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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying that they should be obliged to hand out all their data, just some of it. Example:

We obviously wouldn't want the public to have access to personally identifiable data like GPS movements captured by phones, as this kind of data is highly sensitive. But having access to aggregated, (properly) anonymized data would be sufficient for many things, e.g. to see where local traffic hot spots are and how people commute to work. Giving out this data does not compromise privacy (if done right) and has a very little risk of harming the company that generated it.

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The problem though is that people are effectively made to work for free if the government can order any organization to publish their private information. The government is forcing socialism on the upside and capitalism on the downside.

Almost all information/research would serve a "public good" if it was converted from private to public. If the government forced an investment firm to reveal which companies they thought were the most undervalued in a market, many people would benefit from that knowledge. The question is, what right and what incentive structure promotes the generation of that knowledge. Theft is certainly not a structure that generates it long term.

> The problem though is that people are effectively made to work for free

How so? Sharing this information is a condition of operating in an area. If that is unprofitable, Uber won't operate there.

The problem though is that people are effectively made to work for free if the government can order any organization to publish their private information.

But they're not doing that work for "free". They're doing in exchange for the privilege of being able to run a large-scale business on one of the most highly-trafficked street grids on the planet. Which in turn certainly doesn't exactly come for "free" (and in fact costs many billions of dollars per year to run, involving thousands and thousands of people who certainly don't work for fee either), now does it.

So Uber says they don't want to pay for that privilege? That they'd rather not have to comply with regulations (like every other business operator in any other damn category you can think of) because they're... special?

That's fine, of course -- they just don't have to do business in NYC, then.

If they don't want to share sensitive data such as GPS tracks they oughtn't to store it. From the end user's perspective, the stored data is still available via subpoena, leaks etc

From a user's perspective, data showing me traveling to and from my home directly is not very anonymous.

Maybe that should make you think twice about using a private third party which records that data for your transportation needs.

Perhaps, but currently such services do not make that data available to the general public and users have been operating with that knowledge. If that gets retroactively changed by a local government, I'd say that government is the most at fault.

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