The whole point is that it's not anonymized and it's being inspected for and used for purposes that have little to do with the ostensible customer-service agreement.

People aren't used to transit companies interrogating them about the purposes of their journeys, they just want the transit company to get them from point A to point B (imagine if they did this when you got in the car: "Where are you going? Why?")

And obviously from a business perspective the more you understand your customers and their motivations the better you can serve them.

But lets not kid ourselves. This isn't anonymized data. Uber's publishing in a format that is unspecific, but they have all of the detailed data and can poke through it and infer things at their leisure, and they have no compunction around how they're doing it or why.

This is why ethics and trust around data collectors is really important. Uber seems pretty cavalier about it, and that actually is a problem.

I included the word "decent" because the way they used data goes beyond people's "overnight stays," they previously analyzed the spending patterns of people and tied it to welfare checks and prostitution. They immediately call it "one of the coolest things about working for a data-driven company like Uber" afterwards. It's bad data science, not only because it's only a correlation and not an experiment so nothing can be proven, but because they use these unproven claims to say outlandish and unethical things.

I meant "decent" in an ethical sense, not in a conservative "don't you look at my 'short overnight stays'" sense.