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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or are these alarmist articles are always short on detail as to what the actual threat is?

> Wouldn’t detailed data on such rides be handy for a foreign power eager to map the relationships among various Washington players? It could potentially show both a history of contact and real-time movements as meetings are convening.

And then what? Let's say China knows that Senator A and Senator B both took an Uber to the same restaurant at the same time. What do they do with that information? It doesn't tell them what, if anything was discussed. Maybe they didn't talk politics at all. Maybe they had a big fight and swore never to speak to each other again. Who knows? How does the ride information help? I'm hardly an expert on espionage, but I don't see what advantage this gives anyone.

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My guess is it would be more blackmail oriented. If you knew Senator X was taking an Uber to some hotel, it could be worth looking into if he/she has a call-girl meeting him there. Maybe he's taking an Uber to an office of some defense contractor. Those are the things that could at least lead to some further targeting that might be interesting to foreign powers.

Individual cases don't tell you much. Patterns of behaviour much more-so. If Senator A and Senator B are meeting regularly, that tells you something.

Ask any cab driver about drugs and prostitution in their locale and they'll be able to give you quite a lot of information (you might have to buy them a beer or three first). Uber's records could reveal substantially similar things, like "Person X from escort agency Y visited address Z twice a month for a year".

If you know who lives at Z, you know a lot. Again: not from one trip, but from the pattern. And not with certainty (obviously: knowledge is not certain) but with high enough plausibility to target a deeper investigation.

well, this is how textbook blackmail starts. you can probably compute an inverse "rides of glory" measure and detect people with something to hide, make a stab at what it is, approach them, and pressure them, without ever leaving the safety of your home. you could apply this to everyone. that doesn't sound bad? or do you think that people should just not have anything to hide...

It might be a starting point for blackmail, but if someone is doing something blackmailable then that's a separate problem. They're a liability and I'm sure far more effective means at finding such vulnerabilities are already being employed. They're going to need something more concrete than ride data to effectively blackmail someone, anyway. "Give us the launch codes or we'll release that you took an Uber to this address!" isn't going to cut it, I think.

Transportation data can provide clues about potential business dealings. Say you saw that attorneys and executives from Google are frequent visitors to a small but public software company's offices. You could deduce a possibility that they were hammering out an acquisition, and front-run the deal by scooping up stock in that company before the news was public. It's not a guarantee - but in an age when satellite photos of parking-lot usage are being used as inputs into trading models, you can bet that there's a price some people would be willing to pay for access to the travel records of both private citizens and public officials.

Senators use Uber?

From the article - "To take just one possible example, Uber has become particularly popular among the political class in Washington. During this year’s mid-term Congressional campaigns, Uber accounted for more than 60 percent of rides costing less than $100, according to Hamilton Place Strategies, which culled records from Federal Election Commission reports."

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