from Hacker News

Uber will start audio-recording rides as a safety measure

by random42 on 11/21/19, 2:56 PM with 7 comments

• by friendlybus on 11/21/19, 6:03 PM

  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.

• by Communitivity on 11/21/19, 5:04 PM

  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.

• by stuntkite on 11/23/19, 5:31 AM

  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...

• by Ruth_K on 11/21/19, 3:03 PM

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