A new tool named Movement allows anyone to view anonymized information for two billion trips Few companies in the world have gathered as much transportation data over the last decade as Uber, which operates in over 500 cities on six continents. Yet up until now, Uber has been extremely recalcitrant about releasing that data?even to the cities it considers partners. Now, for the first time, Uber is making data for over two billion trips publicly available.
A new tool named Movement that launched over the weekend is Uber?s first public-facing data release (although it?s not officially open to the public yet?you still need to register to access it?but it will be in a few months). As The Verge reports, Movement is the work of a team at Uber named Project Metropolis, which is working specifically on civic relationships.
Uber has long cited passenger privacy as the reason for being so fiercely protective of its data. This has led to some major rifts with cities, which desperately need to understand how and where Uber is changing transportation habits. In New York City, for example, a case that begins hearings this week is asking Uber to provide the same type of detailed trip data that?s collected by taxis.
But Uber is getting around privacy concerns in Movement by anonymizing the data, meaning that it takes the GPS information collected for each trip and divides it into geographic ?zones.? So what you see when you look at an Uber Movement map for any particular period is t...