Stop California Cities from Killing an Important Location Privacy Bill

If you rely on shared biked or scooters in California, your location privacy is at risk. Five California cities are lobbying hard to defeat a bill in the California Legislature, A.B. 1112, that will require cities to protect individuals’ privacy when collecting data from shared bikes and scooters to regulate public streets.

Cities across the United States are currently pushing companies like Jump, Lime, and Bird that operate shared mobility services to give them individual trip data, including where and when trips start and stop. This data is extremely sensitive, as it can be used to identify people by tracking their movements and patterns over time.

The cities claim they will take steps to protect individual trip data and keep it confidential, but they have not said specifically how they will do that, or even said why, specifically, they need such detailed data. The biggest mistake local jurisdictions could make would be to collect data first and think about what to do with it later—after consumers’ privacy has been put at risk. That’s unfortunately what cities are doing now.

At least four of the cities opposing the bill—Los Angeles, Santa Monica, San Francisco, and Oakland—already have pilot programs that require shared mobility companies to turn over sensitive individual trip data. The cities argue that removing “customer identifiers” like names from this data will be enough to protect rider privacy.

The problem? Even with names stripped out, location information is notoriously easy to reidentify, particularly for habitual trips. Patterns in the data could reveal social relationships, and potentially even extramarital affairs, as well as personal habits, such as when people typically leave the house in the morning, go to the gym or run errands, how often they go out on evenings and weekends, and where they like to go.

We urge the California legislature to pass A.B. 1112, and protect the privacy of all Californians who rely on shared mobility devices for their transportation needs.