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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of cheeky from Uber because there's no reason they could not report the exact regulatory agency requests to give us a better understanding of what is going on. Did they hand over the names and trip routes of 12 million people? Or just aggregate data like "a million people took trips to SFO".

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This is a perfectly legitimate question by guelo. Instead of downvoting, could someone shed light on why transparency reports never give specifics on the actual authorities making the requests or the data given? With the exception of those under seal or gag, of course.

"Almost never", indeed. I think https://lumendatabase.org/ is a shining exception.

(Where I just learnt that you can take down a Tweet with the DMCA: https://lumendatabase.org/notices/12083144)

That was my first thought and details were thin in Uber's report.

>the agencies requested information on trips, trip requests, pickup and dropoff areas, fares, vehicles, and drivers.

It's the exact same regulatory information that lyft and taxicab companies hand over to regulators.

Which is?

How do you know?

When I hail a taxi on the street, and pay cash, what does the driver/company know about me? They could take photos, collect DNA, etc. But there's no metadata, as there is with Uber and Lyft.

They know where you got picked up, where you got dropped off, how you paid

Yeah, so your parent is asking how much Uber, who obviously know more information about their riders than LocalTaxiCashCo., are doing to remove the excess on their responses to regulatory requests.

Right. But they don't know my identity.

That's not the only thing regulators care about. In fact, frequently they don't care about a persons identity. They may want to know things like whether certain neighborhoods are being over/underserved

I'm not concerned about the regulators. What concerns me is the easy access by police and TLAs to so much data about who went where, when, and with whom. Mass surveillance, complementing collection through all the other methods.

The exact same information is collected by public transport systems where you have a pass which you top up with your credit card, if the authorities want access to this data they just get in touch with the transit authority. I hate it and avoid these systems where possible.

Depending on the city, they report exactly the same data as Uber/Lyft: pickup location, dropoff location, date & time, fare amount.

Do we actually know that? I got the impression that they were reporting much more than that. Maybe not to regulators. But to police and TLAs, presumably without warrants. That's the key concern, here. Another form of mass surveillance.

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