Seems like a data play. You’ll likely enable location in the Uber app, so now they’ll get your location passively when you’re just searching public transit routes.
Turn that around and resell the location data to other data aggregating businesses. Or use it in-house to augment forecasting or pricing models.
Seems slimey to me. Public funds should be providing app access for this sort of thing, with audits to demonstrate personal data is not collected.
Really wish it was more popular to lock down privacy options in phones to make it so this sort of thing is not profitable for companies like this.
I look at it more in the sense of Uber's product not being a rideshare app, but being a "move you from point A to B in the best way possible app" (best = meets your cost/time/comfort needs).
The cities could actually charge for access to an api with this data. It would be a new revenue stream for transportation departments and allow for front end viewing to be open to the free market. I'd gladly pay for an app that consisted of OSM with a transit data layer and a strict privacy policy.
I'd be okay requesting the entire map of a region from the front end service to cache and doing the computation with geolocation on my local device.
And they have an app for checking bus locations and buying tickets, and it's free.
I think the API is great for enabling integrations, but I really hope they keep their existing apps. There's no reason end users shouldn't be able to get the data directly from RTD, and they definitely shouldn't be forced into using a sleazy company like Uber.
Charging anything for information about public services is ridiculous. If there is one thing public services should be able to do is to make it as easy as possible for all consumers to be as informed as possible.
Turn that around and resell the location data to other data aggregating businesses. Or use it in-house to augment forecasting or pricing models.
Seems slimey to me. Public funds should be providing app access for this sort of thing, with audits to demonstrate personal data is not collected.
Really wish it was more popular to lock down privacy options in phones to make it so this sort of thing is not profitable for companies like this.