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> How is this not front page New York Times??? Because it's unproven. If no one beats me to it, I'll grab a dump of the data and look myself. But in the abst
by saraid216 12y ago
> How is this not front page New York Times???
Because it's unproven.
If no one beats me to it, I'll grab a dump of the data and look myself.
But in the abstract, I agree; there's a non-zero risk of being able to identify passengers from the logs. This makes for an interesting ethical problem: should this data have been made available? It becomes much, much less useful without those coordinates.
Which is more important? Government transparency or citizen privacy?
- abalone 12y agoI don't even get how this is government transparency. That's like saying everyone's cell phone records ("just the metadata") should be published, minus names, because telecom is regulated.
- saraid216 12y agoGovernment transparency is largely about opening the data they have available to them up to the public in a consumable way. FOIL requests like the one Whong filed are essentially the second-oldest way they have done this. (The oldest being, well, just asking directly.) So, yes. It can definitely be argued that cell phone records, insofar as they are shared with the government in the first place, should be published. A simple counterargument would be that cellphones do not consume a public resource, unlike the way taxis consume road space, so there is no reason to share said data with the government and consequently the public. But as a rule of thumb, government transparency is that any data the government has ultimately belongs to the public. It's not a matter of regulation.
- eric_bullington 12y ago>A simple counterargument would be that cellphones do not consume a public resource, unlike the way taxis consume road space, so there is no reason to share said data with the government and consequently the public. That argument would be incorrect, since all cell phones run over a public resource: the airwaves. These airwaves are licensed by the FCC licenses to private companies, but (in theory at least) the public retains ownership of those airwaves.
- walterbell 12y agoCan Uber be required to make a comparable disclosure? This is transport network packet "metadata".
- saraid216 12y agoNo. Corporations are sacrosanct because private property is holy ground upon which the public may not tread unless invited. That said, Uber certainly has the data. I'm sure we'll have another weev to expose it for us.
- icebraining 12y agoPretty sure cab companies in NYC are also private.
- saraid216 12y agoYes, but this information didn't come from cab companies. It came from the NYC Taxi & Limo Commission: http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/home/home.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/home/home.shtml
- icebraining 12y agoAnd they got it without treading on the cab companies' property, how?
- saraid216 12y agoI don't know. Ask them.
- icebraining 12y agoOh, but I can tell you: the Commission pushed it, despite protests and even lawsuits from the private cab owners (see Taxi & Limousine Commission v. Hassan El-Nahal). I was just pointing out that this very story disproves your claim that "private property is holy ground upon which the public may not tread unless invited", since that's exactly what happened here, and so I don't see why couldn't Uber also be "convinced" to install the trackers.