Uber Files Complaint About Calgary Trip Location Data Requirement ⇥ calgaryherald.com

Scott Strasser, Calgary Herald:

The complaint [by Uber] was issued shortly before council voted 11–3 to approve a suite of changes to the livery and transport bylaw on Tuesday. Among the changes is a requirement for Uber and other ride-booking companies to provide the city with exact geolocation data for each trip down to five decimal places, including trips that start or end outside of Calgary’s boundaries.

[…]

Cory Porter, deputy chief of vehicle for hire with public vehicle standards, noted that Calgary’s taxi and rides-booking regulations already require the longitude and latitude of a driver’s licensed vehicle. He said the city has been collecting vehicle-for-hire data since 2015 and that taxi companies already provide geolocation data accuracy within six to eight decimal points, whereas TNCs [Transportation Network Companies like Uber] provide accuracy within three to five decimal points.

Porter says this data is used to allow drivers to more accurately find a ride hailer in crowded environments and, naturally, it can also be shared with law enforcement.

I had no idea taxicabs record precise location data every two minutes and automatically submit it to the city daily — and have apparently done so since 2014 (PDF). This is information about the car and its driver — not the location of individual passengers. Uber told the Herald these changes will make passengers identifiable to a greater extent than the three decimal places they currently report to, as it increases the precision from about one hundred metres to just one metre. I do not see that in the proposed amendments (PDF), which seem to make the reporting from ride sharing drivers match that of taxi drivers.

I feel like I should be opposed to this on the basis that it records trips with surprising granularity, and that it brings this data uncomfortably close to law enforcement access. The city, for its part, appears to have been a decent steward of the taxi data it has already collected. Also, Uber itself collects location data of riders and drivers for safety and marketing reasons, and shares it with advertisers. The city’s collection may be uncomfortable, but at least it is bound by stricter privacy laws than Uber.

Another thing I learned from digging around for the bylaw amendments is that the city of Calgary has just 1,882 taxi plates (PDF) for a population of over 1.3 million people. There are also over sixteen thousand ride sharing drivers.