Judge says Uber should be suspended in California and fined $7.3 million

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In San Diego Uber is the only reliable car service, years of the city’s Taxi “services” or lack there of have made me an Uber customer.

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So Uber can comply with the law, stop making up claims that privacy would be violated (no information about individual riders or drivers is required by the law), and you can keep using them.

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I certainly agree with making them comply with laws that other businesses are subject to in that locality.

That said, this sounds like a less-than-well-thought-out law to me, because any dataset like that is really hard to anonymize, and it’s very easy to get individual information out of them, (Probably only for frequent riders, but it would be trivial to identify anyone working for them and have granular, down-to-the-minute knowledge about what they do during every working day from that data), so privacy is a real concern.

He can already keep using them. For a customer, the important thing is that the car arrives and then goes to the desired destination within time and budget.

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Love the image…I wonder what a three hour uber tour would cost?

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Well, Uber has managed to make me firmly neutral. It sucks less than taxis, but it’s also a shitty business that’s bilking it’s employees. Well damnit, I’ve gone full neutral and have stopped giving the remotest of shits about it.

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The data being requested is not published for anyone to mine. It goes to the CPUC to verify that laws like the ADA are being complied with. So, if an Uber driver refused service to a blind customer with a service dog in a particular zip code at a particular time, and that person complained, the complaint database and the Uber database could be correlated. But that’s a feature.

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Why comply with the ADA when you could ‘disrupt’ disability?

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The inherent inability of economies to recognize and affirm difference? Preposterous!

The clock is ticking on them. At least in my area my cabs have apps, they’re clean, recent, quick, and no surge pricing nonsense. With all of that, why use Uber?

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And that’s the sound of the “do it but without following any laws or regulations” business plan going up in a puff of smoke.

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Several million US federal government employees understand what you’re saying here.

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Where does one find herrings in such a bright red color?

I think that that is considered to be a feature rather than a bug. After all, with a generous government safety net of prisons and workhouses to accommodate those who the Market objectively deems to be less valuable, why constrain free enterprise with such petty concerns?

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A gentle reminder about the omnipresent data security breaches is not exactly a red herring. If the data exist, it can and often will get where they shouldn’t be.

Promises of “only X will have access” are often quite empty.

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God, I hate the way attorneys talk–and I’m an attorney. They all mindlessly repeat the word “substantial” like it’s the only thing they learned in law school. Okay, so you have provided “substantial amounts” of data, what actually counts in the eyes of the law is whether you have provided THE CORRECT DATA.

[quote=“ericdafruitbat, post:11, topic:61861”]
At least in my area my cabs have apps, they’re clean, recent, quick, and no surge pricing nonsense. With all of that, why use Uber?[/quote]
Because not everyone lives where you do or is as fortunate as you.

As someone mentioned upthread, taxis here in San Diego are just plain awful. Uber is not without its problems, but they show up when they say they’re going to, and you know what it’s going to cost. Both advantages over all the taxi companies I’ve used in metro SD.

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[quote=“Papasan, post:2, topic:61861, full:true”]
In San Diego Uber is the only reliable car service, years of the city’s Taxi “services” or lack there of have made me an Uber customer.[/quote]
Ever try dealing with the MTS Taxi Administration Dept? That’ll make you go postal. I have a complaint against one of our wonderful cab companies that’s been pending for two years over a cabbie who tried to scam me. When that didn’t work he tried to snatch my wallet.

Oh, and as of 4/1/2015 they won’t even accept applications. My favorite Uber driver wants to be legal but they won’t let her.

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The administrative and legal system has a built in bias in favor of the established, legacy ways of doing things.

It takes a decade or two of political palm-greasing and consultancy revolving-door pathing to get a new business model established in those cases where a dinosaur model is firmly entrenched.

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