The great scooter schism was perhaps inevitable. Electric scooters, the latest tech-mobility trend, do more than move people from place to place. They also gather detailed information on where and when people travel. City planners can well use that data to help them plan smarter, safer streets. And they have the leverage to demand it, in return for permission to use city-regulated sidewalk space. Rules and permit systems in many cities now require scooter providers to turn over data on everything from travel routes to flat tires.
But this has sparked a backlash. Uber, Lyft, Bird and the other leaders of Big Scooter have successfully stonewalled many cities on ride-hail data, and they haven't been eager to turn over scooter data, either.
Privacy is at the core of the argument companies use against sharing their data. Thus, companies best known for not cooperating with cities have come to claim that they need to keep scooter data to themselves in order to safeguard the public's digital privacy.
It's true that privacy is a big issue. Within the past few years, the potential for data breaches has grown into one of the greatest risks cities face. By gaining access to travel data, a hacker could readily figure out exactly where any individual travels and when. This is why mobility data are at the center of a larger conversation in cities, state legislatures and the private sector about people's right to digital privacy.
Perhaps you're thinking that Google and Facebook have had your data for a decade, and nothing's gone wrong there. (What's a presidential election between friends?) Data breaches are a fixture of the daily news, snaring all sorts of private companies (including ride-hail companies) and crippling major cities. As of this writing, a ransomware attack has left the city of Baltimore without core services for more than a month.
And lest you assume location data can be harmlessly "anonymized," that's a nebulous term masking art as science. Permanently de-identifying data is exceedingly hard; any computer-science undergrad could re-identify an individual from just a few data points. Some law enforcement agencies already use such data to improperly track down suspects, leading to false arrests.
Privacy concerns are real, but that doesn't mean companies should be able to prevent responsible access to their data. Without the voluminous data that transportation apps gather, cities are left to plan blindly, relying on their old clickers and clipboards. Better cities need better data--to prevent crashes, minimize traffic congestion and get people where they need to go efficiently. So the way to protect mobility data is not to let private companies keep it to themselves; it's for cities to raise the bar on digital privacy, championing practices that protect both citizens and the public interest.
Thankfully, cities navigating this ocean of data are developing new tools for both using it and protecting it. They're building privacy into their data demands--by requesting only what they need, aggregating what they receive, and storing it safely.
In the process, it certainly won't help for any state to limit what data its cities can collect--or to micromanage how cities regulate their streets.
Today we're debating scooters, but in the years ahead we'll be talking about data on autonomous vehicles, flying taxis and other modes of travel that haven't been invented yet. By putting safeguards in place now, we'll have the infrastructure we'll need to protect our lives, property and privacy.
Editorial on 06/19/2019