Uber is turning data about trips and takeout into insights for marketers
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I'd wager that just by the virtue of being commenters on HN, we're already outliers.
If you frame it as a negative thing with no downsides for agreeing with you, of course people will agree. But that's not the reality.
That's your quote as I read it in case some editing happens. There's no caveat in your original post that you are claiming now. You've moved the goal posts. As you originally stated, I agree with all of the follow up comments to it that you are now trying to expand on your original comment. Maybe that's what you always meant but just left out of the original. It happens. But now you're being obstinate about it in a way that doesn't look good.
What's the solution then?
"Would you pay extra for a guarantee your personal data is kept private?"
"Would you pay extra for a guarantee your data isn't sold for marketing purposes?"
One might argue "private" implies more than can truly be promised, for example no US company can promise to ignore subpoenas and actually follow through.
I'd say it mirrors for patriotism: "do you support $OUR_COUNTRY" will get more "yes" responses than almost any more specific question about support for anything tangible. Precisely because it's sort of meaningless and unobjectionable... (well except in the US, where I'm sure it's correlated with whether or not one's favored party is in power)
This is how we have a free-market to begin with. You need enforcement and structures in place so people will actually trust any of this crap. Instead, we have the nutjob early 90's cyber libertarians thinking this will all be magically fixed with just magical freedom and the invisible hand fixing everything.
People on this website are too small a fraction of society to ever move the needle. My point is that it doesn't matter what people on this website want with respect to privacy, in our capitalist democratic society it will never happen unless most people want it.
The reality right now is that most people don't want it.
This narrative is incredibly toxic and honestly a very antisocial viewpoint of people as if they are all just stupid sheep who deserve to be exploited.
There's zero reason why its unfair for a person to both object to advertising because of the annoyance (because it is annoying) AND for a person to not want to be digitally surveilled endlessly without their consent.
I don't disagree with you there.
> This narrative is incredibly toxic and honestly a very antisocial viewpoint of people as if they are all just stupid sheep who deserve to be exploited.
The people get what they vote for, whether or not its what they deserve. The only way to move the needle on this is to educate people. Telling people they're "stupid sheep" for not wanting the thing you think they should want is not typically a winning strategy, in my experience.
> There's zero reason why its unfair for a person to both object to advertising because of the annoyance (because it is annoying) AND for a person to not want to be digitally surveilled endlessly without their consent.
I'm simply saying I think most people care more about the first thing.
It isn't out-of-keeping in this kind of company for a person to start discussions about personal data privacy. In fact: We chat about this stuff here all the time.
But in reality: The number of discussions I've had about personal data privacy and monetization face-to-face with people that I did not meet through a computer network, or bring up myself is exactly 1.
It's thus my observation that most people in the world care about this issue approximately...never.
(The reason they don't care may be that they don't know enough to even begin to question whether the people behind their air fryer, genealogical DNA service, garage door opener, and food delivery system may have ulterior motives.
But guesses about root causation are, at best, both tangential and broadly inconsequential. We can guess and figure and re-figure and even prove theories until the cows come home.
And it doesn't matter.
They didn't care yesterday, they still don't care today while I write this, and they will continue to not care tomorrow.)
Anyway, the devil is in the implementation details here, but this doesn't strike me as a common case.
The answer here isn't really obvious, but I'd suspect that in many cases this is not a very attractive demographic to advertise to.
On the wealthy side, you don't need to be that rich to pay not to get ads.
This demographic is inherently attractive simply because they can spend money.
So now, to justify removing someone from your pool of advertisees, they don't just need to pay what could be made by advertising to them; they need to pay for what could be made to advertise to them and (unwittingly) several poorer people.
I also click them often. $$$$
So a fancy way to say that if you have 10 dollars?
Thank you for the laugh.
While this may be true on an individual level, it’s wildly not true in aggregate.
The first dollar is hardest to get. Once someone has shown a propensity to spend on pretty much anything, they become much more valuable as an advertising target.
That's like thinking that a girl is likely to sleep with everybody because she has a boyfriend. "She's already sleeping with one guy, so why shouldn't she sleep with everybody?".
Of course your current customers are excellent targets for your own upsells and your other products. But not much else.
“If you don’t pay for a product, you are the product”
It’s
“If you don’t pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you’d pay for the product”
I'm not paying crave anymore.
That technically is also competition. And if the market offers garbage for money, but the illegal market is free and better, go with the illegal choice.
You'll be treated like a criminal either way with DRM. So... Yeah.
Even if you take away the money a vpn costs, you still can have a decent vps with decent storage.
If you only need storage, even better. Found an offer for a "Storage VPS" with low hardware specs and 2TB of HDDs for 10€/monthly
And if you are paying… you’re still the product as well.
Although if they did somehow deploy their constellation as a legible ad, I wouldn't even complain. "Drink Coke" spelled out with a hundred satellites would be hilarious.
- Public websites are chock full of ads
- Downloading a file often means hopping through several redirects (each of which is an ad) and sometimes even having to "complete an offer" to get the final link
- Private websites have some affiliate deal with VPN providers. "We did the research, this one is the best, if you subscribe through this link you will get some perks on our website".
Of all the kinds of ads out there, that last one is the least objectionable to me. They don't force it on you, it doesn't clog up the important parts of the site, and they supposedly do some research to pick the best provider to affiliate with. I "never" click on ads but this one worked on me.
There just needs to be a blanket-law where your data is considered every-bit as intellectual property as a piece of copyrighted media and for there to be consent established to sell or give your data to a third-party there needs to be an active exchange of payment, credit or services that is opt-in only, not opt-out from an intentionally obfuscated EULA update email.
Require active opt-in and consent along with a clear set of goods/services/payment, and active simple on-demand revocation with strict timelines, and you could have companies actually properly incentivizing users to sell them their own personal data instead of it just being harvested.
Unfortunately too many libertarian nutjobs out here think that the market here will magically fix all issues.
I'll see your libertarian market nutjobs and raise you reflexive "regulation will fix it" liberals (I don't really know the right term here, but I guess it's the one that fits most closely with US politics for the last 60+ years). Neither group has much room in its worldview for the simple fact that some people are just jerks and will abuse any system.
Regulation can be done well, but doing so in a way that doesn't just hand the entire segment to the current incumbents is hard and regulatory capture isn't just something market worshipers conjured out of thin air.
In an ideal world, you'd instead have drivers assigned to either particular neighborhoods or particular restaurants, allowing for order-stacking and predictable routes. Bonus for set-time daily deliveries (get your order in before 6 or have to wait until 9). Bigger bonus for set neighborhood drop-off points (like those consolidated mailboxes, but warming compartments). Anything more bespoke would cost extra.
Unfortunately, the balance of inefficient operations, decreasing competition, and "line go up" is that prices have to increase.
At the same time you have processes like increasing suburbanization and development of even more car-centric infrastructure, which makes houses and restaurants even further from each other, and makes cheaper delivery vehicles like motorbikes infeasible.
HBO was the first offering that didn't have ads during the show.
No, it was quality of reception, especially for people who were farther from (or had inconvenient terrain between them and) broadcast stations; literally the only thing on early capable was exactly the normal broadcast feed from the covered stations, which naturally included all the normal ads.
Premium add-on channels that charged on top of cable, of which I think HBO was the first, had being ad free among their selling points, but that was never part of the basic cable deal.
It gets trotted on a lot here because the overarching narrative on HN is that regulation is an answer to everything when it's easier to just... not use the thing if you don't like it. Rather than creating a mountain of regulations that only big business can comply with, I think it's better to choose what you do with your money as a consumer.
In most places, your options for a taxi service are Uber or go fuck yourself. That's how they're able to get away with their price gouging, privacy recklessness, and share-cropped labor.
Free market dynamics only work if you are in a free market. We're not, there's one player, and they won the market by literally just cheating and breaking the law. Sorry, sorry, "disrupting".
For streaming, I'm not sure since I don't watch much, and YT+adblocker is sufficient for me. Again, not giving them money is enough of a signal if you don't find the product good.
What if I don't have enough money to buy something and I want it anyway!
> It uses LiveRamp's clean room technology, which lets companies aggregate their data in a privacy-safe environment, without sharing or seeing each other's raw or personally identifiable customer information.
It's apparently not that they directly sell your PII at least.
They have also advertised for the Starbucks in thr Target stores long before when you go to pickup something.
Surely that is the answer.
They’re going to sell to marketers for ads I don’t watch?
Any company that has unique or rare data is compelled to do things with it. Those that don’t either can’t figure out how or explicitly reject the reward function of contemporary capitalism. We should really expect those deviations to be the exception.
To give an industry that's a counterexample to the "they add ads and don't make things cheaper", look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.
I don't follow... it certainly improves the grocer's margins, but how does that do anything at all for the consumer?
I don't think you were unclear, that's what I understood you to be saying.
Surely, the grocer just pockets the extra ad money? Never in my life have I seen a for-profit corporation voluntarily charge a lower price than the market will bear because they increased their margin by other means.
The ads are also inherently shitty to the producers: they all have to spend money on the grocer's ads now, because if they don't, their competitors will. If you look at it that way, the ads are almost extortion.
In the case of the Uber app you should be able to turn these off (they are conveniently enabled by default, of course!).
On the iphone it's Setting -> Communication -> Marketing Preferences -> Push notifications.
That they haven't monetized it like this when this is how basically everything is monetized and they spent so long burning money hand over fist just boggles my mind.
I would be more surprised if they kept peoples privacy, as even your credit card company sells the purchase data. =3
Thankfully corporations have proven themselves so trustworthy and benevolent, we don't think twice about giving them the data they used to have to torture out of us. Likewise the governments, that we know are among the buyers [1], are just as beloved and uncontroversial, unlike in the old days.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/14/23759585/odni-spy-report-...
I can't imagine any depth they wouldn't dive to, in order to get a morsel to feed on.
Privacy is very important. That's why I think sharing of customer data - individual or aggregate - is bad.
Aggregating protects privacy when done properly.
It seems pretty obvious to me that sharing individual data is orders of magnitude worse than sharing aggregated data.
If you think they're the same, then you don't seem to value the privacy that aggregation provides.
So what am I misrepresenting about what you said?
I'm tired of false equivalences. One thing that's maybe slightly bad, and another thing that's super-super-bad, aren't equally bad.
When done properly is going a lot of heavy lifting there. Time and time again it's been found most aggregates are not filtered properly and be deanonymized with eaze.
It's not that one is big bad, and one is little bad, it's the little bad can become big bad with a small amount of work by an attacker/company. Then when you add in zero external third party verification of these company claims, you really don't have any reason to believe them.
Not really. There are common practices for it. Yes it hits HN when deanonymization can happen at a well-known company, just like it hits HN when there's a security vulnerability that gets patched at a well-known company.
But "it's the little bad can become big bad" is what's doing the heavy lifting in your argument. No, that's not how it works. There's no universe in which aggregate data can be deanonymized to anywhere close to what all of the individual profiles would be. It's a completely false equivalenace, period.
As a completely unrelated aside, I wonder how much social progress is hindered by people alienating people on their own side.
It's easy, just admit the two are not the same and move on. You don't need to get defensive about it. "I wonder" how much social progress is hindered by people making wrong statements and then getting defensive about it? Or by making snarky "completely unrelated" asides?
I’ve got it on less than 6 months.
> Uber Intelligence will let advertisers securely combine their customer data with Uber's to help surface insights about their audiences, based on what they eat and where they travel.
So the companies have the identities. It sounds like they're going to be learning something about their customers, the question is just how much detail they'll get.
1) Hook new drivers with better than average rates before tapering off 2) Take into account the age/model/value of the vehicle and what payments for it would look like in the market and dole out enough to cover costs but not "too much" that they're getting ahead of other drivers
Totally baseless and sourceless hearsay tho. Still, if true, really plays into the image of "there's no depth they won't go".
>neither app would send me orders for up to half an hour
>as soon as one had assigned me and order, the other would start sending my multiple per minute
>all of these orders were either comically low-compensation (no tip), a 15-minute-plus drive away from the order I'd just accepted (to areas it had never sent me before), or both
was marked.
> New York City has released data of 173m individual taxi trips – but inadvertently made it "trivial" to find the personally identifiable information of every driver in the dataset.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/d...
If you're sharing data for a specific purpose, then it's much easier to limit the data sharing to suit that purpose: omit irrelevant data, aggregate where possible, and anonymize individual data points only when you actually need to share that level of detail.
Uber support in India is the most robotic and useless I have ever seen with any vendor. I gave up after fighting for months, just to utilize my wallet amount in other country or get refund. Both were impossible.
> It uses LiveRamp's clean room technology, which lets companies aggregate their data in a privacy-safe environment, without sharing or seeing each other's raw or personally identifiable customer information.
> A hotel brand could use Uber Intelligence to help identify which restaurants or entertainment venues it might want to partner with for its loyalty program, for example.
Not much details on that "Clean room" but it sounds like the third parties get an environment where they can join their data to ubers and then run aggregate queries, but not actually see individual customer records. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
Consider what will happen every time there is a trade-off to be made between making/keeping the data more useful to the companies involved, and actually upholding the anonymity of the data subjects.
Anonymization is nearly impossible to get right even when you're trying really hard, and this is more likely to be a fig leaf to be able to do things that are illegal by sufficiently obfuscating them.
I hope that if EU customer data is included in this, the EU will have the balls to actually enforce GDPR. Uber is one of the few tech company cases where 2-4% of overall revenue would actually hurt, rather than being a small "tax" on the extra profit made through the illegal use of data.
Pretty amazing really. They'll even uturn if they are on the other side of the road.
Flatbush Ave and Church Ave in Brooklyn also have a good amount of $1 buses and $1 cabs going up and down the avenue. This is on top of the MTA busses and subway in the area.
I just realized taxis still exist and most restaurants offer their own delivery service (or pick-up!)
It's been real Uber. GL HF
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/uber-crunches-user...
Other than getting in a taxi line at the airport, I've never been able to use street hailing as a practical way to get around. There just have never been enough taxis in the places that I've lived.
Seriously you want people to use your travel and movement and choice data to make a suggestion list of restaurants for you to order from? How helpless are you?
I like good recommendations better than bad recommendations. The value I get is better recommendations.
Like, I literally update the categories of things I'm interested in, in my Google profile, so I get less useless ads.
People complain about bad and useless recommendations and irrelevant ads all the time. Personalization is how you get better ones.
How many combinations of the restaurants around you do you think exist and are needed to provide that information? Certainly need Uber guzzling down Terabytes of data to rank the local Chiles over the local Applebees.
Lets be honest, restaurant suggestions aren’t a real problem anyone has.
I suspect you don't live in New York City, or another city with a thriving restaurant scene where new places open and old places close all the time and you can't keep track of them all in your head.
If you have problems with restaurant rankings in Nyc you’re not living right.
Oh really?
Sometimes you just need a quick decision, whether you're going somewhere with friends at the last second, or yes ordering delivery and just want something that will be one of the better options. Because there isn't 1 Chinese place in your delivery radius, there are 20.
Believe me, I read restaurant blogs and talk to people too. But that's more for stuff I plan in advance, not last-minute decisions in a neighborhood I don't visit often.
So maybe don't be so quick to judge that others aren't "living right", how about?
I've never heard any complaint about that except from people who work in adtech.
In contrast to high-quality ads that are e.g. for a movie you actually want to see.
It's going to be a conflict of interest like most ads. It's not optimized for you but toward you
-opaque optimization function over which you have no control and is not tailored to you (but yay you can sort by a few predetermined fields)
-willingness of the recommended to outbid one another for your attention
-companies who have paid some baseline pay-to-play vig
If you want real recommendations, talk to someone who isn't profiting off of you.
Are people suddenly moving more between corp A and corp B? Must be something going on, let's buy the stock.
Suddenly multiple Ubers are dropping off people at a residential building during the night? They probably know each other. Let's flag that as a potential risk.