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from the town-planning-or-real-time-tracking dept.
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Uber sues Los Angeles to keep scooter location data private
Los Angeles wants a peek at the location data collected by the Uber scooters in its city. The company, better known for its ride-hailing service, doesn't want to give up the information, and is taking legal action to keep the data private.
On Monday, Uber filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles after months of refusing to give the Department of Transportation access to its scooter location data. In September 2018, LADOT instituted a requirement for all scooter companies to provide location data on the vehicles. The city said it was for city planning purposes.
Los Angeles' "Mobility Data Specification" plan represents one way local governments are trying to wrestle with the impact of technology companies. It's caught on in other cities such as Seattle; Austin, Texas; and Louisville, Kentucky because they don't want to be caught flat-footed the same way they did when ride-hailing companies first arrived and caused traffic headaches. But the request for real-time location data on scooters is a step too far, raising serious privacy concerns, Uber argued.
"Independent privacy experts have clearly and repeatedly asserted that a customer's geolocation is personally identifiable information, and -- consistent with a recent legal opinion by the California legislative counsel -- we believe that LADOT's requirements to share sensitive on-trip data compromises our customers' expectations of data privacy and security," an Uber spokesperson said. "Therefore, we had no choice but to pursue a legal challenge, and we sincerely hope to arrive at a solution that allows us to provide reasonable data and work constructively with the City of Los Angeles while protecting the privacy of our riders."
[...] "Given that we seem to have exhausted all other avenues to find a compromise solution, tomorrow we will file a lawsuit and seek a temporary restraining order in the Los Angeles Superior Court, so that a judge will hear these concerns and prevent the Los Angeles Department of Transportation from suspending our permit to operate," Uber's director of public affairs Colin Tooze said in a letter to LADOT on Monday.
LADOT's requests for location data have also faced criticism from privacy advocates like the Center for Democracy and Technology, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Tuesday October 29 2019, @06:53PM (3 children)
Is there any reason why LA should need to know who the customers are? Or even which scooter is where? Presumably all that's needed for traffic analysis is each trip's time and trajectory.
Or does Uber have some dirty secrets that could be revealed by even this little information?
(No doubt is has other dirty secrets as well)
-- hendrik
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Tuesday October 29 2019, @07:28PM (2 children)
Nothing in the city's (open source) schema [github.com] that references the identity of riders. They just want to track the scooters themselves and their locations.
A nefarious individual could couple that information with another dataset to infer riders' identities, and I hope the database itself isn't public facing and there's appropriate restrictions on its use.
As to why each scooter and where, the law's stated reasons for tracking this are:
Some of those require a plot on a map to do.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by darkfeline on Wednesday October 30 2019, @02:16AM (1 child)
Uh no. Simply having the data that a scooter was in front of your house and then traveled to the brothel is enough to identify your personal hobbies.
Even a broken clock is right sometimes, and Uber is right that this is a huge privacy problem.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30 2019, @10:18PM
Your neighbors like brothels? You like dropping uber's scooters at random locations?
Uber knows who rode the scooter, so the user's privacy ain't so much.