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Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)

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Re: Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)

#31

Post by sillysaurus3 »

mmcclure wrote: post #26

I gotta say, I'm not really seeing the creepy / cringey / evil / whatever-else here... Anyone (especially the HN crowd) should know they have the data, and if you think they're not carefully analyzing it behind the scenes (like every other tech company who has your data), I've got things to sell you. I personally think a tiny peek like this into the data, much like the usage posts that OKCupid, YouPorn, and others gi…

Yeah, the blog post seems fine minus the last sentence. And if they'd simply removed the last sentence, I doubt anyone would have noticed.

The Streisand effect is so well-known that I'm surprised anyone would delete a blog post nowadays.

EDIT: I actually hadn't read the blog post in detail until now, which was more than a little dumb. I thought it was just an analysis of rides along with some neat heatmap images. I didn't realize it was about sexual datapoints.

Re: Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)

#34

Post by joshvm »

Curious to see how companies deal with this kind of data because, ignoring the creep-factor, it is thoroughly interesting to see these sort of patterns emerge and the only way you can find out this kind of stuff is to track people.

It's the actions of the unscrupulous minority that ruin this for the rest of us. I personally believe that most of the time when companies say "We simply aren't that interested in you." they're probably telling the truth. Stats is pointless if you look at single points. It only takes one person to snoop on an ex or to blow everything up. Unfortunately you have to mitigate that risk, but proper database sanitisation before handing over to the analysts should be sufficient. Provided there is no overlap between the sensitive database and the one the analysts have access to there shouldn't be a problem.

I guess it's a side effect of becoming 'big' that you can no longer run these kind of public posts without looking extremely unprofessional.

Re: Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)

#35

Post by op00to »

bren2013 wrote: post #22

Uber employees are the kind of people who kept a telescope in their bedroom window to peep on girls down the street. I'll never understand why they're still in business.

They're still in business because they are far better than the entrenched, governmentally-appointed taxi companies in any locality I've been in, except for perhaps Manhattan.

Re: Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)

#36

Post by eli »

cbd1984 wrote: post #10
sergiotapia wrote: post #2

I can see why they deleted it, it's extremely cringey.

Is it cringey because of the data they present, or because of the conclusions they draw from that data?

I think probably the language and tone of the post more than either the data or the conclusions.

Re: Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)

#37

Post by roywiggins »

mikeash wrote: post #19
clarkm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Do you find OkCupid's blog posts cringey too?

Sex is OkCupid's business, while it's not Uber's business. And yes, a lot of people find fault with their blog posts too. You'll see lots of comments like that on any related HN submission.

I never minded OkCupid because it's sort of a game anyway. It's all online, and whether you meet someone there or not is up to you to tell OkCupid.

Uber is mining information about people's movements in the real world, which feels ickier.

Re: Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)

#38

Post by chockablock »

kogir wrote: post #30
chockablock wrote: post #13

In another deleted post [0] the author talks about using a name-to-gender API to look at ride locations by gender, which implies that these analyses were not done using anonymized data. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140827195715/http://blog.uber....

You have to start with the original data, which is obviously de-anonymized. Full data -> [gender, time, origin neighborhood, destination neighborhood] leaves you with a pretty anonymous dataset, and is all that would be required for this analysis. Internal metrics teams nearly always have access to complete data. The issue is sharing non-anonymized data externally.

I agree it's possible that the name-to-gender mapping was done before the full ride data was handed over to this analyst. (Though just removing real names would still leave a lot to be desired in the anonymizing process).

However there's no mention in these posts of such safeguards, and subjectively the post reads more like the analyst is just fishing around in the full raw dataset of ride times, start and end locations, and names. To wit:

"What else can we learn? First, we can devise a way to statistically assess whether there are more women or men in a neighborhood than we’d expect. [...] We used Rapleaf’s Name to Gender API to assess the likelihood of a rider’s gender given their name, only accepting a match if the probability was >= 95%."

And in the original post, he categorizes rides as possibly related to a late-night hookup based on whether the destination and departure points for 2 rides are within 0.1 mi of each other.

>Internal metrics teams nearly always have access to complete data. The issue is sharing non-anonymized data externally.

I disagree pretty strongly with this. Do you think that your average Uber rider would be OK with Uber employees analyzing their ride patterns (with their real names attached) to try to figure out where and when they are having sex? Do you think Uber should allow such access to its employees by policy? (It seems we agree that writing a blog post about it is not a great idea.)

Re: Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)

#39

Post by cddotdotslash »

op00to wrote: post #35
bren2013 wrote: post #22

Uber employees are the kind of people who kept a telescope in their bedroom window to peep on girls down the street. I'll never understand why they're still in business.

They're still in business because they are far better than the entrenched, governmentally-appointed taxi companies in any locality I've been in, except for perhaps Manhattan.

Manhattanite here. Taxis are still terrible for some things. While it's almost never impossible to find one, they still do the same tricks of "oh, the credit card machine is broken," and "I'll only drive uptown right now," and "I don't drive to JFK in the morning." I can't stand a lot of Uber's ethical practices, but I still prefer them over cabs.

Re: Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)

#40

Post by yuhong »

joshvm wrote: post #34

Curious to see how companies deal with this kind of data because, ignoring the creep-factor, it is thoroughly interesting to see these sort of patterns emerge and the only way you can find out this kind of stuff is to track people. It's the actions of the unscrupulous minority that ruin this for the rest of us. I personally believe that most of the time when companies say "We simply aren't that interested in you." th…

I guess it's a side effect of becoming 'big' that you can no longer run these kind of public posts without looking extremely unprofessional.

Does it really matter these days?

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