Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cowsandmilk 3449 days ago
> Hope this is as fantastic as this sounds

The experience in Boston was that Uber anonymized the data too much for it to be useful[1]. I would be very skeptical of this as it seems to be a program publicly touted as useful, but the e-mails obtained via FOIA requests show it to not be. I'm not sure what the solution is since privacy should be a concern.

[1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber...

1 comments

An unsurprising quote from the article:

> [Boston chief information officer Jascha Franklin-Hodge] said the data has been useful to show the volume of Uber rides in Boston and users’ typical wait times, but it has not done much to aid in city planning.

In other words, that was just a PR offensive. Maybe this new iteration will be something else, but I would be skeptical.