San Francisco The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Northern and Southern California today asked a federal appeals court to reinstate a lawsuit they filed on behalf of electric scooter riders challenging the constitutionality of Los Angeles’ highly privacy-invasive collection of detailed trip data and real-time locations and routes of scooters used by thousands of residents each day.
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) collects from operators of dockless vehicles like Lyft, Bird, and Lime information about every single scooter trip taken within city limits. It uses software it developed to gather location data through Global Positioning System (GPS) trackers on scooters. The system doesn’t capture the identity of riders directly, but collects with precision riders’ location, routes, and destinations to within a few feet, which can easily be used to reveal the identities of riders.