Uber starts selling ride/eats data to marketers
63 comments
·December 8, 2025dfxm12
So many times on this website, people say, "I will pay for the service to get rid of advertising." You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper. It is naive to think any company isn't finding ways to monetize your behavior, whether you're paying them or not.
teeray
If you have the disposable income to pay to remove advertising, you are exactly the market segment advertisers want to reach. They will always be willing to pay to outbid that segment’s own desire to not see ads.
Cpoll
I started to rebut this with the expected value of the bid... but if you're advertising a sports car, it's worth paying $100/impression even if your conversion rate is 1%.
matheusmoreira
Yep. People are paying for the privilege of segmenting themselves into the high disposable income categories of the market. They're paying to do the corporation's market segmentation for them.
landgenoot
This is very insightful
charles_f
I think when you give money for a service it's a reasonable expectation that the company you're giving the money to will respect your privacy, if only because selling your data is not a great outlook and could jeopardize the main revenue stream. I'm guess I'm proven wrong
toomuchtodo
Without regulation, you have no protections against these corporate actions. If you’re expecting or relying on corporations to act in good faith, you are going to be disappointed.
tdeck
Uber, famously a company that respects existing laws and regulations.
goalieca
I paid quite a fee to have crave streaming service in canada. It's pretty premium with HBO and that. Yet, all the star trek shows are now behind ads.. several minutes for a 20 minute episode of lower decks. Things are getting out of hand.
charles_f
I was paying $24 for crave. They showed me ads.
I'm not paying crave anymore.
AznHisoka
If you arent paying, you are the product.
And if you are paying… you’re still the product as well.
matheusmoreira
Yeah. Only way to avoid becoming the product is to become a "pirate" instead. Pretty sad but it is what it is.
efsavage
In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials. That didn't last long...
neom
Uber ride app has ads in it now on top of data collection, service fees, etc, uber eats also sells sponsored placement, and then the fees and prices now... like what the actual fuck is this? https://s.h4x.club/9Zun85Lj - these people have lost their minds, y'all really gonna drive the business down to 10 loyal customers who you milk to hell and high water? Weird strategy.
lotsofpulp
Target just started hitting me with ads right after you press pay in their app.
jcalvinowens
People object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.
mitthrowaway2
No, I care about that as much or more.
jcalvinowens
You're an outlier. Ask ten people at your local bus stop if this is important to them, and tell me how many start laughing at you :)
pavel_lishin
But are you most people?
I'd wager that just by the virtue of being commenters on HN, we're already outliers.
underlipton
Delivery in particular remains underpriced at even the high prices we see. The way the platforms are set up, you're basically paying to chauffeur a single order straight to your house, on-demand. Mobile tech and "own car" efficiencies don't begin to cover those costs. The problem was that this is the kind of service that they had to offer in order to supersede existing delivery.
In an ideal world, you'd instead have drivers assigned to either particular neighborhoods or particular restaurants, allowing for order-stacking and predictable routes. Bonus for set-time daily deliveries (get your order in before 6 or have to wait until 9). Bigger bonus for set neighborhood drop-off points (like those consolidated mailboxes, but warming compartments). Anything more bespoke would cost extra.
Unfortunately, the balance of inefficient operations, decreasing competition, and "line go up" is that prices have to increase.
gnatman
I’m pretty surprised they haven’t been doing that for years already tbh.
smeej
That was my thought too. "Starts"?? I assumed they had been selling aggregated data about user trips the whole time.
zx8080
Who said they did not? It's probably not public, that's all.
jadyoyster
There should be a law forcing ride hailing apps to give anonymized ride data to local governments so that they can plan public transport better. If they sell it to marketers they must be able to do this technically.
pavel_lishin
Anonymizing data is incredibly difficult to do: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/new-york-...
> New York City has released data of 173m individual taxi trips – but inadvertently made it "trivial" to find the personally identifiable information of every driver in the dataset.
nerdponx
I'm surprised they weren't already doing this. Maybe they wanted to give it some time to see if there were other ways to monetize it before opening up the aggregates for sale.
lwhi
Uber really are the piranhas of the corporate world.
I can't imagine any depth they wouldn't dive to, in order to get a morsel to feed on.
morkalork
The allegation that driver payouts are manipulated to:
1) Hook new drivers with better than average rates before tapering off 2) Take into account the age/model/value of the vehicle and what payments for it would look like in the market and dole out enough to cover costs but not "too much" that they're getting ahead of other drivers
Totally baseless and sourceless hearsay tho. Still, if true, really plays into the image of "there's no depth they won't go".
underlipton
Add another: the various platforms talk to each other (or analyze driver movement) in order to manipulate order offerings in such a way as to discourage drivers from taking orders from more than one app at once. One app will wait until the other has confirmed an accepted order before deluging you with their own orders, all taking you in the opposite direction (which makes you late for one or more deliveries, giving cause to terminate your contract).
andsoitis
From the article: ”aggregate users' data without revealing their identities.”
DennisP
Also from the article:
> Uber Intelligence will let advertisers securely combine their customer data with Uber's to help surface insights about their audiences, based on what they eat and where they travel.
So the companies have the identities. It sounds like they're going to be learning something about their customers, the question is just how much detail they'll get.
zx8080
Everything? Ok, everything. Names "anonymmized" (but easily trackable) and the list of addresses. Why not sell it to get money? /s
malshe
That's how it starts
kotaKat
Over/under on when someone is able to de-aggregate an identity down to an individual user?
I’ve got it on less than 6 months.
indymike
More like 15 minutes.
code_for_monkey
6 weeks would be optimistic
schnable
how do de-aggregation attacks or whatever you'd call this work?
baggachipz
Source: "trust us bro"
squigz
Why do you think this makes it better?
crazygringo
You think data tied to individual users isn't any worse? That privacy has no value?
like_any_other
Back in the day in my country, if your neighbor or taxi driver was informing the authorities of your habits and travels, this was considered a dangerously hostile action. If no willing informant could be found, there were torture basements to get it. It's what kept the government in power for so long. E.g. travel data makes it easy to identify nascent political groups.
Thankfully corporations have proven themselves so trustworthy and benevolent, we don't think twice about giving them the data they used to have to torture out of us. Likewise the governments, that we know are among the buyers [1], are just as beloved and uncontroversial, unlike in the old days.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/14/23759585/odni-spy-report-...
techterrier
At this point im just going to move to Shetland, live in a hut and spend the next 30 years making wooden boats. It's the only way to be free of this nonsense.
keehee
Will gladly start using and paying for local car services instead.
xnx
Another reason to use Waymo (for now).
vasco
As long as it is to advertise in their own platform sounds great. I'd rather have nice restaurant suggestions on top than McDonald's and Dominoes or whoever paid the most every day. Using Uber eats is like some app from the past with ads as global banners that are the same for all users. If you're going to throw me ads at least use my history to try and do something useful.
CGamesPlay
Just so we are clear about how advertising works, you will still just see suggestions from who paid the most every day. The data just informs the marketing teams whether they should pay more for your eyeballs specifically.
esafak
Not necessarily. It depends on the ad type; cost per impression vs click. The latter incentivizes relevance.
keehee
That something useful is turning you into a data cow and making money off of it while returning zero value to you.
Seriously you want people to use your travel and movement and choice data to make a suggestion list of restaurants for you to order from? How helpless are you?
landgenoot
I don't think the problem is these kind of suggestions.
Are people suddenly moving more between corp A and corp B? Must be something going on, let's buy the stock.
Suddenly multiple Ubers are dropping off people at a residential building during the night? They probably know each other. Let's flag that as a potential risk.
crazygringo
...yes?
I like good recommendations better than bad recommendations. The value I get is better recommendations.
Like, I literally update the categories of things I'm interested in, in my Google profile, so I get less useless ads.
People complain about bad and useless recommendations and irrelevant ads all the time. Personalization is how you get better ones.
HWR_14
> People complain about bad and useless recommendations and irrelevant ads all the time.
I've never heard any complaint about that except from people who work in adtech.
keehee
Just wanted to verify how far you are willing to go to get a list generated for you that’s probably not even that unique from the other Y number of people who love being suggested obvious information.
How many combinations of the restaurants around you do you think exist and are needed to provide that information? Certainly need Uber guzzling down Terabytes of data to rank the local Chiles over the local Applebees.
Lets be honest, restaurant suggestions aren’t a real problem anyone has.
knollimar
Good recommendations are places where you maximize payment [to people willing to pay], not best experience.
It's going to be a conflict of interest like most ads. It's not optimized for you but toward you
null
The business life-cycle: