“Uber can track your one-night stands”
Whew, that’s a relief. Hey, I’ll be the first to admit, it’s hard to keep track some times.
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Does your local cab company have a dispatch service[1]? Then they have a framework that could be used to collect this information.
[1] Yes
The data exists, I never doubted that. And someone could now run a similar analysis, but
- the data was obtained via a FOIA request to the NYC taxi commission, not a taxi company
- hopefully not only the NYC taxi commission, but other public bodies handling similar data, have learned from the cabbie de-anonymisation that was rapidly discovered, pointed writings about personal safety exposures, and articles and findings just like the one you posted, and would not again release a data dump like that.
- there’s no indication anyone in either a taxi company or the taxi commission has been doing anything like that sort of analysis.
I’m not sure how much hope I can really hold out on 2). I’m sure some such organisations have learned, and others have utterly failed to…
All your data are subject to analysis and resale.
Doesn’t matter whether your uber rides are booty call related or not, the mere suggestion that they could be will be enough.
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An old man enters a confessional and proudly exclaims, “Father, I have
to tell you what happened to me last night. I’m 90 years old, and I
made love to two 18-year-old women for eight hours!”
The stern priest replies, “That is a sin. I will have to give you a penance.”
“Father, you can’t give me a penance.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m Jewish.”
The perplexed Father asks, “Then why are you telling me?”
“I’m telling everyone!”
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Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I used to do late night Intel wrestling. But given the prevalence of the other platform especially in the Android world, Arm wrestling will not be uncommon. 
The only way to make this kind of thing truly anonymous is to take public (not privatized personal - public) transport, and pay with some non-identifying means (ie, cash).
Any time you hand over identity, you’re opening yourself up to tracking. Question is, is the tradeoff worth it?
I have a half-formed idea which it might be useful to have an internet comment section tear to threads, just to see if there’s anything to it.
I get why some generic “privacy law” would be unenforceable, unworkable, and destined to be drowned in trillions of lobbyist dollars if need be. I surrender unconditionally to the data-miners, if only because I’m a member of a species that routinely kills each other over small sums of money that aren’t even important to the people involved, much less the infinite wealth that can be generated by this species of analysis. (Well, I mean, better than the hookup charts discussed here, but you know what I mean.)
So how about this instead. Make a law saying every company above a certain size, who conducts (or contracts out) any such analysis** involving their customers, has to make public the terms involved within a certain period of time–say, 90 days. Not the results–those would be proprietary–but the variables examined. Make a Chief Data Officer personally responsible for verifying the accuracy and completeness of these public declarations, just as an in-house lawyer or notary or CPA would be for the public statements they certify. Permit any private citizen to sue for compliance, or bring a complaint to an administrative body, in the fashion of the ADA.
The problem here isn’t really that Uber is capable of knowing if I’m stepping out on my wife; it’s that I wouldn’t have known they were actively checking up on me unless they told me so. (A mistake they’ll NEVER make again!) It’s not foolproof, obviously, but cynicism about corporate ethics aside, there are a lot of businesses out there who would comply with the law out of an abundance of caution, which might in turn reduce the amount of shitty behavior in this regard.
As I said, it’s just a thought. Have at it, internet.
** what this means would have to be hammered out, obviously
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Wait! I need closure on that anecdote!
Who won?
My insistence on the phone that there was no way I could lose was very well founded.
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You don’t live in DC. We already have cabs with drivers that assault passengers, have horrible falling apart cars, often don’t know where they’re going, and are run by a corrupt agency that has all sorts of dodgy dealings with the govt. and journalists refusing to deal with any kind of change or extra regulation.
Seriously, Uber is a step up over a DC cab, because even if all the accusations are true, they still let you use a credit card and don’t try to rip you off.
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Just be careful - a bootysector call can sometimes result in the discovery of a bootysector infection, which takes more than your off-the-shelf McAfee to get rid of.
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I’ve been working on something like this. The idea is to create a voluntary compliance structure that includes industry standards for properly anonymized data, transparency in collected data and sale of data etc. more to follow but if you want to get involved, ping me on pm.
“Pozdrawlenie dla wychowankow Piecka”, or similar, I don’t remember exactly. That was the payload of one that no off-the-shelf thing was able to even detect. It was not interfering at all, except of one day of year when it asked “Podaj haslo”, said “blah” when it was wrong, and if you entered “pieck”, the correct one, it shown the payload message and let you through.
I spent ungodly amount of time with a disassembler, gridded paper, and colorful pens on that one.
You can usually get rid of those old things by overwriting the zero track and reconstructing the MBR to correctly point to the original bootloader address.
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