alt Hacker NewsOn the flip side, you are Uber and you’re trying to decide if you should charge the “low price” or the “high price” to somebody who just opened your app.
Luckily the person you’re about to make an offer to lives within the flock network so you quickly get pings from the last week that they shopped at Whole Foods and dropped by a dispensary on the way home. Yeah this person probably has disposable income, let’s charge them the 30% increased rate.
Or maybe you’re a future employer - oh this guy stopped at a dispensary 12 years ago? The algorithm will give him +4 risk points before we make our hiring decision. Plus he regularly goes to this bad neighborhood (which the algorithm doesn’t know is where his sister lives that he visits), that’s another +9 risk points.
AND on the darker side — if you knew they did this, would you visit your sister less?
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Pretty sure flock network isn't available to Uber.
As an aside, some people have an uncanny ability to take two things that are different in every conceivable way except one, and use the one similarity as the basis for an analogy.
There's some proper shareholder-oriented thinking! Even I was falling into the trap of purely considering Flock in a governmental context, and thus the potential for law abuse. But of course, they're not government, they're a private (indeed YC backed, Summer 2017) company. Policing might be their tent-pole and install argument but once in place there's all sorts of potential profitable revenue streams they might turn their minds too.