I'm sorry if the idea that "people's short overnight stays are evident in their travel data" makes you blush, but that isn't anyone else's problem.
People aren't used to transit companies interrogating them about the purposes of their journeys, they just want the transit company to get them from point A to point B (imagine if they did this when you got in the car: "Where are you going? Why?")
And obviously from a business perspective the more you understand your customers and their motivations the better you can serve them.
But lets not kid ourselves. This isn't anonymized data. Uber's publishing in a format that is unspecific, but they have all of the detailed data and can poke through it and infer things at their leisure, and they have no compunction around how they're doing it or why.
This is why ethics and trust around data collectors is really important. Uber seems pretty cavalier about it, and that actually is a problem.
That's a fairly large accusation to make.
This blog post was originally published in 2012 - two years ago. Since then has anything come out that would confirm your suspicions? I haven't seen anything.
..even if it's from TC (I won't hold it against you).
I meant "decent" in an ethical sense, not in a conservative "don't you look at my 'short overnight stays'" sense.
I don't disagree that they've not scaled any sort of pinnacle in data science, but neither do I think what they're reporting is uninteresting.
In what way is what they're saying outlandish and unethical?