31–40 of 146 posts
This is cool. NYC already releases this information for taxis. It might even include Uber rides since they all have TLC plates, though I'm not sure. http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtm...
Hope this is as fantastic as this sounds. Many cities are starting to make this data publicly available, and the potential impact to urban planning, traffic reduction, parking and more is enormous. That said, what's Uber's commercial angle? Licensing fees? "Movement makes all insights available under the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial license."
Making friends. Uber is quite aware that their reputation within cities hasn't been the best. Internally, there is a loose federation of people who genuinely want to improve cities, and people who recognize the business value in not continuing to piss cities off.
My quess would be that Uber use it as a carrot for cities. Let Uber operate and we will give city official data and city planning tools for free.
I'm curious what techniques they will use to anonymize the data. I would guess some sort of differential privacy technique.
I hope so, but I would be a little surprised if they used DP. I am more inclined to think they will take a 'traditional' (weaker in terms of provable privacy protection) approach.
Example technique: if you treat each record as a (src,dst) pair of (lat,lon) pairs or somesuch, you can then build a 4d grid whose cells you populate with (Laplace) noisy counts. This provides eps-differential privacy when the noise is roughly 1/eps.
Whenever counts are sufficiently large, you can refine the contents of the cell and ask again. If you do the refinement at most k times, you get k*eps-differential privacy. There are smarter ways that work even better.
These provide "trip privacy", meaning they mask the presence/absence of individual trips. Uber presumably has user identifiers, and could group all trips by one user together, and do the same counting where the weight of each trip is scaled down so that they sum to at most one for each user. This would then give "user privacy", meaning it masks the presence/absence of individual users.
My quess would be that Uber use it as a carrot for cities. Let Uber operate and we will give city official data and city planning tools for free.
> We believe that breakthrough insights and ideas can come from anywhere. In the coming months, we’ll be making this data open to all. I genuinely do not believe this. If they intended on making anonymized data open, they wouldn't have a marketing site up already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making friends. Uber is quite aware that their reputation within cities hasn't been the best. Internally, there is a loose federation of people who genuinely want to improve cities, and people who recognize the business value in not continuing to piss cities off.
Yep. Conversely, it's interesting to see some urban planning folks warm up to ride sharing as a way to extend the reach of existing transit networks. But still a lot of hostility, to be sure.
Hope this is as fantastic as this sounds. Many cities are starting to make this data publicly available, and the potential impact to urban planning, traffic reduction, parking and more is enormous. That said, what's Uber's commercial angle? Licensing fees? "Movement makes all insights available under the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial license."
The experience in Boston was that Uber anonymized the data too much for it to be useful[1]. I would be very skeptical of this as it seems to be a program publicly touted as useful, but the e-mails obtained via FOIA requests show it to not be. I'm not sure what the solution is since privacy should be a concern.
[1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber...
How does Uber anonymize the data? Does it only use subset of a trip? If you can see where and when a trip started or finished, it's definitely not anonymous enough.
Watch the video again--geographic aggregation. Summary stats from geo-to-geo. EDIT: I think in the video they showed census tracts, which is one of many geographic units they could choose from.
[1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber...