We talk a lot about NSA surveillance, National Security Letters, warrant canaries, facial recognition technology, a police van disguised as a Google Maps vehicle, the war against encryption, and government-mandated backdoors. And yeah, sure, the expansive net of government surveillance is really troubling. That’s why organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation put out “Who’s Got Your Back” reports, grading the technology industry on how they treat user privacy.

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It’s not just drivers that are affected by Uber’s reach, and it’s not just rank capitalism that motivates privacy invasions. In 2012, Uber published an astoundingly tasteless blog post that quantified user data to look at “Rides of Glory”—Uber rides that were being taken after one night stands.

There was no point to accessing private user data like this, except for a laugh at their passengers’ expense, and Uber published the results for the whole world to see. The post has since been taken down—signaling a little more self-awareness at the company. But because there’s little to no transparency into what it's doing behind passengers’ and drivers’ backs, we don’t know if this kind of creepy data analysis is still going on.

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In the Supreme Court case US v. Jones, Justice Sotomayor noted in her concurrence that GPS tracking data could say a lot about a person. “Disclosed in [GPS] data . . . will be trips the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on.”

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