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Comment by habnds | Hacker News Reader

Seems like if Uber is going to use this data for their benefit society should be able to use it to ours as well for planning an infrastructure purposes for example.

The way that society does stuff like this is through government bodies. The real problem here seems like a lack of trust or oversight of government bodies, which creates the impossible situation you identify.

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> Seems like if Uber is going to use this data for their benefit society should be able to use it to ours as well for planning an infrastructure purposes for example.

I don't necessarily disagree, but "data used for their benefit" covers all data used by all businesses, from your emails stored by your provider (assuming you don't self-host) to trade secrets, etc.

So either we say the government should be able to access all data from everywhere (except the few that individuals store on their own) for planning purposes and such, or we must define why this data is different from other.

Fair point, I think there's a fundamental difference between the data collection done by a company like Uber or the FANG or whatever and the data that other companies collect in the normal course of business but it's hard for me to think of a good definition for the difference.

There's also the idea that maybe we should have total access to a currently unthinkable amount of data [0]

[0] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/fftransparent/

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