
Uber will start audio-recording rides as a safety measure - random42
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/20/20974814/uber-audio-recording-rides-safety-rideshare-lyft
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friendlybus
Part of the reason I enjoyed Uber rides was a feeling of casual quality. Some
random Joe had water bottles and a spotless car ready to go and was nothing
like the worn out office-in-a-car local cab service.

The more filming and recording that has started in Uber the more the divide
between customer and driver becomes and we are on the road to the same old
customer experience. I don't want to get into transport knowing that I am
performing for the state/megacompany on camera. I like talking freely with
average joes without the feeling of hawks watching every move.

Being under the eye of judgement changes people regardless of the 'nothing to
hide' argument. It's unpleasant. Having always on phone tracking that Uber
does and a star rating system was supposed to be good enough. Why am I
bothering at this point? If someone's going to track everything I ever do it
may as well be the local cab company that I could plausibly trust because it's
local and regular. I could go to a physical premises and talk to employees
from my culture that have been there for decades.

I don't get it anymore. The only advantage is rapidly becoming price because
they're not regulated the same way.

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Communitivity
The privacy implications of this are concerning. How long will these
recordings be kept? Will the recordings, or excerpts from them, be sold to
third parties?

I can see recorded conversations being used to extract data that is anonymized
and then sold to third parties. An example: this week mentions of the company
Foo,Inc. went up 35% in Mountain View,CA as opposed to up 5% average across
the rest of the country. From this example it's reasonable that one of the
companies in Mountain View is about to have a significant interaction with
Foo, Inc., perhaps an acquisition, so this could be financially valuable
information. And of course it would valuable to marketers.

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dfsegoat
Indeed. What if I casually discuss a medical condition with my driver? That is
protected health information right?

What if my kids who are under 18 are with me? How does that work?

Just seems like a very slippery slope.

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54thr
> What if my kids who are under 18 are with me? How does that work?

Exactly the same? They'll gleefully monetize all personal data they accrue,
which is standard practice for any data-gathering effort. It doesn't matter if
the slope is slippery. The terms and conditions will promise they'll act in
good faith (unless compelled otherwise). They'll share data with third parties
to improve user experience. The intelligence agencies will be delighted. The
obliteration of privacy has been normalized. Most people have been trained not
to care.

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stuntkite
I understand the safety implications but as recording has become more common
I've become more and more uncomfortable with taking ride share. I haven't been
too bothered by private cameras owned by the drivers. Though I don't love it
and am not talkative. I really hate the advertising ipads that some drivers
hang on their seats that are clearly operated by sleezy merchants. Not just
because they are bright and loud and not what I'm paying for but there's
totally two cameras and microphones pointed right at me with correlative info
and zero accountability.

Remember back in 2014 an Uber exec showed live data of a specific journalist
he didn't care for[0]? The sort of things that people talk about in a ride
share... With a system like that what sort of information harvesting and
manipulation could you do? Stock trading? Political profiling? Blackmail? Even
if the operation is actually about "safety" and there is oversight and most of
the team is interested in upholding that there is about a 0% chance that
someone in the department won't use it for seriously evil shit.

[0] [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/uber-
is-i...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/uber-is-
investigating-its-top-new-york-executive-for-privacy)

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Ruth_K
It`s interesting why they do it only now...

