Uber: The Big Data Company | Hacker News Reader

Uber: The Big Data Company

forbes.com

37 pointsifcologne7 comments

Well, that was a very frank -- and super scary -- disclosure screen. It'll be interesting to see if people are cool with sharing that data. I honestly don't have much of a notion of whether they will.

My sense of Uber is that they don't have much of an idea of what to do with their data-store in-house. Like, besides sell it. Maybe they're using it to try to massage supply and demand a little closer together, but if they are, it's not apparent through radical improvements in the user experience.

I'm pretty loose with my data but I don't like this. Does Starwood really need to know all of my transportation activity? And now I have to worry if Starwood offers its agents a "God View"?

"Uber offers Starwood reward program" is a more reasonable title

Sharing all your data with their partners doesn't sound like being a big data company; I'd think a big data company would want to keep their data to themselves and under their own control.

Is Starwood also a big data company now because they're getting this data?

I feel like this author just discovered OAuth. Starwood is asking for permission to see those things. People "Log in with Facebook" dozens of times a day and Facebook knows a lot more than Uber does.

One interesting thing about this data is that it is also all in Gmail (or whatever email you use) because of ride receipts. So theoretically someone could ask for read access to your email and get all this data and more. It also means Uber is leaking their valuable (?) to every email provider.

You say that as though "asking for read access to your email" was a reasonable request that a company might ask for and get. I mean, who knows what non-technical users would be willing to give out, but if any service asks for read access to your email, it should be called out here and the entire technical community should make a real effort to let everyone know that that's giving away the keys to the kingdom, letting that entity basically steal your credentials for every web services you use.

Obviously, if you use any kind of remote email service, whoever provides that service has some kind of access to your email. But nobody else ever should.

This could be a signal that Uber is exiting.

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