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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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You will reach the highest possible point in your business or profession.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Arik on Monday December 05 2016, @04:34PM
Just how stupid, naïve, ignorant do they think we are?
Very few, if any, smartphones have a GPS that's actually accurate enough to tell which side of the street you get out on under real world conditions.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(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.
"Cervantes definitely was prescient in describing a senile Don fighting against windmills." -- larryjoe on /.
(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).
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday December 05 2016, @04:50PM
You're right, (civilian) GPS isn't that accurate. But "location services" probably is. "Are they closer to starbuck's wifi or the cafe's across the street?"
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @05:05PM
Civilian GPS has exactly the same accuracy as military GPS since Selective Availability was disabled more than 16 years ago.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Monday December 05 2016, @07:54PM
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-difference-between-military-GPS-data-and-civilians-in-terms-of-accuracy [quora.com]
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Monday December 05 2016, @11:46PM
But you won't get that kind of accuracy with the extremely minimal hardware actually built into the typical cellphone, at least not without staying in the same place for a long period of time and averaging.
A dedicated GPS unit will have a MUCH better antenna and will localize more quickly.
Google likes to cheat by taking into account wifi signals and previous readings etc. but in the end they're still guessing, and often noticeably wrong.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @04:55PM
The message is not directed at you, but at the typical user.
Very few smartphone users who read the announcement will even start to consider the question whether this is actually possible. And even fewer will be able to correctly answer it.
Indeed, I'd be surprised if the majority even knew what GPS is, beyond "something in my smartphone that determines where I am".
(Score: 2) by jcross on Monday December 05 2016, @05:00PM
That's true, but if they track both the driver and passenger for some time around the drop-off, it can be inferred. For instance, they can assume (in a drive-on-the-right-side country) that if the driver is coming from the south, they are likely letting the passenger out on the east side of the street. If the driver makes a U-turn with the passenger still in the car, we can assume the passenger is being let off on the west side of the street, but if the driver makes a U-turn without the passenger coming along, the driver is probably just changing direction to get to their next location. One can also look at whether the passenger starts going west or east and how long it takes them (i.e. did they need to wait to cross the street). The data are probably still ambiguous, but might be informative in the aggregate.
Not that I disagree with your point that it's a lame excuse to justify collecting the data. Much more likely they want to know *why* people are taking that Uber ride in the first place, based on their actual destination rather than the address they entered into the app.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday December 05 2016, @05:03PM
I just walked over to the curb to check it. GPS put me on the correct side of the street. Google Maps directions are also specific about which side of the street you are supposed to be on.
Phones can utilize multiple variants of positioning satellite. GLONASS, BeiDou, and Galileo are all active or will be soon. There are two more I didn't even know about being launched by Japan [wikipedia.org] and India [wikipedia.org]. GLONASS is supposed to be more accurate than civilian GPS. A quick search found that the Samsung Galaxy S4 supports GLONASS, and that phone is over three and a half years old. Radio/Wi-Fi signals can also be used to improve accuracy. I believe Android/GMaps even asks whether you want to turn on Wi-Fi to improve positioning.
Maybe you are living in a previous century, as shown by your predilection for monospaced fonts.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @06:19PM
Worse than that, Android uses wifi networks to further narrow your location unless you disable it... and continue to decline enabling it every fucking time you turn on your navigation app.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:43AM
Android can actually use wifi signals only - I've used this a couple times when weather made GPS impossible.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday December 05 2016, @11:07PM
Off topic, but the reason GLONASS is being included everywhere because Russia has a 25% tariff on any GPS device not including GLONASS. Including vehicles.