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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

#71

Post by CountSessine »

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…

All of the powers that a municipality wields are limited in scope and specifically granted through the state charters and laws that actually created those cities. A city can’t usurp the power of the state that created it nor can it create new ones itself. Cities, especially compared to states and the federal government, are very limited and ephemeral legal entities that can be carved up, amalgamated, renamed, or dissolved at the pleasure of their state governments.

My question would be, does the city have the right to demand this information from Uber? I don’t think that they do. I’d like to see this decided in court.

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

#72

Post by SilasX »

sokoloff wrote: post #58
SilasX wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In dense urban areas, there are probably a lot of scooters within a 100m x 100m block.

I think that's the point of the suggestion.

The "point" was to ensure privacy while satisfying the other desiderata of the the system, which includes ability to find a distinct scooter. I was disputing that it met the latter criteria by grouping too many scooters together (Scylla) in its attempt to avoid privacy violation (Charybdis). After all, why not just lump scooters into the east vs west coast?

Though I grant the general point that making the drop-off location more granular could satisfy both criteria, but you would need some kind of varying size to account for scooter density.

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

#73

Post by Spivak »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #65
Spivak wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it's not shady at all. Like these bike companies track the location of the bikes with GPS. Any when you go for a ride on one you are by proxy being tracked with GPS. Like this isn't magic or unexpected. Are you mad that an airlines have your location information while you're on the plane? Are you gonna demand the FAA stop tracking flights for rider privacy?

But nobody actually getting the blame since it would be weird if anyone was actually mad at this. Does anyone seriously believe that using Find My iPhone doesn't allow Apple access to your phone's location for the purposes of showing you where it is?

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

#74

Post by stale2002 »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #65
Spivak wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not shady though!

That's the point. If you buy a GPS tracker, for example, by definition it will track your GPS location.

Would you expect a GPS tracker to not track your GPS location? Because that is what you are saying.

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

#75

Post by CountSessine »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #65
Spivak wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Renting scooters and necessarily keeping track of them is “shady”? What else is shady?

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

#76

Post by snagglegaggle »

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…

There's good argument to be made a lot of restrictions on business are unconstitutional in various ways. It is not that any regulation on business or activity is absurd; it is more that in practice what the regulation says and what it does are not reconcilable.

E.g. many locations have pet registration fees but these fees may not entirely go towards the maintenance of a pet tracking system* or to retaining animal control. In some places none of the fees go towards those things. So it's just a tax that was never voted on.

* And do these things even lead to a safer public? In some cases outcome testing isn't required for a valid law, but if the law states desired outcome it can be.

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

#77

Post by snagglegaggle »

CountSessine wrote: post #71
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…

All of the powers that a municipality wields are limited in scope and specifically granted through the state charters and laws that actually created those cities. A city can’t usurp the power of the state that created it nor can it create new ones itself. Cities, especially compared to states and the federal government, are very limited and ephemeral legal entities that can be carved up, amalgamated, renamed, or diss…

This is true, but keep in mind the experience of many people is at odds with this. Municipalities de facto wield huge authority through their control of the police and tend to never be challenged. As an extreme but rather common example, there are still locales in the south US that couple religious functions with their public schools and other government offices. Sporadically someone with the knowledge and means will be able to challenge the local government up to the state level, but until that happens the local government can run roughshod over community members (if they don't just force them out).

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

#78

Post by stale2002 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #36
dpratt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the above article itself shows some empirical data that Uber will not, in fact, just hand over my data when asked. Note that I don’t think they do this out of the goodness of the hearts or altruism, but rather that they’ve done the calculus and determined that giving this data to the government would cost them enough ill will and loss of revenue to make it not worthwhile. Uber, unlike a government, has to answe…

That's because the US government is still fundamentally democratic and follows the rule of law. Such a government might also treat your data with some due process. A government that's willing to use force to arbitrarily enforce its will is also one that would do the same to Uber and its executives. In that environment Uber would not resist.

But right now, Uber is resisting, right?

And at the same time, the government is doing bad things with your data.

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

#79

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

sailfast wrote: post #70
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oth…

Uber appears to be claiming some kind of procedural issues happened here. They mentioned an "eleventh-hour administrative review process" in the article, although I don't have time right now to dig in and find more details on what they're talking about.

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

#80

Post by snagglegaggle »

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…

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.

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