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Uber is turning data about trips and takeout into insights for marketers
- lwhi 10mo agoUber really are the piranhas of the corporate world. I can't imagine any depth they wouldn't dive to, in order to get a morsel to feed on.
- andsoitis 10mo agoFrom the article: ”aggregate users' data without revealing their identities.”
- malshe 10mo agoThat's how it starts
- squigz 10mo agoWhy do you think this makes it better?
- crazygringo 10mo agoYou think data tied to individual users isn't any worse? That privacy has no value?
- pavel_lishin 10mo agoI think they're suggesting that anonymized and potentially aggregated data can still have individual data extracted from it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/new-york-taxi-details-anonymised-data-researchers-warn https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/new-york-...
- squigz 10mo agoWhat the heck? Where did I say either of those things? Privacy is very important. That's why I think sharing of customer data - individual or aggregate - is bad.
- crazygringo 10mo agoYou asked why someone would think aggregating would make it better. Aggregating protects privacy when done properly. It seems pretty obvious to me that sharing individual data is orders of magnitude worse than sharing aggregated data. If you think they're the same, then you don't seem to value the privacy that aggregation provides. So what am I misrepresenting about what you said? I'm tired of false equivalences. One thing that's maybe slightly bad, and another thing that's super-super-bad, aren't equally bad.
- pixl97 10mo ago>Aggregating protects privacy when done properly. When done properly is going a lot of heavy lifting there. Time and time again it's been found most aggregates are not filtered properly and be deanonymized with eaze. It's not that one is big bad, and one is little bad, it's the little bad can become big bad with a small amount of work by an attacker/company. Then when you add in zero external third party verification of these company claims, you really don't have any reason to believe them.
- crazygringo 10mo ago> When done properly is going a lot of heavy lifting there. Not really. There are common practices for it. Yes it hits HN when deanonymization can happen at a well-known company, just like it hits HN when there's a security vulnerability that gets patched at a well-known company. But "it's the little bad can become big bad" is what's doing the heavy lifting in your argument. No, that's not how it works. There's no universe in which aggregate data can be deanonymized to anywhere close to what all of the individual profiles would be. It's a completely false equivalenace, period.
- squigz 10mo ago
- kotaKat 10mo agoOver/under on when someone is able to de-aggregate an identity down to an individual user? I’ve got it on less than 6 months.
- code_for_monkey 10mo ago6 weeks would be optimistic
- schnable 10mo agohow do de-aggregation attacks or whatever you'd call this work?
- snapcaster 10mo agoOne of the easiest methods is to find a different data source with overlap and use that to map real people to anonymized lists. Big tech companies find this super easy to do because of all the internal data they already have on everyone
- indymike 10mo agoMore like 15 minutes.
- DennisP 10mo agoAlso from the article: > Uber Intelligence will let advertisers securely combine their customer data with Uber's to help surface insights about their audiences, based on what they eat and where they travel. So the companies have the identities. It sounds like they're going to be learning something about their customers, the question is just how much detail they'll get.
- zx8080 10mo agoEverything? Ok, everything. Names "anonymmized" (but easily trackable) and the list of addresses. Why not sell it to get money? /s
- baggachipz 10mo agoSource: "trust us bro"
- morkalork 10mo agoThe allegation that driver payouts are manipulated to: 1) Hook new drivers with better than average rates before tapering off 2) Take into account the age/model/value of the vehicle and what payments for it would look like in the market and dole out enough to cover costs but not "too much" that they're getting ahead of other drivers Totally baseless and sourceless hearsay tho. Still, if true, really plays into the image of "there's no depth they won't go".
- underlipton 10mo agoAdd another: the various platforms talk to each other (or analyze driver movement) in order to manipulate order offerings in such a way as to discourage drivers from taking orders from more than one app at once. One app will wait until the other has confirmed an accepted order before deluging you with their own orders, all taking you in the opposite direction (which makes you late for one or more deliveries, giving cause to terminate your contract).
- gruez 10mo agoSource?
- underlipton 10mo agoPure anecdata. However, the change from the first two days I multi-apped and made almost 3 times my usual hourly rate, to the following weekend, when >neither app would send me orders for up to half an hour >as soon as one had assigned me and order, the other would start sending my multiple per minute >all of these orders were either comically low-compensation (no tip), a 15-minute-plus drive away from the order I'd just accepted (to areas it had never sent me before), or both was marked.
- dfxm12 10mo agoSo many times on this website, people say, "I will pay for the service to get rid of advertising." You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper. It is naive to think any company isn't finding ways to monetize your behavior, whether you're paying them or not.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- jcalvinowens 10mo agoPeople object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.
- mitthrowaway2 10mo agoNo, I care about that as much or more.
- pavel_lishin 10mo agoBut are you most people? I'd wager that just by the virtue of being commenters on HN, we're already outliers.
- jcalvinowens 10mo agoYou're an outlier. Ask ten people at your local bus stop if this is important to them, and tell me how many start laughing at you :)
- squigz 10mo agoIf I went up to random people and went like, "Do you approve of companies tracking what you buy, eat, do, where you go, and every other aspect of your life?" I promise you I would get a majority of "No"s
- gnatman 10mo agoI’m pretty surprised they haven’t been doing that for years already tbh.
- zx8080 10mo agoWho said they did not? It's probably not public, that's all.
- smeej 10mo agoThat was my thought too. "Starts"?? I assumed they had been selling aggregated data about user trips the whole time.
- nerdponx 10mo agoThis data is extremely extremely valuable, so my guess is that they were sitting on it until they were sure this was the best business decision. Also they already have their own ads so they have certainly been using this data internally all along.
- smeej 10mo agoI just genuinely thought this had been the case for at least ten years. That's what makes it so surprising. That they haven't monetized it like this when this is how basically everything is monetized and they spent so long burning money hand over fist just boggles my mind.
- Joel_Mckay 10mo agoMarketing lead-generation and sales conversion is what every company does with their customer list eventually (sign of a failing business model.) Whether it is internal revenue generation, or a 3rd party... this is what most large web companies trade with Marketers. I would be more surprised if they kept peoples privacy, as even your credit card company sells the purchase data. =3
- nerdponx 10mo agoI'm surprised they weren't already doing this. Maybe they wanted to give it some time to see if there were other ways to monetize it before opening up the aggregates for sale.
- vasco 10mo agoAs long as it is to advertise in their own platform sounds great. I'd rather have nice restaurant suggestions on top than McDonald's and Dominoes or whoever paid the most every day. Using Uber eats is like some app from the past with ads as global banners that are the same for all users. If you're going to throw me ads at least use my history to try and do something useful.
- CGamesPlay 10mo agoJust so we are clear about how advertising works, you will still just see suggestions from who paid the most every day. The data just informs the marketing teams whether they should pay more for your eyeballs specifically.
- esafak 10mo agoNot necessarily. It depends on the ad type; cost per impression vs click. The latter incentivizes relevance.
- keehee 10mo agoThat something useful is turning you into a data cow and making money off of it while returning zero value to you. Seriously you want people to use your travel and movement and choice data to make a suggestion list of restaurants for you to order from? How helpless are you?
- crazygringo 10mo ago...yes? I like good recommendations better than bad recommendations. The value I get is better recommendations. Like, I literally update the categories of things I'm interested in, in my Google profile, so I get less useless ads. People complain about bad and useless recommendations and irrelevant ads all the time. Personalization is how you get better ones.
- keehee 10mo agoJust wanted to verify how far you are willing to go to get a list generated for you that’s probably not even that unique from the other Y number of people who love being suggested obvious information. How many combinations of the restaurants around you do you think exist and are needed to provide that information? Certainly need Uber guzzling down Terabytes of data to rank the local Chiles over the local Applebees. Lets be honest, restaurant suggestions aren’t a real problem anyone has.
- jadyoyster 10mo agoThere should be a law forcing ride hailing apps to give anonymized ride data to local governments so that they can plan public transport better. If they sell it to marketers they must be able to do this technically.
- pavel_lishin 10mo agoAnonymizing data is incredibly difficult to do: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/new-york-taxi-details-anonymised-data-researchers-warn https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/new-york-... > New York City has released data of 173m individual taxi trips – but inadvertently made it "trivial" to find the personally identifiable information of every driver in the dataset.
- afarah1 10mo agoInteresting read, thanks. The related article shows that even more robust anonymization techniques may still be insufficient (in the case of the taxi rides, spatial-temporal analysis could still lead to de-anonymization). More reason to reduce data collection. Unfortunately the trend is the opposite for governments all around the world.
- wtallis 10mo agoThat example only demonstrates leaked information of the drivers, not the passengers/customers. And the "anonymized" driver and license data wouldn't need to be released in any form at all to produce a dataset useful for public transportation planning purposes: approximate time of day and approximate location are sufficient to estimate demand, and there's no need to keep track of who is making which trips.
- jadyoyster 10mo agoExactly, all you need to start is "a significant amount of people from this area want to go to those areas".
- the_sleaze_ 10mo ago
- keehee 10mo agoWill gladly start using and paying for local car services instead.
- pavel_lishin 10mo agoDo those still exist?
- alistairSH 10mo agoYes.
- hgfguj467 10mo agoThey're called taxi cabs. You'll see "taxi" printed on the vehicle. If they have a light on the top of the vehicle that's lit, you can just wave at it, arm raised and it'll pick you up. Pretty amazing really. They'll even uturn if they are on the other side of the road.
- keehee2 10mo agoAh but there was an Uber before Uber called private car services or gypsy cabs. Flatbush Ave and Church Ave in Brooklyn also have a good amount of $1 buses and $1 cabs going up and down the avenue. This is on top of the MTA busses and subway in the area.
- xnx 10mo agoAnother reason to use Waymo (for now).
- like_any_other 10mo agoBack in the day in my country, if your neighbor or taxi driver was informing the authorities of your habits and travels, this was considered a dangerously hostile action. If no willing informant could be found, there were torture basements to get it. It's what kept the government in power for so long. E.g. travel data makes it easy to identify nascent political groups. Thankfully corporations have proven themselves so trustworthy and benevolent, we don't think twice about giving them the data they used to have to torture out of us. Likewise the governments, that we know are among the buyers [1], are just as beloved and uncontroversial, unlike in the old days. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/14/23759585/odni-spy-report-surveillance-data-location-tracking https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/14/23759585/odni-spy-report-...
- tanseydavid 10mo agoWelcome to the Panopticon.
- jacquesm 10mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- techterrier 10mo agoAt this point im just going to move to Shetland, live in a hut and spend the next 30 years making wooden boats. It's the only way to be free of this nonsense.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoOr not use these services? I've never used Uber once in my life.
- pixl97 10mo agoI mean, this is just one particular service, have you not read the other articles on how private companies are mass tracking license plate information/location and selling it?
- Permit 10mo ago[dead]
- everdrive 10mo agoI'm quite surprised this was not already being done. But yes, ALL services will do their best to maximize value and make the service worse for you. One way in which they do this is to sell your data to marketers.
- buellerbueller 10mo agoAdvertising is a virus that seeks to invade every ecosystem.
- zkmon 10mo agoI'm not surprised. It won't hesitate to turn more unethical than any other company. Uber support in India is the most robotic and useless I have ever seen with any vendor. I gave up after fighting for months, just to utilize my wallet amount in other country or get refund. Both were impossible.
- harvey9 10mo agoThe Uber app keeps pushing notifications to advertise fast food. This is so annoying since you need alerts enabled for when your ride is on its way. As I am a very infrequent customer I just uninstall the app, and reinstall it if I need a ride.
- Marsymars 10mo agoYou don’t actually need alerts enabled for your ride - I just get ready, order my ride, then have a seat in a chair where I can see the road and do some reading. When my ride shows up I leave the house.
- davey48016 10mo agoThis is why I use Lyft, and only install Uber when I'm traveling to a country where Lyft doesn't operate.
- cptnntsoobv 10mo agoThis abuse of notifications (and the user) is quite prevalent, unfortunately. In the case of the Uber app you should be able to turn these off (they are conveniently enabled by default, of course!). On the iphone it's Setting -> Communication -> Marketing Preferences -> Push notifications.
- Esophagus4 10mo agoI have a rule that if an app gives me a marketing push notification, they lose notification privileges.
- speedylight 10mo agoSo many freaking apps do this crap, Apple needs to implement a categorization system for notifications and allows users to choose which categories of notifications to allow. Anything other than essential notifications needs to go in the useless crap category.
- alistairSH 10mo agoHonestly, I'm surprised this is news. As in, I assumed they were already doing it, because that's what companies do in 2025.
- loeg 10mo agoIt sounds like Uber is literally selling data; as opposed to when Facebook is accused of more metaphorically "selling data" (allowing advertisers to target their ads).
- advisedwang 10mo agoArticle says: > It uses LiveRamp's clean room technology, which lets companies aggregate their data in a privacy-safe environment, without sharing or seeing each other's raw or personally identifiable customer information. > A hotel brand could use Uber Intelligence to help identify which restaurants or entertainment venues it might want to partner with for its loyalty program, for example. Not much details on that "Clean room" but it sounds like the third parties get an environment where they can join their data to ubers and then run aggregate queries, but not actually see individual customer records. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 10mo ago> I'm not sure how I feel about that. Consider what will happen every time there is a trade-off to be made between making/keeping the data more useful to the companies involved, and actually upholding the anonymity of the data subjects. Anonymization is nearly impossible to get right even when you're trying really hard, and this is more likely to be a fig leaf to be able to do things that are illegal by sufficiently obfuscating them. I hope that if EU customer data is included in this, the EU will have the balls to actually enforce GDPR. Uber is one of the few tech company cases where 2-4% of overall revenue would actually hurt, rather than being a small "tax" on the extra profit made through the illegal use of data.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 10mo agoA lot of other companies are in the business of selling data, too. It's not like Uber is uniquely evil for doing this. I'd argue that selling aggregated metrics is comparatively innocuous compared to what Meta does with fingerprinting, shadow profiles, etc. and also compared to what credit card companies, banks, credit rating agencies, ISPs, etc. can do.
- zouhair 10mo agoImagine a World where legacy taxis are no more. Yup, it's gonna get way worse.
- RandallBrown 10mo agoThe only thing legacy taxis add that Uber's don't is being able to hail them from the street. Other than getting in a taxi line at the airport, I've never been able to use street hailing as a practical way to get around. There just have never been enough taxis in the places that I've lived.
- lacoolj 10mo agoCool so not only do the prices of the food not drop (because Uber's crazy fees to the restaurant), but we also get to suffer through (more) ads, and they will now be targeted? And Uber makes even more off it all while making no improvements to the user and/or provider experience? I just realized taxis still exist and most restaurants offer their own delivery service (or pick-up!) It's been real Uber. GL HF
- throw58903 10mo agoI have misguided friends working with payment processors (think companies like VISA, mastercard, etc.) to build models that run across all transactions to extract the purchasing behaviors of individuals, uncover correlations between accounts for marketing purposes, and predictively model future purchases and life events. Surveillance is inescapable at this point. How long until AI shops for us based on past purchases or we live in a world where mass individualized price discrimination is the norm? How to avoid that future? Sometimes I forget privacy is a basic right, as society often requires that we sign it away.
- kkukshtel 10mo agoduh
- Animats 10mo agoCan you buy Uber's "Ride of Glory" data? [1] [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/uber-crunches-user-data-to-determine-where-the-most-one-night-stands-come-from/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/uber-crunches-user...
- jmward01 10mo agoThe core issue here is one of companies lying about the service and the price. TOS should not be allowed to hide price at time of checkout, which they effectively are doing by allowing selling personal data. So the fix is simple. if they are going to make additional money on you after the service ends and that is considered part of the payment then it should be clearly displayed as part of the cost and NOT allowed in the TOS. This should be required by law. If you are making money off of me and I don't know it it should be a crime. You stole from me.