Los Angeles is quietly expanding a controversial real-time tracking system from dockless scooters to taxis and ride-hailing vehicles with the goal of creating a future-proof tool to digitally manage the city’s rights of way, but critics fear the technology puts passengers’ privacy at risk.
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation will soon require the tracking program to be integrated into sweeping new regulations for L.A.’s taxi industry. At the same time, a city-supported effort is underway to leverage access to the Los Angeles World Airports to force ride-hailing companies, which have argued they are not subject to the city’s rules, to join the system, too, according to a 2020 report to the City Council.
“Part of what LADOT is trying to do is harmonize everything, to get it all on the same platform,” said Mohammad Tajsar, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, which sued LADOT last year over the tracking of scooters. “The problem is the system they are using to harmonize all of these things is deeply privacy invasive.”
Last week, a U.S. District Court judge acknowledged the ACLU’s privacy concerns, but ruled the tracking program, known as Mobility Data Specification, or MDS, did not violate the privacy rights of the two riders the ACLU represented. The court’s decision was a major victory for LADOT ahead of its planned expansion into other modes of transportation.
Tajsar, who was interviewed prior to the ruling, could not be reached following the decision. The ACLU of Southern California in a statement said they feel the lawsuit “brought to light an ongoing threat to privacy” and that they would be assessing their legal options.
In a statement, the Open Mobility Foundation, which spun off from L.A. to take the open-source MDS to other cities, declared the outcome made it clear “there is no legal basis to challenge the use of MDS on privacy grounds.”
L.A. argues the data collected through MDS is needed to ensure its public policies can evolve alongside ride-hailing and autonomous vehicles, on the streets and in the air. LADOT wants to apply MDS to “all shared and connected modes to optimize safe and equitable street design and operations,” according to its strategic plan.
While the data does not directly identify users, privacy advocates such as Tajsar argue the granular nature of the information — which includes specific addresses where rides begin and end — could be used to track an individual’s movements when paired with other public sources. Someone getting into a taxi from his home could be identified from property records and then tracked to his destination, Tajsar said in the earlier interview.
To illustrate the risks of mass data collection, the ACLU pointed to a state auditor’s report that found law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, failed to properly protect the privacy of drivers recorded by automated license plate readers.
In other cities, trip data from taxis specifically has led to violations of privacy.
In 2013, New York City released data from 173 million individual taxi trips through a public records request, but inadvertently left in identifiable information, according to The Guardian. Security experts reverse-engineered the anonymized data within minutes and identify drivers, their vehicles and specific trips. The blog Gawker used the information to trace celebrities’ trips and how much they tipped their drivers.
MDS data is confidential and cannot be released through public records requests, according to LADOT. Officials stated the city has secured other sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers, for decades.
Judge says program isn’t unconstitutional
U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee dismissed the ACLU’s lawsuit on the grounds that tracking scooters does not violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment because riders effectively agree to share their information and trips are tracked on a single-ride basis “disassociated from other rides the user may have purchased,” according to the ruling.
A second claim alleging the tracking violated the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act also was dismissed. The attorney general, not private action, is the enforcement mechanism for that law, Gee determined.
“The Court recognizes the Plaintiffs’ concern with the unprecedented breadth and scope of the City’s location data collection,” Gee wrote. “But that alone does not mean it violates their constitutional or statutory privacy rights. This is an issue that may be more appropriately addressed as a matter of public policy, which is not for this Court to opine.”
Assemblywomen Jacqui Irwin and Buffy Wicks introduced a bill earlier this month to do exactly that. AB 859 would allow public agencies to only collect anonymized trip data, once it is older than a day, for planning and safety purposes. The bill bars the sharing of data with contractors and prohibits commercial use.
The LADOT declined to comment on the new legislation. The agency previously opposed an identical bill last year. Seleta Reynolds, director of the LADOT, testified at the time that raw data is necessary to protect against companies providing incomplete, inaccurate or false information.
“Eventually, when fleets of air taxis, delivery drones and autonomous vehicles emerge, we will need tools like this one to make sure that companies abide by the rules of the road and the sky,” Reynolds stated during her testimony to the state Legislature last year. “We cannot make policy in the dark — we’ve learned what happens when we try.”
For now, ruling specific to scooters
The district judge’s decision is less clear on other modes of transportation. Gee notes the same tracking could be considered a search “if it catalogues every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period of time.” Until now, MDS has managed shared micromobility vehicles. Taxis and ride-hailing add new variables, such as always-present drivers and personally owned vehicles.
Gee determined the collection of “robust data” for scooters was necessary for “smart, effective regulation of a completely novel industry” that, at its worst, clutters city sidewalks, lacks safety features and interferes with disability access to city streets.
Taxis would hardly be considered novel and have been heavily regulated for decades. Rules for ride-hailing services, at least for now, are set at the state level.
Unclear what data will be collected
Though L.A. can’t regulate ride-hailing services directly, Los Angeles World Airports, the city agency that operates LAX, has authority from the state to set rules for the vehicles at the airport. These trips are a crucial portion of ride-hailing companies’ business in Los Angeles.
In a January 2020 report to the City Council, LAWA’s chief executive officer, Justin Erbacci, stated LAX could collect data more accurately and in real time if it used MDS. The airport currently collects the date and time of each transaction, a GPS location for each transaction, unique driver identifiers, and license plates and identification of the “ride party per transaction.” MDS could collect that plus the “origin and destination data” from outside of the airport’s digital borders and “real-time telemetry,” according to the report.
The airport will not request personally identifiable information in the future, the report states.
It is less clear what LADOT will collect from taxis. Initially, it is likely to include the vehicle used, the identification of the driver, where rides start and end, and where vehicles are dispersed throughout the city, according to Jarvis Murray, LADOT’s for-hire transportation administrator. Much of what will be collected has been provided manually, often on paper, by taxi companies for nearly 90 years, Murray said. The city will not collect the identification of passengers with MDS, he said.
Taxicab companies already make GPS location data “readily available to DOT and authorized law enforcement agencies,” according to approved regulations. In the future, MDS will pull the information sought automatically from the company’s internal systems. Law enforcement would need a subpoena or a warrant, according to Reynolds’ testimony in 2020. The department had never received such a request as of that year, she said.
LADOT may seek additional information as new policies take shape, Murray said. The city wants a flexible foundation ready to adapt to unexpected innovations.
“We have to test it out, sandbox it.” Murray said. “It is still kind of an open question.”
L.A. tightly controls access to MDS, he stressed. Third parties need a court order, while the city’s partners sign agreements restricting use of the data, he said. Raw vehicle information is only for “LADOT’s operational and regulatory needs,” according to the city’s data principles.
“We have data protection principles that absolutely ensure we are not giving out this data or sending it to someone who can monetize it,” Murray said.
How the data might be used is open-ended as well, according to Murray. Potential uses include ensuring taxis are equitably spread throughout the city, or that drivers aren’t manipulating meters.
The lack of clarity about what will be collected and how it will be used is a key criticism of privacy advocates, according to Tajsar, the ACLU attorney. The city appears to want to collect sensitive information for problems it may never have, or for age-old ones with simpler solutions, he said.
Cities have managed their rights of way effectively for centuries without GPS location data, he added. LADOT should identify what it wants to address and then collect the least amount of data necessary to accomplish its goals, Tajsar said.
“It is a real red flag because it’s basically the government saying they want to collect really sensitive information about people and they’re not going to tell you why they need it,” Tajsar said. “I fear that what LADOT is doing by ever expanding MDS is just ignoring all of the ways that it can protect people’s privacy and seeking instead to figure it out later, after they’re sitting on a treasure trove of information.”
‘The price we have to pay’
MDS is not facing pushback from the taxicab companies, according to Leon Slomovic, president of the Taxi Workers Association of Los Angeles. Past attempts to implement the system were rejected, but Slomovic believes the industry is more concerned about other, industry-shaking changes under consideration. Drivers are used to being tracked by dispatch systems, he said, and are willing to concede on MDS if it means preventing other regulations.
“There are such bigger issues that we need to deal with,” Slomovic said. “It becomes the collateral damage in the whole scheme of things, even though we don’t want it, and we don’t like it, but that’s the price we have to pay to get a better system, so drivers and the companies can survive and prosper.”
Regulations proposed alongside MDS would eliminate the franchise system, remove caps on fleet sizes and mandate the use of apps. Companies no longer need to use garish colors and can shift to decals instead.
Though Slomovic agrees modernization is needed, he fears a large company could drive down prices by flooding the proposed open market system with taxis until the smaller companies collapse. Two of city’s seven franchised companies have stopped operating since the COVID-19 pandemic began, he added.
“If we’re forced into a price war and a vehicle war with Uber and Lyft, there is little chance for the industry to survive,” he said.
That’s not LADOT’s goal, according to Murray. The proposed regulations are meant to make an industry that has fallen behind more viable, not to pit it against the unsustainable rates of tech companies, he said.
LADOT released its draft regulations in September, but has not finalized its plans. In mid-February, the city’s Transportation Committee extended the existing system for another six months and asked LADOT to ensure future regulations provided a livable wage for drivers.