Which is fine. They chose to collect the information, and they are facing a bad look following that decision.
Of course, their business model might not work without the collection, but not every business model is guaranteed to look good.
Like this is a little nuts, if you buy one of those GPS trackers for your kids you don't get to act shocked when you find out the company has their location records. You get to be angry if they use those records for anything other than providing you service but of course they have them.
Critcizing users afterwards that they "can't act shocked" for having these things done to them is only playing a blame game.
It's not even remotely shady for a service to inherently involve knowing where you are. That's something that is true of every brick and mortar store, and indeed every cab driver. Yet the government doesn't demand that those businesses provide real-time feeds of information about the movements of their customers, and if the government were to do so and they were to object on privacy grounds, we wouldn't take it to mean that their entire business model is inherently immoral and all shops should cease to exist.
But nobody actually getting the blame since it would be weird if anyone was actually mad at this. Does anyone seriously believe that using Find My iPhone doesn't allow Apple access to your phone's location for the purposes of showing you where it is?
That's the point. If you buy a GPS tracker, for example, by definition it will track your GPS location.
Would you expect a GPS tracker to not track your GPS location? Because that is what you are saying.
Uber's ride hailing service, sure. But the same is not true for the scooter and bike services, which have no need for such information.
No, they just need to know where they are when:
1. They run a collection routine 2. The bike/scooter is low on battery.
There is no info they need in association with the rider's trip. Or at least not, as the GP states, info required "by nature". That perspective is true of ride sharing (the driver needs to know where to pick up and drop off) but false in relation to bikes/scooters (no need to know start/end points, just need to know where the bike is during collection or low battery, and not in association with a rider).
Consider a similar system that would work with coin operated scooters. They can have GPS in the vehicle without constant association with users.
In any cases these two tracking databases, where is each scooter and who is on which scooter, should be separate so they can provide the former to law enforcement without disclosing citizens whereabouts.
But I avoid using Uber-anything, in part due to Uber's data collection, so my opinion on this data sharing is probably not that important.
The way that society does stuff like this is through government bodies. The real problem here seems like a lack of trust or oversight of government bodies, which creates the impossible situation you identify.
I don't necessarily disagree, but "data used for their benefit" covers all data used by all businesses, from your emails stored by your provider (assuming you don't self-host) to trade secrets, etc.
So either we say the government should be able to access all data from everywhere (except the few that individuals store on their own) for planning purposes and such, or we must define why this data is different from other.
There's also the idea that maybe we should have total access to a currently unthinkable amount of data [0]
"Uber shares real-time rider information with government agency"?
It seems like Uber can't win. If they share information, they're violating the trust and privacy of their riders. If they don't they still don't care about privacy but they're now also flouting regulators.