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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

#131

Post by scelerat »

DuskStar wrote: post #129
scelerat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Indeed, I don't entirely disagree.

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

#132

Post by garrickvanburen »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #104
supercanuck wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Uber a Retail Store? Does the Store leave their merchandise all over the neighborhood with GPS micro controllers on them? This analogy is absurd. As municipalities get more technically advanced, why shouldn't they have access to the same type of data or where these scooters are? How hard is it to open up an API? This seems to be, how dare citizens impose a cost of doing business in their neighborhoods!

> why shouldn't they have access to the same type of data or where these scooters are? How hard is it to open up an API? They don't have the right to know where I go.

I suspect that part of Uber/Lime/et.al’s pitch to municipalities is to provide them greater visibility how people move through the city to help inform long-term planning.

Which would necessitate this data exchange is price they pay to operate in the city.

I also trust that cities are getting more sophisticated and if LA said that data exchange is their price for doing business, then good on LA for knowing how the dataset could benefit them.

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

#133

Post by rootusrootus »

lm28469 wrote: post #119
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very comfortable saying alcohol affects the world as much as Uber does. Liquor stores regularly use sketchy loopholes to dodge regulation, and the entire reason they're so tightly regulated is that we believe unrestricted liquor sales will kill people.

I'm very comfortable saying alcohol would never be approved/legal if it started being marketed 10 years ago.

Like cannabis?

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

#134

Post by zachkatz »

testfoobar wrote: post #88

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:/…

Now do cars.

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

#135

Post by morganherlocker »

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…

Municipalities need to comply with state law. In this case, CalECPA gives California residents a number of protections with respect to location data collection by government agencies. Generally speaking, collection is allowed when either a warrant is used or a user explicitly consents. Trip data reveals information about your relationships, life style, and medical status, so getting this right is an important issue for user privacy and safety.

To read more about this, the nonpartisan CA Office of Legislative Counsel has published an analysis of how the law applies, which found that this type of collection does in fact violate CalECPA in its current form [1]. The debate will likely come down to what steps need to be taken to make the collection scheme compliant.

[1] https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/calecpa_dockl...

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

#136

Post by icebraining »

habnds wrote: post #38
bko wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you feel the same way if Uber complied privately and the article read: "Uber shares real-time rider information with government agency"? It seems like Uber can't win. If they share information, they're violating the trust and privacy of their riders. If they don't they still don't care about privacy but they're now also flouting regulators.

Seems like if Uber is going to use this data for their benefit society should be able to use it to ours as well for planning an infrastructure purposes for example. The way that society does stuff like this is through government bodies. The real problem here seems like a lack of trust or oversight of government bodies, which creates the impossible situation you identify.

> Seems like if Uber is going to use this data for their benefit society should be able to use it to ours as well for planning an infrastructure purposes for example.

I don't necessarily disagree, but "data used for their benefit" covers all data used by all businesses, from your emails stored by your provider (assuming you don't self-host) to trade secrets, etc.

So either we say the government should be able to access all data from everywhere (except the few that individuals store on their own) for planning purposes and such, or we must define why this data is different from other.

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

#137

Post by robomartin »

scelerat wrote: post #120
robomartin wrote: post #86

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 infrastruct…

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.

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.

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

#138

Post by morganherlocker »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #99
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 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.

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.

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

#139

Post by steve_gh »

SilasX wrote: post #72
sokoloff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

If you can count how many scooters are in the system at any time (and how many belong to different providers) then you should be able to enforce your licencing regime.

And if you know roughly where rides are going to / from and when, then that helps you integrate your different types of public transport - for example making sure that when the train arrives there are enough scooters there, or understanding how popular scooter ride paths interact with bike lanes, bus lanes, etc.

Mobile phone cell size is generally a pretty good proxy for population density - modern micro-cell sectors can be pretty small, and 5G will make them even small in urban areas.

(I work on this sort of stuff for a major engineering data science and asset management group in the UK).

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

#140

Post by lm28469 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #133
lm28469 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very comfortable saying alcohol would never be approved/legal if it started being marketed 10 years ago.

Like cannabis?

You mean illegal in most places, barely tolerated for medical purposes in a few other and legal in a very few states/countries VS legal and abused almost universally in the world ? Yeah exactly.
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