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loeg 19 hours ago

It sounds like Uber is literally selling data; as opposed to when Facebook is accused of more metaphorically "selling data" (allowing advertisers to target their ads).

nerdponx 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of other companies are in the business of selling data, too. It's not like Uber is uniquely evil for doing this. I'd argue that selling aggregated metrics is comparatively innocuous compared to what Meta does with fingerprinting, shadow profiles, etc. and also compared to what credit card companies, banks, credit rating agencies, ISPs, etc. can do.

advisedwang 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Article says:

> It uses LiveRamp's clean room technology, which lets companies aggregate their data in a privacy-safe environment, without sharing or seeing each other's raw or personally identifiable customer information.

> A hotel brand could use Uber Intelligence to help identify which restaurants or entertainment venues it might want to partner with for its loyalty program, for example.

Not much details on that "Clean room" but it sounds like the third parties get an environment where they can join their data to ubers and then run aggregate queries, but not actually see individual customer records. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

16 hours ago | parent | next [-]
[deleted]
tgsovlerkhgsel 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Consider what will happen every time there is a trade-off to be made between making/keeping the data more useful to the companies involved, and actually upholding the anonymity of the data subjects.

Anonymization is nearly impossible to get right even when you're trying really hard, and this is more likely to be a fig leaf to be able to do things that are illegal by sufficiently obfuscating them.

I hope that if EU customer data is included in this, the EU will have the balls to actually enforce GDPR. Uber is one of the few tech company cases where 2-4% of overall revenue would actually hurt, rather than being a small "tax" on the extra profit made through the illegal use of data.