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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never heard of a liquor board that required stores to deliver to the government a real time feed of who’s buying what liquor. If such a policy were created, and BevMo announced they refuse to comply, I’d be fully in support of that despite my normal concerns about companies ignoring regulations.

It’s not about the general principle here. If Uber’s claim about deanonymization is accurate, this specific policy is PRISM level bad.

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Agreed, and I don’t necessarily agree with the real-time requirement as the best way to regulate. That said, while the data providing burden is certainly more than the liquor store must provide, it doesn’t seem like they’ve delayed permitting for months, requiring public notice, checking to ensure named individuals are at work, etc (not to mention some of the graft that has been associated with liquor licenses in other cities).

They have a data requirement. It is not new, the company is not responding. Don’t they already do this with ride data from Uber?

EDIT: Looks like they don't do this for rides yet, and may be using this as a trial balloon for greater data access? (based on this article from May, if accurate?) https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/tech/uber-lyft-cities-data/in...

EDIT2: DC has been doing this with car / ride-sharing agencies for awhile but I don't believe it's published. Not sure of the status of SharedStreets: https://www.wired.com/story/uber-nacto-data-sharing/

Uber appears to be claiming some kind of procedural issues happened here. They mentioned an "eleventh-hour administrative review process" in the article, although I don't have time right now to dig in and find more details on what they're talking about.

Yeah - checking on the overall policies for LADOT as well and their data API but only so deep you can go when it’s not your day job haha. Appreciate the discussion!

Is Uber a Retail Store? Does the Store leave their merchandise all over the neighborhood with GPS micro controllers on them?

This analogy is absurd.

As municipalities get more technically advanced, why shouldn't they have access to the same type of data or where these scooters are? How hard is it to open up an API?

This seems to be, how dare citizens impose a cost of doing business in their neighborhoods!

Because a private company having access to GPS data and the government having access to GPS data are two different threat models with different concerns.

The "elected representatives by the citizens of Los Angeles" (Government) are accessing GPS Data about a companies property in its jurisdiction because the companies are not regulating their own behavior and property.

This is where citizens need to advocate in their own neighborhoods and get involved and vote if that is what they want.

Thus you are agreeing that the government should get access to every phone calls, because some people may use it for illegal purpose and phone company doesn't regulate their behavior?

If you have an issue with how theses companies operate, stop theses ways of operating, that's all. The solution isn't to deanonymize the userbase.

Uber is a corporation and the property is the corporations. The data is the corporations too, and not the property of the individual.

Users relinquished that control in your TOS.

What the user wants has no bearing in this whatsoever. Uber is simply using you as a tool to get around the laws in the regions it operates in.

How would you feel that instead of demanding the data , they simply purchased it?

> Uber is a corporation and the property is the corporations. The data is the corporations too, and not the property of the individual.

I'm not arguing who is owning that data, I'm arguing about what happens to that data and whether that's right or wrong. The fact that it's legal or not doesn't change anything.

Would you be fine with a genocide if the ones comitting them made sure it was ratified as a law first?

> Uber is simply using you as a tool to get around the laws in the regions it operates in.

If they didn't use that reason and simply shared it, I would still be arguing the same point...

> How would you feel that instead of demanding the data , they simply purchased it?

It would be just as bad.

> why shouldn't they have access to the same type of data or where these scooters are? How hard is it to open up an API?

They don't have the right to know where I go.

You as an individual I agree; there should be no disclosure of customers themselves. However, I do think the city deserves to know in real time where all the 30 pound lithium ion battery and motor, pieces of litter are.

I think it's more complicated than that though.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-los-angeles-sco...

> The data would not include a rider’s name, but even in sprawling metropolitan areas, paths between home, work and school are typically unique, experts say. Someone with basic coding skills and access to the data could easily connect a trip to an individual person.

> “This data is incredibly, incredibly sensitive,” said Jeremy Gillula, the technology projects director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights group.

I suspect that part of Uber/Lime/et.al’s pitch to municipalities is to provide them greater visibility how people move through the city to help inform long-term planning.

Which would necessitate this data exchange is price they pay to operate in the city.

I also trust that cities are getting more sophisticated and if LA said that data exchange is their price for doing business, then good on LA for knowing how the dataset could benefit them.

If you honestly can't see the difference between a liquor store and a company that changed the face of every major cities in the world and how their inhabitants move around in less than 10 years* I don't think anyone can argue against your point.

edit: *while using every loopholes, sketchy and sometimes straight up illegal ways to do it and killing someone as a result.

I'm very comfortable saying alcohol affects the world as much as Uber does. Liquor stores regularly use sketchy loopholes to dodge regulation, and the entire reason they're so tightly regulated is that we believe unrestricted liquor sales will kill people.

Liquor is tightly regulated for tax enforcement.

I'm very comfortable saying alcohol would never be approved/legal if it started being marketed 10 years ago.

Like cannabis?

You mean illegal in most places, barely tolerated for medical purposes in a few other and legal in a very few states/countries VS legal and abused almost universally in the world ? Yeah exactly.

Yes, I see the difference. My purpose with this comment was to illustrate that Uber's primary complaints appear to be about the Process, and not the request. "Last minute X" etc.

While a good process is important, I was holding up that often times in local regulation there are all kinds of really terrible flaws and gotchas - you have to know people to get a license or permit, etc.

In this case, it seems like a pretty straightforward compliance request, using an API whose code is publicly available, in a process that has been in-progress for at least six months, which, for local regulation, is pretty good!

I was not comparing the industries, or the materials requested.

Your analogy makes no sense.

Liquor stores don't physically move around and violate regulations on where they should operate.

That is why LA is asking for this information. To regulate them since Uber can't be trusted.

On where they should operate, maybe not. But liquor stores definitely do violate regulations on how they should operate, and a real-time feed of sales would surely help catch things like Amazon's clearly fake retail outlets (https://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2019/11/amazon-still-mocking...).

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