[drglitch]

This. If you've lived in manhattan for more than a month, you'd know that pickup and dropoff locations are not precise, specifically:

1) you never get a cab on quiet single-family condo streets - gotta get to corner of an avenue

2) cabbies often click meter to off half a block before you actually say "stop right here please, between the drunken couple and the pile of garbage on the left side". They do this so you pay and get out quicker, clearing way for another passenger.

3) There are a LOT of "skyscrapers" in manhattan, with 300+ apts in each

What WOULD be interesting is taking credit card logs of someone's cab payments and cross-matching dropoff based on charge timestamp :)

[abalone]

Most of the comments here about pickup/dropoff accuracy and large buildings suffer from the same logical flaw: "often" is not the same as "never".

With comprehensive data set of literally 173 million trips, even if we limit ourselves to precise locations in front of small buildings and residences -- let's say it's a paltry 5% -- that's still 8 million trips.

That's more than enough to invade the privacy of a very large number of people.

And that's just the low hanging fruit. With geolocation data you don't always need precise location accuracy or small buildings to see identifying patterns. Don't forget that time is also a very useful factor, and often precise to the minute. E.g. trips departing after 1am within a half-block radius of the only bar in that radius are more likely than not to be patrons. And trips arriving at an apartment building at at particular time may be relatively rare, making it easy to look up the single trip that matches it.

Thus, a neighbor or roommate who saw someone arrive and noted the time (or had a security camera) might be able to deduce the bar that they visited, address or block of the person they're dating, whether they were actually where they said they were... That's one of a zillion scenarios. Precise address-to-address trips are just the low hanging fruit.