It feels like a year has passed in the time of the pandemic. But it was just late February when I wrote about the City of Los Angeles using its Mobility Data Specification (MDS) tool for real time tracking of scooter riders. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) requires shared scooter operators to report two types of data into MDS that violate individual privacy rights: individual trip data and real time reporting. These two aspects of MDS turn an otherwise sensible policy tool into a government surveillance and tracking system. At the time I noted:
If you don’t ride a scooter and think this privacy issue affects just a narrow group of millennials in LA, think again. This surveillance of travel behavior isn’t going to be limited to scooter trips. LADOT wants to collect this data for all transportation trips — whether in Uber or Lyft cars, autonomous ride services, drones, or whatever other devices are invented next. And maybe for personal car trips too, if they can get it. Moreover, other cities are using MDS and may adopt LADOT’s practices in the future if they are not stopped.
And just a few weeks later, here we are: the District of Columbia is now requiring shared scooter operators to provide individual trip data in real time — just like Los Angeles — becoming the second city in the nation to adopt these troublesome requirements…
