Uber God View

Following up on today’s Uber theme, There is an article on USAToday.com tonight that says that Uber has something they call “God View” that allows Uber employees to stalk VIP users (and apparently track the movements of any Uber user) – including journalists who are writing articles negative to Uber.

My guess is that this is no different than what a lot of tech companies can do – they have a lot of data about us and we have no choice but to trust how they use the data or not use the service.

The challenge is that we don’t really know what companies that have our data can do, cannot do or claim that they should not do even though they can.

Obviously, transparency is important and to the degree that companies fess up to what they are doing, that makes the decisions that we make more valid.

For example, Amazon knows everything that I purchase (and if I am logged in, everything that I look at) and Netflix knows every movie that I watch.  My cable or satellite provider knows every show that I watch and every commercial that I TIVO over.

I make a decision based on that knowledge whether I want to use those services based on the facts that I know about.

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