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

latimes.com

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

#61

Post by sneak »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #40
sneak wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CCTV video files are just a less efficient form of GPS and time stamp logging. JSON from a GPS receiver is more straightforward.

GPS logging, however, contains a bunch of data unrelated to the security of bicycles themselves. I also don’t understand how mentioning JSON is even relevant in this thread.

It’s to point out that their suggestion of CCTV is really just a type of unstructured logging, and isn’t much better than the structured logging that seems to be going on today.

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

#62

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

mdorazio wrote: post #29
michaelt wrote: post #3

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 governmen…

Do you worry about Google having that same data? If you use google maps on a regular basis they know where you live, work, eat, travel, hang out with friends, and which routes you take when.

Google lets you disable location history or limit collection to the last three months. Existing old data can be manually deleted.

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

#63

Post by ysavir »

Spivak wrote: post #59
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like Uber can't win. Which is fine. They chose to collect the information, and they are facing a bad look following that decision. Of course, their business model might not work without the collection, but not every business model is guaranteed to look good.

But Uber is offering a service that by its very nature requires that you expose the service provider to information you may wish to keep private. How is this the service provider's fault? It's not like they're going out of their way to add tracking into something that doesn't require it. Like this is a little nuts, if you buy one of those GPS trackers for your kids you don't get to act shocked when you find out the c…

> But Uber is offering a service that by its very nature requires that you expose the service provider to information you may wish to keep private.

Uber's ride hailing service, sure. But the same is not true for the scooter and bike services, which have no need for such information.

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

#64

Post by tyxodiwktis »

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.

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

#65

Post by diffeomorphism »

Spivak wrote: post #59
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like Uber can't win. Which is fine. They chose to collect the information, and they are facing a bad look following that decision. Of course, their business model might not work without the collection, but not every business model is guaranteed to look good.

But Uber is offering a service that by its very nature requires that you expose the service provider to information you may wish to keep private. How is this the service provider's fault? It's not like they're going out of their way to add tracking into something that doesn't require it. Like this is a little nuts, if you buy one of those GPS trackers for your kids you don't get to act shocked when you find out the c…

If a service "by its very nature" does shady things, maybe that service should not be offered in the first place?

Critcizing users afterwards that they "can't act shocked" for having these things done to them is only playing a blame game.

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

#66

Post by mschuster91 »

alistairSH wrote: post #30
_8j50 wrote: post #23

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.

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 Yes, the city could just use traffic enforcement to issue tickets. But, I'm inclined to have software enforcement and no…

> 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.

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

#67

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

sailfast wrote: post #57

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…

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.

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

#68

Post by alistairSH »

mschuster91 wrote: post #66
alistairSH wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Yes, the city could just use traffic enforcement to issue tickets. But, I'm inclined to have software enforcement and no…

> 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.

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.

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

#69

Post by spenrose »

tyxodiwktis wrote: post #64

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 eve…

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.

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

#70

Post by sailfast »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #67
sailfast wrote: post #57

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…

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…

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/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/

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