Your Uber and Lyft rides visualized | Hacker News Reader

Your Uber and Lyft rides visualized

pistats.io

38 pointsxasos34 comments

    We collect and store data which are provided by Google OAuth authentication:
    first Name, last name, gender, email, all your Lyft and Uber
    receipts, Google+ profile link, Google+ profile picture link

Read that again... email.

Sign-in with Gmail, and their privacy policy allows full access to your email. But it's OK, they're not sharing it with anyone (promise).

Elsewhere they say they're only reading the Uber and Lyft emails... but I'm not sure that matters as it's the privacy policy which counts.

I suspect they mean "e-mail address", but that's a pretty hideous oversight as copy editing goes.

I've just made a scrappy version that does not require email access. Because no way I'm giving my email for that. And there's a leaderboard ;) https://uberstats.parseapp.com/

Is there a tool that can analyze privacy policies of websites and assign it a score? Would be nice to have a chrome extension or something similar, if the website gets anything less than A, just close and move on...

https://tosdr.org/

Was featured on HN before. Far from totally complete, but it's a cool idea.

Not only that but the last line on their privacy policy is fun: "This privacy policy is subject to change without notice and was last updated on March 15, 2013."

Thanks, but no thanks.

Giving away access to my Gmail account just so I can visualise my Uber rides is a bit too much I think!

This... I would gladly take the time to setup a filter that forwards all the receipts to the site.

Sadly, companies seem to actively avoid this kind of integration, with the notable exception of Trip It. I suspect the thought of setting up an maintaining and inbound mail server seems harder than handcrafting integrations for every provider?

Just use Mailgun[1] and you get incoming mail POSTed to your server for free.

I think Sendgrid[2] offers the same too?

[1] http://www.mailgun.com/

[2] https://sendgrid.com/

TripIt probably has the email forwarding for business users that have to deal with corporate policies restricting scanning of email.

But even then, TripIt also provides constant email scanning if you're too lazy to forward things to them.

They could provide a randomnumber@receipts.pistats.io email address for each account. Then it would be easy to send all your receipts without giving them access to your GMAIL. Another advantage would be that non GMAIL people could join too.

"We only look at your Uber and Lyft receipts. Please see our Privacy Policy for further information."

Are you nuts? In a color barely different to the background?

Wouldn't a much better way to do this be to set up a random e-mail (e.g. wofydfino67okfuyw@pistats.io) that you can then send you receipts to?

You could either do it all at once or with a forward, and it would mean that people that don't use Gmail could do it too.

Why do they want to look through all my emails to get this data? It's available via the uber api, is it not?

It would appear so - https://developer.uber.com/v1/endpoints/#user-activity-v1-1

It doesn't seem to give the pickup / dropoff locations, however.

How to steal the identity of others. Just count on their stupidity to get their uber or lyft data.

This is really cool, but the gmail thing is a turnoff.

Worked for me: http://i.imgur.com/5T8TDFm.png

I'm a bit reluctant to give access, but I already do for TripIt, the e-mail account these go to isn't particularly sensitive. With other accounts it'd definitely be a no-go, so an alternative means (i.e. a forwarding address) would be awesome.

There's an obvious privacy/trust issue that has already been solved by cloud photo sharing. I've seen it in Flickr and OneDrive: both of them allow one to select a bunch of items, or a folder/album, and generate an URL key that allows access to only those items.

Actually, having that in mail systems could be rather useful for many other work flows.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt that this isn't anything malicious. It seems like you were even able to normalize the currencies and distances? Are you actually checking if the email has it listed in Kilometers or Miles?

Lots of comments not wanting to give away full Gmail access to use this tool. Could this be done as a desktop app, which you can sandbox and ensure it isnt uploading your data off your computer

Probably not. As they will be fetching email directly from Google's server using your access token.

Giving access to my Gmail access is way over the line, but if at least this was working.

It would be interesting if the government used this data to expand the public transport system where appropriate.

I was a bit disappointed that lines for the trips weren't displayed -- just pick-up and drop-off points.

Does it also show how much longer the ride was compared to the shortest route?

Deleted comment

Seems that there was an issue if the first batch of receipts were all of the old format, the guys behind pistats.io is looking into it right now[1]

[1]: https://twitter.com/pistatsio/status/580214043715072001

"@matiassingers thanks for your kind words, we'll look at it right now ;)"

This response, if correctly linked, does not inspire confidence that they care about my privacy concerns.

Edit: Looks like mts was addressing a bug?

Yeah, the now deleted comment said something about a bug with the site.

Any way to use the service without logging in with gmail?

I'm sure they could process exported gmail data dump: https://www.google.com/settings/takeout

An analogy would be this social graph network analysis tutorial which walks you through exporting your Facebook social graph data and creating cluster graph on it using a tool called Gephi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbLFMObmLNQ

I got a bunch of 500 errors and stack overflows.

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