Any you trust them (as a company) that they'll "only track you for 5 minutes after using the app", and you trust each of their staff members will have controlled/secured/audited access to only the 5 minutes location data after a trip, and you trust them to never deploy a production bug in their tracking code, and you trust every law enforcement or business partner request for that data including gag-order-backed-NSLs.

And that's OK - if you're good with that. Now go and ask some women you know whether they have all that trust? Or minorities. Or activists. If you were a Muslim or Mexican in the US right now - do you suppose you'd be happy leaving an Uber app with "Always" location tracking permission on your phone past Jan 20th? If you had a close friend legally and peacefully protesting the pipeline in North Dakota right now and you knew they used Uber - would you be checking that they know this?

I reject the position that because _you_ don't really care, that it's OK to "accept" this. Even though _you_ don't care, tell Uber you do not accept this because of what it means for your sister or friends or coworkers or neighbours or your allegedly "freedom loving" society...

>And that's OK - if you're good with that. Now go and ask some women you know whether they have all that trust? Or minorities. Or activists. If you were a Muslim or Mexican in the US right now - do you suppose you'd be happy leaving an Uber app with "Always" location tracking permission on your phone past Jan 20th?

The NSA already has the ability to track cellphones, regardless of what Uber does with their app.

Unless you are using open source phone with your own built chip, Apple and Google may be tracking you without you knowing right now.

How do you know your neighbor are not actually government agency spying on you?

I'm having a hard time reconciling what your problem with this actually is. Firstly you seem to be implying that Uber is going to track you indefinitely (because reasons), and that their dangerous mass-murdering drivers will use this to do something nefarious. Then it's "the guvmint" who you seem to think can't track you already using any of the 5 million other ways your smartphone advertises your exact location, and is now relying solely on a ride-sharing app to know your whereabouts.

And then what? Women, Muslims, and Mexicans are now being targetted? By who? Why? What's going to happen to them? This has been a thing since January, so presumably there's already been at least a dozen abductions?

I don't care about this because there I have no reason not to trust Uber with knowing my approximate location for a few minutes. So no I won't be educating my friends and family on stranger danger, nor will I be explaining to them how Uber is going to get them abducted by G-Men.

What I find funny are the people that accept it when it's a Western company doing it, but then freak out with it's a Chinese company doing it (especially when they don't even live in China).

It's worth noting that if Uber accidentally started collecting location data from every rider's phone in perpetuity while they're not on-trip, it would be a very big problem for Uber. That's an absolutely ridiculous amount of data and would easily overwhelm the service. You wouldn't have to worry about NSLs because the data centers would be a fiery mess of steel and silicon. Even if they weren't, the data is overwhelmingly not useful for anyone at Uber (how many hours of "sleeping at home" worth of data points could ever be used?), and it would be destroyed because it's a giant waste of resources.

Uber is big, but not that big. You're already volunteering your location for the service (by being in a car tracked by Uber), this simply adds a small margin of data at the end of the trip.

Efficiently storing and analyzing vast amounts of data isn't very difficult these days - esp if the data is something that they can monetize.

This mindset is exactly what is destroying democracy around the world.

I'm dumb, you're going to have to be a bit more explicit here and tell me how Uber knowing my rough location for a few minutes leads to election fraud, or whatever else it is you seem to think is undermining democracy here.

The issue then becomes Uber is doing it so all the other ride hailing apps start doing it.

This is how the Overton Window shifts, and how our right to privacy is rapidly eroded.

If you described 2016 to me in 2004, I'd call you a paranoid lunatic, yet here we are. I'm starting to realize that many of the "alarmist" voices [1] of that time were, in fact, optimistic.

Thinking about what's considered "alarmist" today makes me fear for the future.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/you-are-a-suspect....