You could claim the data is a public good. If the data is useful for companies beyond Google or Uber, or even other industries, it is plausible that it confers a public benefit, a benefit that (at least theoretically) is not being accounted for when Uber and Google do their calculus about how much to invest in data collection. In that sense, government would be the perfect actor to support -- and perhaps even subsidize -- this data collection in exchange for having it shared with the broader community.