Uber will start audio-recording rides as a safety measure | Hacker News Reader

Uber will start audio-recording rides as a safety measure

theverge.com

20 pointsrandom427 comments

Part of the reason I enjoyed Uber rides was a feeling of casual quality. Some random Joe had water bottles and a spotless car ready to go and was nothing like the worn out office-in-a-car local cab service.

The more filming and recording that has started in Uber the more the divide between customer and driver becomes and we are on the road to the same old customer experience. I don't want to get into transport knowing that I am performing for the state/megacompany on camera. I like talking freely with average joes without the feeling of hawks watching every move.

Being under the eye of judgement changes people regardless of the 'nothing to hide' argument. It's unpleasant. Having always on phone tracking that Uber does and a star rating system was supposed to be good enough. Why am I bothering at this point? If someone's going to track everything I ever do it may as well be the local cab company that I could plausibly trust because it's local and regular. I could go to a physical premises and talk to employees from my culture that have been there for decades.

I don't get it anymore. The only advantage is rapidly becoming price because they're not regulated the same way.

The privacy implications of this are concerning. How long will these recordings be kept? Will the recordings, or excerpts from them, be sold to third parties?

I can see recorded conversations being used to extract data that is anonymized and then sold to third parties. An example: this week mentions of the company Foo,Inc. went up 35% in Mountain View,CA as opposed to up 5% average across the rest of the country. From this example it's reasonable that one of the companies in Mountain View is about to have a significant interaction with Foo, Inc., perhaps an acquisition, so this could be financially valuable information. And of course it would valuable to marketers.

Indeed. What if I casually discuss a medical condition with my driver? That is protected health information right?

What if my kids who are under 18 are with me? How does that work?

Just seems like a very slippery slope.

> What if my kids who are under 18 are with me? How does that work?

Exactly the same? They'll gleefully monetize all personal data they accrue, which is standard practice for any data-gathering effort. It doesn't matter if the slope is slippery. The terms and conditions will promise they'll act in good faith (unless compelled otherwise). They'll share data with third parties to improve user experience. The intelligence agencies will be delighted. The obliteration of privacy has been normalized. Most people have been trained not to care.

Doesn't need to be that sophisticated - Uber already knows who their riders are. Simply cross-reference that list with the publicly listed executives in public companies, and have someone read all the transcripts of their car rides. You'll likely identify at least one Merger and Acquisition deal that you'll be able to front-run for a few million dollars, and this is 100% legal because A) you've notified people that they're being audio recorded so it counts as two-party consent, and B) Uber has no obligation to not trade on insider information that they happen to overhear.

I understand the safety implications but as recording has become more common I've become more and more uncomfortable with taking ride share. I haven't been too bothered by private cameras owned by the drivers. Though I don't love it and am not talkative. I really hate the advertising ipads that some drivers hang on their seats that are clearly operated by sleezy merchants. Not just because they are bright and loud and not what I'm paying for but there's totally two cameras and microphones pointed right at me with correlative info and zero accountability.

Remember back in 2014 an Uber exec showed live data of a specific journalist he didn't care for[0]? The sort of things that people talk about in a ride share... With a system like that what sort of information harvesting and manipulation could you do? Stock trading? Political profiling? Blackmail? Even if the operation is actually about "safety" and there is oversight and most of the team is interested in upholding that there is about a 0% chance that someone in the department won't use it for seriously evil shit.

[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/uber-is-i...

It`s interesting why they do it only now...

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