Uber starts selling ride/eats data to marketers

https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-ads-launches-intelligence-insights-trips-takeout-data-marketers-2025-12

78•sethops1•1h ago

Comments

lwhi•53m ago

Uber really are the piranhas of the corporate world.

I can't imagine any depth they wouldn't dive to, in order to get a morsel to feed on.

andsoitis•48m ago

From the article: ”aggregate users' data without revealing their identities.”

malshe•45m ago

That's how it starts

squigz•38m ago

Why do you think this makes it better?

crazygringo•27m ago

You think data tied to individual users isn't any worse? That privacy has no value?

pavel_lishin•25m ago

I think they're suggesting that anonymized and potentially aggregated data can still have individual data extracted from it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/new-york-...

squigz•23m ago

What the heck? Where did I say either of those things?

Privacy is very important. That's why I think sharing of customer data - individual or aggregate - is bad.

kotaKat•35m ago

Over/under on when someone is able to de-aggregate an identity down to an individual user?

I’ve got it on less than 6 months.

code_for_monkey•31m ago

6 weeks would be optimistic

schnable•30m ago

how do de-aggregation attacks or whatever you'd call this work?

snapcaster•13m ago

One of the easiest methods is to find a different data source with overlap and use that to map real people to anonymized lists. Big tech companies find this super easy to do because of all the internal data they already have on everyone

indymike•26m ago

More like 15 minutes.

DennisP•33m ago

Also from the article:

> Uber Intelligence will let advertisers securely combine their customer data with Uber's to help surface insights about their audiences, based on what they eat and where they travel.

So the companies have the identities. It sounds like they're going to be learning something about their customers, the question is just how much detail they'll get.

zx8080•23m ago

Everything? Ok, everything. Names "anonymmized" (but easily trackable) and the list of addresses. Why not sell it to get money? /s

baggachipz•13m ago

Source: "trust us bro"

morkalork•23m ago

The allegation that driver payouts are manipulated to:

1) Hook new drivers with better than average rates before tapering off 2) Take into account the age/model/value of the vehicle and what payments for it would look like in the market and dole out enough to cover costs but not "too much" that they're getting ahead of other drivers

Totally baseless and sourceless hearsay tho. Still, if true, really plays into the image of "there's no depth they won't go".

underlipton•15m ago

Add another: the various platforms talk to each other (or analyze driver movement) in order to manipulate order offerings in such a way as to discourage drivers from taking orders from more than one app at once. One app will wait until the other has confirmed an accepted order before deluging you with their own orders, all taking you in the opposite direction (which makes you late for one or more deliveries, giving cause to terminate your contract).

dfxm12•37m ago

So many times on this website, people say, "I will pay for the service to get rid of advertising." You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper. It is naive to think any company isn't finding ways to monetize your behavior, whether you're paying them or not.

jcalvinowens•32m ago

People object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.

mitthrowaway2•28m ago

No, I care about that as much or more.

pavel_lishin•27m ago

But are you most people?

I'd wager that just by the virtue of being commenters on HN, we're already outliers.

jcalvinowens•26m ago

You're an outlier. Ask ten people at your local bus stop if this is important to them, and tell me how many start laughing at you :)

squigz•21m ago

If I went up to random people and went like, "Do you approve of companies tracking what you buy, eat, do, where you go, and every other aspect of your life?" I promise you I would get a majority of "No"s

jcalvinowens•16m ago

The question I'm asking is "would you pay more money if the service promised not to sell your data". That's a hard no for most people.

If you frame it as a negative thing with no downsides for agreeing with you, of course people will agree. But that's not the reality.

squigz•10m ago

The claim you made was that people don't care about their behavior being monetized.

jcalvinowens•7m ago

Don't care enough to sacrifice anything tangible to achieve it, yes. I would think it's obvious the question as you framed it biases responses to the point they're meaningless...

teeray•32m ago

If you have the disposable income to pay to remove advertising, you are exactly the market segment advertisers want to reach. They will always be willing to pay to outbid that segment’s own desire to not see ads.

landgenoot•23m ago

This is very insightful

neom•4m ago

Just to give you another little titbit if you're interested. I work in go to market, and part of that is awareness, and part of that is advertising. Where people use the platform has a huge impact on the prices you pay to advertise on the platform, for example reddit is very expensive because they have a very high mobile traffic population, and the ads can't be blocked, advertising on X is hard because the people I want to reach all pay for premium, so the traffic you get from it now is basically useless, linkedin skews towards desktop, but their targeting is amazing, but because they skew towards desktop people run ad blocks, some platforms let you pick the devices you serve to, some don't, all of it impacts the price you pay to serve the ads.

matheusmoreira•20m ago

Yep. People are paying for the privilege of segmenting themselves into the high disposable income categories of the market. They're paying to do the corporation's market segmentation for them.

Cpoll•5m ago

I started to rebut this with the expected value of the bid... but if you're advertising a sports car, it's worth paying $100/impression even if your conversion rate is 1%.

goalieca•26m ago

I paid quite a fee to have crave streaming service in canada. It's pretty premium with HBO and that. Yet, all the star trek shows are now behind ads.. several minutes for a 20 minute episode of lower decks. Things are getting out of hand.

charles_f•18m ago

I was paying $24 for crave. They showed me ads.

I'm not paying crave anymore.

AznHisoka•26m ago

If you arent paying, you are the product.

And if you are paying… you’re still the product as well.

matheusmoreira•21m ago

Yeah. Only way to avoid becoming the product is to become a "pirate" instead. Pretty sad but it is what it is.

thenthenthen•5m ago

Thers no ads on the high seas?

underlipton•20m ago

Delivery in particular remains underpriced at even the high prices we see. The way the platforms are set up, you're basically paying to chauffeur a single order straight to your house, on-demand. Mobile tech and "own car" efficiencies don't begin to cover those costs. The problem was that this is the kind of service that they had to offer in order to supersede existing delivery.

In an ideal world, you'd instead have drivers assigned to either particular neighborhoods or particular restaurants, allowing for order-stacking and predictable routes. Bonus for set-time daily deliveries (get your order in before 6 or have to wait until 9). Bigger bonus for set neighborhood drop-off points (like those consolidated mailboxes, but warming compartments). Anything more bespoke would cost extra.

Unfortunately, the balance of inefficient operations, decreasing competition, and "line go up" is that prices have to increase.

efsavage•19m ago

In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials. That didn't last long...

charles_f•19m ago

I think when you give money for a service it's a reasonable expectation that the company you're giving the money to will respect your privacy, if only because selling your data is not a great outlook and could jeopardize the main revenue stream. I'm guess I'm proven wrong

toomuchtodo•15m ago

Without regulation, you have no protections against these corporate actions. If you’re expecting or relying on corporations to act in good faith, you are going to be disappointed.

tdeck•7m ago

Uber, famously a company that respects existing laws and regulations.

neom•10m ago

Uber ride app has ads in it now on top of data collection, service fees, etc, uber eats also sells sponsored placement, and then the fees and prices now... like what the actual fuck is this? https://s.h4x.club/9Zun85Lj - these people have lost their minds, y'all really gonna drive the business down to 10 loyal customers who you milk to hell and high water? Weird strategy.

lotsofpulp•7m ago

Target just started hitting me with completely third party ads right after you press pay in their app.

They have also advertised for the Starbucks in thr Target stores long before when you go to pickup something.

gunt_crusher•3m ago

This site is full of the most useful idiots known to man.

gnatman•37m ago

I’m pretty surprised they haven’t been doing that for years already tbh.

zx8080•22m ago

Who said they did not? It's probably not public, that's all.

smeej•6m ago

That was my thought too. "Starts"?? I assumed they had been selling aggregated data about user trips the whole time.

nerdponx•36m ago

I'm surprised they weren't already doing this. Maybe they wanted to give it some time to see if there were other ways to monetize it before opening up the aggregates for sale.

vasco•34m ago

As long as it is to advertise in their own platform sounds great. I'd rather have nice restaurant suggestions on top than McDonald's and Dominoes or whoever paid the most every day. Using Uber eats is like some app from the past with ads as global banners that are the same for all users. If you're going to throw me ads at least use my history to try and do something useful.

CGamesPlay•32m ago

Just so we are clear about how advertising works, you will still just see suggestions from who paid the most every day. The data just informs the marketing teams whether they should pay more for your eyeballs specifically.

esafak•20m ago

Not necessarily. It depends on the ad type; cost per impression vs click. The latter incentivizes relevance.

keehee•30m ago

That something useful is turning you into a data cow and making money off of it while returning zero value to you.

Seriously you want people to use your travel and movement and choice data to make a suggestion list of restaurants for you to order from? How helpless are you?

crazygringo•26m ago

...yes?

I like good recommendations better than bad recommendations. The value I get is better recommendations.

Like, I literally update the categories of things I'm interested in, in my Google profile, so I get less useless ads.

People complain about bad and useless recommendations and irrelevant ads all the time. Personalization is how you get better ones.

keehee•23m ago

Just wanted to verify how far you are willing to go to get a list generated for you that’s probably not even that unique from the other Y number of people who love being suggested obvious information.

How many combinations of the restaurants around you do you think exist and are needed to provide that information? Certainly need Uber guzzling down Terabytes of data to rank the local Chiles over the local Applebees.

Lets be honest, restaurant suggestions aren’t a real problem anyone has.

HWR_14•19m ago

> People complain about bad and useless recommendations and irrelevant ads all the time.

I've never heard any complaint about that except from people who work in adtech.

knollimar•18m ago

Good recommendations are places where you maximize payment [to people willing to pay], not best experience.

It's going to be a conflict of interest like most ads. It's not optimized for you but toward you

goopypoop•3m ago

How often do you act on these recommendations?

landgenoot•14m ago

I don't think the problem is these kind of suggestions.

Are people suddenly moving more between corp A and corp B? Must be something going on, let's buy the stock.

Suddenly multiple Ubers are dropping off people at a residential building during the night? They probably know each other. Let's flag that as a potential risk.

jadyoyster•28m ago

There should be a law forcing ride hailing apps to give anonymized ride data to local governments so that they can plan public transport better. If they sell it to marketers they must be able to do this technically.

pavel_lishin•26m ago

Anonymizing data is incredibly difficult to do: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/new-york-...

> New York City has released data of 173m individual taxi trips – but inadvertently made it "trivial" to find the personally identifiable information of every driver in the dataset.

keehee•15m ago

Will gladly start using and paying for local car services instead.

pavel_lishin•3m ago

Do those still exist?

xnx•12m ago

Another reason to use Waymo (for now).

like_any_other•9m ago

Back in the day in my country, if your neighbor or taxi driver was informing the authorities of your habits and travels, this was considered a dangerously hostile action. If no willing informant could be found, there were torture basements to get it. It's what kept the government in power for so long. E.g. travel data makes it easy to identify nascent political groups.

Thankfully corporations have proven themselves so trustworthy and benevolent, we don't think twice about giving them the data they used to have to torture out of us. Likewise the governments, that we know are among the buyers [1], are just as beloved and uncontroversial, unlike in the old days.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/14/23759585/odni-spy-report-...

jacquesm•9m ago

The business life-cycle:

  - Ascension

    - solve problem

    - proof of concept / MVP

    - investment

    - roll-out in home market

    - polished product

    - more investment, global roll-out

    - disruption of existing industry

    - non-autonomous growth by acquisition of other players

    - land-grab growth

      - lots of hiring
 
      - fancy offices, founders and stockholders make out like bandits

    - market domination

    - data hoarding as part of the 'moat'

    - continued innovation: go to 'step 1', otherwise...

  - Milk the cow

    - eventual competition
 
      - market share reduction

      - eroding margins

    - first reorganizations, lay-offs

    - founders replaced with financial managers

    - Data hoarding phase ends, data is sold *<- you are here*

  - Decline

    - reduced sales

    - shrinking profits

    - downsizing

  - terminal phase

    - lawsuits

    - patent portfolio and other IP used as strategic weapon

    - brand and IP acquisition by other players, not necessarily the same party
      acquiring both

techterrier•7m ago

At this point im just going to move to Shetland, live in a hut and spend the next 30 years making wooden boats. It's the only way to be free of this nonsense.

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