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Uber is beginning to track the locations of riders up to five minutes after a ride has ended:
As promised, Uber is now tracking you even when your ride is over. The ride-hailing service said the surveillance—even when riders close the app—will improve its service.
The company now tracks customers from when they request a ride until five minutes after the ride has ended. According to Uber, the move will help drivers locate riders without having to call them, and it will also allow Uber to analyze whether people are being dropped off and picked up properly—like on the correct side of the street.
"We do this to improve pickups, drop-offs, customer service, and to enhance safety," Uber said.
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Uber Now Tracking Users After the Ride is Over
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There *__is* intelligent life on Earth, but I leave for Texas on Monday.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedGreen on Monday December 05 2016, @04:48PM
"Just how stupid, naïve, ignorant do they think we are?"
From what I have observed with all these new "services" people are signing up to in the last decade or so pretty fucking stupid, naive and ignorant. Giving away all your personal information for very little returned in exchange for it these companies are getting your entire life history for peanuts. Best part is most people are perfectly fine with this as long as they can sign up for the next new shinny to come along.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday December 05 2016, @08:52PM
From what I have observed with all these new "services" people are signing up to in the last decade or so pretty fucking stupid, naive and ignorant. Giving away all your personal information for very little returned in exchange for it these companies are getting your entire life history for peanuts.
To be fair, a lot of these services ask to track people in rather innocuous or even completely transparent ways. It's not like every time you go to a new website, a little dialogue box pops up and says, "Hey -- you know you're sharing just about everywhere you visit on the internet with Facebook, right? Would you like Facebook to know that you've visited this page and what you click on?"
Changing various hidden bits of settings in your web browser or the settings on your phone or tablet can have significant privacy implications that most people don't realize. Yes, part of this is that they are "naive and ignorant," but part of it also is that services and apps conspire to keep them that way, and people have to deliberately seek out info on privacy to realize what those innocuous dialog boxes or hidden settings really can do.
Consumers are simply never going to be educated on a deep level about all that stuff, and I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to be. If people are really concerned about the spreading privacy issues, the only solution that will actually work for most of the population is more sweeping regulation restricting what data can be collected and how, requiring everything to be "opt-in," AND making clear those "opt-in" things explain the implications concisely and clearly (e.g., not in the form of a 50-page EULA).