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Comment by jakelarkin | Hacker News Reader

read the report https://transparencyreport.uber.com/

the 12M users are mostly demands from regulatory authorities

- 6M is California, likely CPUC

- 3M is New York, probably the TLC there

that's how you get the data sets for analysis like http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-ta... which appear on HN periodically and are eagerly upvoted

the regulators make this a requirement for Uber to open or continue operating in their respective regions. Uber tries to negotiate a narrow scope for info disclosure as much as possible.

(disclaimer: uber employee)

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Any pointers to your data collection and retention policies? After all, if you don't have it, you can't give it.

I'm pretty sure the principle doesn't apply here, as these are known regulations requiring the retention and transmission of data, not post-hoc warrants etc. It's like the IRS requiring you to keep receipts.

Right, which is exactly why he is asking for collection policy, aka, what data are you getting in the first place?

If its anything like most companies data retention boils down to "we keep everything that someone decided to log in an adhoc fashion, and we keep it forever unless we run out of disk space then we delete it again in an adhoc fashion".

What are CPUC & TLC?

California Public Utilities Commission and the Taxi & Limousine Commission

Easily Googleable regulatory authorities in California and New York.

and perhaps even more relevantly defined in an HN post...

CPUC is the state regulator of "Transportation Network Companies" (Uber, Lyft etc.) since 2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Utilities_Co...

Do you know to what degree the data is anonymized?

And just think ... Uber and (mostly Silicon Valley) companies like it thought all along how easy it would be for "software to eat the world" and thus merely "disrupt" the establishment, "disrupt" the old school, "disrupt" and "democratize", "disrupt" the 1%'ers / elite power structures which pull the puppet strings of the state and federal regulators. Meritocracy eh?

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