alt Hacker NewsIt's often interesting to observe the different ways that privacy is approached in the US and Europe.
In Europe we often accept pretty grave restrictions of our liberty like the UK's Online Safety Act, which would never fly in the US, and we do so without much public comment.
On the other side of things, organisations in the US happily expose datasets like this one, which would give a most EU Data Protection Officers a heart attack, and nobody bats an eyelid.
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In Lyft's defense, they are providing it anonymized under the NYCBS Data Use Policy. They also aren't providing the exact GPS routes, which is why OSRM is used to calculate the shortest path instead.
I don't see anything problematic about start-end pairs from one public facility to another.
This data is mandated by NYC law: https://intro.nyc/local-laws/2015-99
I've heard that releasing these sorts of data sets help competitors do market research, and thus mitigates "winner takes all" forces. NYC also tends to be fairly pro-public-datasets: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/browse?%3BsortBy=most_accessed...