able to do more than one thing at a time.
- justinzollars 7y ago
  ah right. They can simultaneously fail business and the homeless. #concurrency
bsder 7y ago
You say that like "homelessness" is some super easy problem to solve if we just wave our hands and throw money at it. This isn't China. Governments in the US are not allowed to simply round up people and put them somewhere without permission and/or due process.

angleofrepose 7y ago

The general conversation of the comments here is confusing. > Companies are required to transmit real-time data on all trips made within the city, including the start point, end point and travel time. This is not "real-time rider information" as mentioned by many comments, this is 'real-time scooter information'. > Uber has resisted the rule for months, arguing, with the backing of several data privacy organizations, that the city’s policy constitutes government surveillance. With minimal analysis, they say, the information could easily reveal where people live, work, socialize or worship. I don't understand. The city should know where you live, you pay taxes and utilities and I'm sure there is a whole mess of bureaucracy that knows where individual names live for different reasons. Are we worried about specific elements within the bureaucracy knowing certain information? Is this information only accessible by monitoring scooters and not available to said entity by getting it through other means (school district zoning and so on)? > Los Angeles officials have said the data are necessary to figure out which companies are flouting the permit program’s rules, including caps on the number of vehicles and bans on riding in certain areas. They have also argued that the companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. This makes sense, no one would expect a regulation with no ability for the enforcing agent to monitor to be followed. > Companies such as Uber “generate and collect massive amounts of personal and financial data,” while the city “does not collect information specific to individual riders beyond trip information,” said Marcel Porras, the Transportation Department’s chief sustainability officer, in a letter to Uber last week. Yeah, that's pretty much what I expect from this situation, the whole dog and pony show that these rideshare companies put on seems like a farce. I'm not happy with municipalities for a whole load of reasons, LA especially has an awful history in many domains. But there is no world in which I trust these rideshare companies MORE than I trust municipalities. EDIT: I should add I'm sad that Uber(Jump) get to redefine the data privacy debate via their spokesperson and this journalist. I don't blame the writer, but it is absurd to validate claims like my second except above. I think this is gaslighting? If not, then related. Some PR moves to seed public expectation in this matter. They are implicitly defining this issue as something that is fundamentally different when the data is stored and collected by a corporation (them) to be sold and used however they desire vs utilization by entities in the public sector. I am happy to point people to a fantastic conversation on the "two" definitions of data privacy here: https://idlewords.com/talks/senate_testimony.2019.5.htm#two_views https://idlewords.com/talks/senate_testimony.2019.5.htm#two_...

mentat 7y ago

Feels like the buried lede is that all the other companies already sold out all the private information of their riders.

notpeter 7y ago

In case folks are curious about the underlying technical details, LADOT along with the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) built the Mobility Data Specification (MDS) which are "RESTful APIs used to specify the digital relationship between mobility as a service Providers and the Agencies that regulate them." API Spec: https://github.com/CityOfLosAngeles/mobility-data-specification/tree/dev/agency https://github.com/CityOfLosAngeles/mobility-data-specificat... Uber, as they do, is refusing to comply with laws/provide data that would enable local governments to actually regulate them. As I understand it, the pilot phase was for Bikes/Scooters, but the intention is to require use of similar APIs by car based rideshare companies in the future. Which explains some of Uber's resistance despite this only currently covering JUMP Bike Share. There's a number of other cities (NYC, Miami, Philly, SF, SJ, SEA, etc) involved with OMF/MDS. LADOT is one of the first implementations but they aren't doing it all in house. Much of the design/development of the mobility API spec and open source implementation[2] has been contracted out to Lacuna.ai (via Ellis & Associates, a wholly owned subsidiary)[3]. [2]: https://github.com/CityOfLosAngeles/mds-core https://github.com/CityOfLosAngeles/mds-core [3]: http://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinecontracts/2019/C-130956_c_7-26-19.pdf#page=10 http://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinecontracts/2019/C-130956_c_7-2...

Mikeb85 7y ago

Uber doesn't really have a leg to stand on. Cities use traffic data to determine things like traffic light synchronisation, where to build or expand roads, speed limits, etc... In this case, they're allowing electric personal vehicles on city sidewalks, information would be useful to determine if they should create bike lanes, change traffic signal patterns, etc... Not to mention, at the end of the day, cities do have control over what drives where, how fast, etc...