Uber Now Tracks Passengers’ Locations Even After They’re Dropped Off

Re:Uber Now Tracks Passengers’ Locations Even After They’re ... by rm999 on Thursday December 01, 2016 @11:55PM (#13086141)

> Uber's infrastructure is completely incapable of handling that volume of data,

The data volume isn't very big. Let's assume Uber records locations for 20 million users and pings each user every 5 minutes. We're talking about 20 million users * 12 events per hour * 24 hours * 16 bytes (my generous assumption of how much it would cost to store a user id, timestamp, and precise long/lat data) = ~100 GB a day or 3 TB a month. And 20 million / (5 * 60) = 67k events per second.

I could probably build out the infrastructure to process and store a year's worth of user location data for 20k a year on AWS.

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Re:Uber Now Tracks Passengers’ Locations Even After They’re ... by bastawhiz on Friday December 02, 2016 @12:16AM (#13086231)

Being a bug, though, it would record with the fidelity of the Uber app. Which is a lot more than every five minutes.

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Re:Uber Now Tracks Passengers’ Locations Even After They’re ... by rm999 on Friday December 02, 2016 @01:46AM (#13086658)

It's not a bug I'm concerned about, it's this part of the privacy policy "if you permit the Uber app to access location services through the permission system used by your mobile operating system (“platform”), we may also collect the precise location of your device when the app is running in the foreground or background"

What I'm getting at is that it's pretty straightforward and easy for Uber to maintain a database of every user's locations at all times, even if they aren't active users. This kind of data is valuable. Assuming Uber isn't already doing it, all it takes is one mid-level product manager to initiate a small project to kickstart it.

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Re:Uber Now Tracks Passengers’ Locations Even After They’re ... by swyman on Friday December 02, 2016 @03:19AM (#13087011)

You're not doing yourself any favors here. People say they don't trust your company because of past behavior of the company itself and history of even ethical companies being bought or changing priorities, and you just keep pushing me further and further toward Lyft or my bike.

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Re:Uber Now Tracks Passengers’ Locations Even After They’re ... by xapata on Friday December 02, 2016 @12:35AM (#13086287)

Only 12 events per hour? I'd guess you're off by an order of magnitude.

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Re:Uber Now Tracks Passengers’ Locations Even After They’re ... by ghshephard on Friday December 02, 2016 @01:10AM (#13086455)

They explicitly stated "Every 5 minutes" - which is 12 records/hour.

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