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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

But Uber is offering a service that by its very nature requires that you expose the service provider to information you may wish to keep private. How is this the service provider's fault? It's not like they're going out of their way to add tracking into something that doesn't require it.

Like this is a little nuts, if you buy one of those GPS trackers for your kids you don't get to act shocked when you find out the company has their location records. You get to be angry if they use those records for anything other than providing you service but of course they have them.

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If a service "by its very nature" does shady things, maybe that service should not be offered in the first place?

Critcizing users afterwards that they "can't act shocked" for having these things done to them is only playing a blame game.

But it's not shady at all. Like these bike companies track the location of the bikes with GPS. Any when you go for a ride on one you are by proxy being tracked with GPS. Like this isn't magic or unexpected. Are you mad that an airlines have your location information while you're on the plane? Are you gonna demand the FAA stop tracking flights for rider privacy?

But nobody actually getting the blame since it would be weird if anyone was actually mad at this. Does anyone seriously believe that using Find My iPhone doesn't allow Apple access to your phone's location for the purposes of showing you where it is?

It's not shady though!

That's the point. If you buy a GPS tracker, for example, by definition it will track your GPS location.

Would you expect a GPS tracker to not track your GPS location? Because that is what you are saying.

Renting scooters and necessarily keeping track of them is “shady”? What else is shady?

This is a very daft take.

It's not even remotely shady for a service to inherently involve knowing where you are. That's something that is true of every brick and mortar store, and indeed every cab driver. Yet the government doesn't demand that those businesses provide real-time feeds of information about the movements of their customers, and if the government were to do so and they were to object on privacy grounds, we wouldn't take it to mean that their entire business model is inherently immoral and all shops should cease to exist.

> But Uber is offering a service that by its very nature requires that you expose the service provider to information you may wish to keep private.

Uber's ride hailing service, sure. But the same is not true for the scooter and bike services, which have no need for such information.

Huh? They have to know where the scooters and bikes are so they can be collected to be recharged.

And also to be rented, if the user doesn't happen to have one in sight.

Do they need to know where they are at every given moment, and collect data on each customer in association with where they're coming from and where they're going?

No, they just need to know where they are when:

1. They run a collection routine 2. The bike/scooter is low on battery.

There is no info they need in association with the rider's trip. Or at least not, as the GP states, info required "by nature". That perspective is true of ride sharing (the driver needs to know where to pick up and drop off) but false in relation to bikes/scooters (no need to know start/end points, just need to know where the bike is during collection or low battery, and not in association with a rider).

The rider uses an app to find a bike/scooter near them. That requires real-time location data

They need to know where the scooters are but they don't really need to know where the customers are though.

Consider a similar system that would work with coin operated scooters. They can have GPS in the vehicle without constant association with users.

In any cases these two tracking databases, where is each scooter and who is on which scooter, should be separate so they can provide the former to law enforcement without disclosing citizens whereabouts.

How are they going to display the bikes and scooters on a map inside of the app without GPS coordinates?

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