Data Sharing on Uber’s Terms

Figure 7. Strava Metro’s home page encourages cities to “Apply”.46 The Strava Metro program moved away from a paid subscription model in 2020 and is now, like Waze CCP / W4C, free for city transportation officials selected via an application process.

At around the same time as the launch of Strava Metro and Waze CCP, the most prominent sharing economy urban platform, Uber, also began voluntarily sharing data with cities. In January of 2015, Uber announced it had negotiated a data sharing agreement with the City of Boston and would share “anonymous data about the duration, general locations, and times of rides that start or end in the city”.47 Although lauded by public officials at the time, this initiative again illustrates the limitations of the data philanthropy model for local governments. Boston’s then Chief Information Officer, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, would later admit that the highly summarized data shared by Uber only at the zip code level and only on a quarterly basis was “essentially useless” for the objectives the city had in mind. Tellingly, voluntary data sharing with Boston was announced just one week after Uber refused to furnish ridership data newly required by New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, suggesting a desire to retain control of data sharing by bolstering the data philanthropy model as an alternative to agency policy mandates.48

46 “Strava Metro Home,” accessed May 17, 2022, https://metro.strava.com/.

47 “In First, Uber to Share Ride Data with Boston - The Boston Globe,” accessed April 6, 2022, https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/01/13/uber-share-ridership-data-withboston/4Klo40KZREtQ7jkoaZjoNN/story.html.

48 “In First, Uber to Share Ride Data with Boston - The Boston Globe.”

Uber entered into similar voluntary data sharing agreements with other cities and eventually productized the way it would share highly summarized data, launching its Uber Movement interface, a dashboard intended for city transportation officials, in January 2017. This tool received much the same reaction as the data sharing agreement in Boston, with some praising the company’s proactive transparency and commitment to privacy via data aggregation, and others more critical of Uber Movement’s inability to meet the needs of common government use cases for ride-hail data. Many in this latter camp were also skeptical of the program as an attempt to preserve platform control by extending the data philanthropy era’s emphasis on voluntary private sector data sharing over government mandates.

Figure 8. A screenshot of Uber’s “Movement” platform published as part of the company’s press release in January 2017.