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by mrzimmerman 4230 days ago
The idea that statistics have a moral imperative to be "decent" is as fascinating as it is ridiculous. Anonymized data is not a privacy breach, and Uber probably doesn't have any data that can help with "hunger, poverty, illiteracy, etc.".

I'm sorry if the idea that "people's short overnight stays are evident in their travel data" makes you blush, but that isn't anyone else's problem.
2 comments
knowtheory 4230 days ago
The whole point is that it's not anonymized and it's being inspected for and used for purposes that have little to do with the ostensible customer-service agreement.

People aren't used to transit companies interrogating them about the purposes of their journeys, they just want the transit company to get them from point A to point B (imagine if they did this when you got in the car: "Where are you going? Why?")

And obviously from a business perspective the more you understand your customers and their motivations the better you can serve them.

But lets not kid ourselves. This isn't anonymized data. Uber's publishing in a format that is unspecific, but they have all of the detailed data and can poke through it and infer things at their leisure, and they have no compunction around how they're doing it or why.

This is why ethics and trust around data collectors is really important. Uber seems pretty cavalier about it, and that actually is a problem.

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smokinjoe 4230 days ago
> But lets not kid ourselves. This isn't anonymized data. Uber's publishing in a format that is unspecific, but they have all of the detailed data and can poke through it and infer things at their leisure, and they have no compunction around how they're doing it or why.

That's a fairly large accusation to make.

This blog post was originally published in 2012 - two years ago. Since then has anything come out that would confirm your suspicions? I haven't seen anything.

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knowtheory 4230 days ago
Sure, i don't normally like linking to TC but this has a pretty good roundup of links: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/20/following-pressure-from-u-s...
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smokinjoe 4226 days ago
Well shut my mouth, thanks for the link.

..even if it's from TC (I won't hold it against you).

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striking 4230 days ago
I included the word "decent" because the way they used data goes beyond people's "overnight stays," they previously analyzed the spending patterns of people and tied it to welfare checks and prostitution. They immediately call it "one of the coolest things about working for a data-driven company like Uber" afterwards. It's bad data science, not only because it's only a correlation and not an experiment so nothing can be proven, but because they use these unproven claims to say outlandish and unethical things.

I meant "decent" in an ethical sense, not in a conservative "don't you look at my 'short overnight stays'" sense.

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maroonblazer 4230 days ago
>It's bad data science, not only because it's only a correlation and not an experiment so nothing can be proven, but because they use these unproven claims to say outlandish and unethical things.

I don't disagree that they've not scaled any sort of pinnacle in data science, but neither do I think what they're reporting is uninteresting.

In what way is what they're saying outlandish and unethical?

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