Uber has announced that it has struck a data-sharing agreement with the city of Boston in an effort to help make more "liveable, resilient, and innovative" communities.
In a blog post, Uber says it will be sharing what it calls "smart data" with city officials of Boston to provide insight that will help the city create and enforce policies that will ease traffic congestion, improve public transportation, manage urban growth, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The announcement may rankle privacy advocates, which isn't surprising, given Uber's numerous privacy controversies in the recent past. This is why the ride-sharing company got out of its way to point out that it will be sharing anonymized trip-level data with city officials in quarterly reports.
This will include time stamps for the start and end of the trip and the ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) of where the trip began and ended. It will also provide the distance of the trip in miles and the trip's duration in seconds. Uber says the data will not contain drivers' or passengers' names, specific locations and any other data that will make them personally identifiable.
Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh welcomed the partnership, saying data provided by Uber will "help us reach our transportation goals, improve the quality of our neighborhoods, and allow us to think smarter, finding more innovative and creative solutions to some of our most pressing challenges."
Uber says trip-level data could help urban planners and policy makers make data-driven decisions about how to achieve Vision Zero goals, a national program that aims to reduce the number of road fatalities to zero, improve traffic planning, and identify areas in the city that need road improvements. It could also allow transportation officials to determine if Uber drivers are discriminating against certain neighborhoods and ensure that Uber sanctions drivers who do.
"Local regulators often demand and receive granular trip records from taxi and car service providers," says Jules Polonetsky, director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum. "It's great to see Uber taking a more privacy friendly approach by providing ZIP code level records, which can be just as useful for city planning purposes but which help maintain individual privacy."
The announcement is the only piece of good news for Uber, which has been plagued with problems left and right for refusing to comply with local transportation regulations. Earlier this month, five of Uber's six operations centers in New York were closed following Uber's refusal to provide data to the city's Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC), citing "an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy." Although Uber says it is currently "in talks" with the city about an agreement similar with that it forged with Boston, the TLC denies negotiations are taking place.
"No communications taking place between Uber and the TLC could be characterized as their 'being in talks' with us," says TLC representative Allan Fromberg. "There are no negotiations to be had."
Still, Uber maintains it looks forward to partnering with other cities to help achieve their transportation and planning goals, although the company did not specify what other cities it will be working with soon.
