During the holiday season, New York City through its Taxi & Limousine Commission (the “TLC”) proposed a new rule expanding data reporting obligations for car service platform companies including Uber and Lyft. If the rule is adopted, car services will now have to report the GPS coordinates of both passenger pick-up and drop-off locations to the city government. Under NY’s Freedom of Information Law, that data in bulk will also be subject to full public release.
This proposal is either a classic case of good intentions gone awry or a clandestine effort to track millions of car service riders while riding roughshod over passenger privacy.
The stated justification for the new rule is to combat “driver fatigue” and improve car service safety. While the goal is laudable and important, the proposed data collection does not match the purpose and makes no sense. Does anyone really think GPS data measures a driver’s hours on the job or is relevant for the calculation of a trip’s duration? If the data collection were really designed to address driver fatigue, then the relevant data would be shift length (driver start/stop times, ride durations, possibly trip origination), not pick up/drop off locations.
The reporting, though, of this GPS data to the city government poses a real and serious threat to passenger privacy. The ride patterns can be mined to identify specific individuals and where they travel. In 2014, for instance, The Guardian reported that the TLC released anonymized taxi ride data that was readily reverse engineered to identify drivers. A 2015 paper shows that mobility patterns can also be used to identify gender and ethnicity. Numerous examples—from the Netflix release of subscriber film ratings that were reverse engineered to identify subscribers to the re-identification of patients from supposedly anonymous health records—show that bulk data can often be identified to specific individuals. Disturbingly, the TLC proposal only makes one innocuous reference to protecting “privacy and confidentiality” and yet includes neither any privacy safeguards against identification of individual passengers from ride patterns nor any exemption from the NY State Freedom of Information Law.