Unusual Gathering Episode XXVI | With Melanie Ensign and Bennett Cyphers | April 8, 2019

Conversations At The Intersection Of IT Security And Society
Guests
Melanie Ensign, Uber | Bennett Cyphers, EFF
Hosts
Sean Martin | Marco Ciappelli

Pretend for a moment that you are crushing it on Sunset Blvd. on one of those electric scooters that are all over the place in Los Angeles. You're minding your own business, enjoying yet another sunny day, going wherever you want to go, and nobody needs to know about it. Right? Wrong. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) is on the scene. Apparently, they really want to know what you're up to—or at least what your scooter is up to. There’s more to this story though.

In this Unusual Gatherings episode, we talk about data collection, anonymization, sharing, re-aggregation, storage and the potential utilization of such data and, of course, what it means in terms of consumers’ privacy and identity as we use those services.

We are having this conversation because LADOT is requesting that all the shared scooter companies give them all the data they collect as a condition “sine qua non” if they want to do business on the streets of L.A.. As you can imagine, this requirement to share ride information makes us citizens—regardless of the choice to use those specific types of transportation or not—a little worried for the many ways that our privacy can be affected by this practice. As it goes, we are not the only ones who are concerned: Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) didn’t celebrate when they heard of the news—and neither did Uber.

In order to understand and consider the vast implications of this news, we invited Melanie Ensign from Uber and Bennet Cyphers from EFF to ride their electric scooters as fast as they could—and as carefully as possible—to meet us at the intersection of IT security and society to have a conversation with us. Soon after our request, they arrived, parked their scooters responsibly, grabbed some coffee, sat down, and had this conversation that goes in our books as:

ITSPmagazine’s Unusual Gatherings XXVI:
All your trips’ data belong to us — and so does your privacy.

Read the full chronicle here
https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-unusual-gatherings/unusual-gathering-episode-xxvi
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Thanks to our episode sponsor, Onapsis. Be sure to visit their directory listing on ITSPmagazine: https://www.itspmagazine.com/company-directory/onapsis
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For more Unusual Gatherings, please visit:
https://www.itspmagazine.com/unusual-gatherings