Navigating intersection of privacy, data issues

City transportation officials can analyze data from shared-mobility services and learn a lot about the movement of people and goods on public streets and sidewalks. Maybe too much.

Data harvested from ride-hailing, scooter and e-bike services can pinpoint trouble spots for road safety and identify places bike lanes are needed. It can also create privacy concerns, and riders have grown wary about their whereabouts being shared with local governments.

Navigating the crossroads of individual privacy and public benefit has been tricky business. Now comes an effort to establish a middle ground.

The Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington nonprofit that explores privacy challenges in the technology and data realms, has created an assessment and published guidance intended to help city officials, private companies and others forge policies around data-sharing and privacy.

"Sharing mobility data is not something we're going to cut off, and there's a lot of valid reasons for this data to be shared," said Chelsey Colbert, policy counsel at Future of Privacy Forum and lead on the project. "So if this is the universe we're operating in, it's a great approach to enable data-sharing in a responsible way that protects individual privacy and communities' interests and encourages transparency."

Colbert and her colleague Kelsey Finch have created the Mobility Data Sharing Assessment. Tailored for transportation uses, city officials and other organizations can use it as a customizable, open-source tool as a guide in forming and implementing their own policies. Further, they've developed an "operator's manual" of sorts that provides additional guidance and resources.

While the assessment is not legal advice, it does address the landscape of privacy-related laws and regulations. It also provides context on ensuring only relevant data is extracted, advocates for transparency and encourages officials to consider how data will be safeguarded. Colbert hopes the assessment amounts to more than a box-checking exercise and that cities will take privacy principles and be spurred into thinking about how to implement them.

"It's really easy to say you have certain principles around retention and, 'I'll only keep this data for as long as we need it and only collect data that we need,' " she said "But what does that mean in the real world? How do you put it into operation? That's what we wanted to establish: an operational framework folks could use."

Future of Privacy Forum worked with executives at Uber and Lyft, as well as transportation officials from Florida's Miami-Dade County and the city of Tallahassee, to create the assessment tool. This is its first iteration; future ones may encompass emerging forms of mobility such as delivery bots and air taxis.

It arrives at a time when privacy "guardrails," as Colbert called them, are blurred amid rising demand for data exchanges between private industry and public entities.

Los Angeles officials, for one prominent example, have been at the forefront, with the city both establishing a mobility data-sharing specification and facing a lawsuit that sought to stop that sharing over privacy concerns.

Generally, cities want the data as a means to understand and better plan for new forms of mobility as they manage public roads and spaces. But unchecked, access to granular customer data via APIs, a type of software interface, could allow governments to build comprehensive and sensitive portraits of mobility users' movements and habits. It could reveal, for example, which doctors they visit or what religious services they attend.

Future of Privacy Forum recommends organizations share trip data in an anonymized fashion but concedes there may be cases where scrubbing data of identifying features may not be possible or even desired — if it's used for law enforcement purposes, for example. Considering whether to collect anonymous or identifiable data is covered in the assessment tool. But nonanonymous data worries others.

"When cities start demanding individual-level trip data, they are no longer just smart cities, they are surveillance cities," representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation told a California Senate subcommittee in February 2020.

The foundation joined a lawsuit that sought to prevent the Los Angeles Department of Transportation from ingesting real-time mobility data through its Mobility Data Specification, a pioneering tool that has served as model for other cities since its inception in 2018.

Even when Judge Dolly Gee dismissed the case against the transportation department in February, citing it as a matter for public policy and not the courts to decide, she noted the "court recognizes plaintiffs' concern with the unprecedented breadth and scope" of the city's location data-collection efforts.

Exactly how cities should balance their fresh data opportunities for better understanding their streets and sidewalks with the privacy concerns of everyday travelers remains a question for which there are not yet clear answers.

"There's no silver-bullet formula that, 'If I do A, B and C, then I'm in the clear,' " Colbert said. "With privacy and this type of location data, context is super important. It goes back to knowing the reasons you want that data and making sure the data you're getting actually meets those purposes."