After months of speculation and calls for transportation network companies to share data that might be helpful in refining the transportation systems of cities, Uber has announced a partnership with Boston that could do just that.
Emily Badger reports: "Uber is announcing plans to share its data more broadly with local governments in a gesture that's both an act of good will and a bid for good press after a rough few months of criticism."
The data sharing program will begin with a pilot program of sorts in Boston, by "sharing quarterly anonymized trip-level data with the city in a model that Uber says will become its national data-sharing policy. The data will include date, time, distance traveled and origin and destination locations for individual trips, identified only by zip code tabulation area to preserve privacy," according to Badger.
Moreover, "this information will be open to records requests, meaning that the public (and researchers) will have access to it, too."
The article goes on to provide a lot more detail about the politics and policy behind the privacy considerations.
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