According to Gizmodo, Uber has launched a new advertising program called Uber Intelligence that lets marketers combine their own customer data with granular Uber ride and delivery information. The system was built in partnership with a SaaS company called LiveRamp, which provides a “clean room” cloud service for merging data sets. Uber’s global head of measurement, Edwin Wong, was hired in May when the company was projecting $1.5 billion in annual ad revenue, a 60% increase from earlier in 2024. The company started selling location data to advertisers back in 2022 and became profitable in 2023. With this new tool, advertisers can gain insights into behaviors like what a user eats and how often they move through specific neighborhoods.
The Privacy “Clean Room” Paradox
Here’s the thing about this “clean room” setup. It’s supposed to be the elegant, privacy-compliant solution. LiveRamp’s clean rooms are billed as secure digital workshops where data is combined without raw personal info being exposed. But let’s be real. The output is still incredibly intimate. An advertiser won’t see “John Smith at 123 Main St,” but they will know that a cluster of high-value users frequently travels from the financial district to a specific sushi restaurant after 7 PM. Is that really anonymous? It creates a profile so detailed that the lack of a direct name feels like a technicality. Uber gave the example of a hotel chain identifying nearby restaurants to rope into a loyalty program. That sounds helpful, but it’s a tiny step from there to inferring your income, your social habits, and your vulnerabilities.
Uber’s Unique (And Creepy) Advantage
This move highlights Uber’s killer app in the data world: terrestrial intelligence. As analyst Andrew Frank noted, this isn’t like Google knowing what you searched for or Amazon knowing what you bought. This is Uber knowing where you physically are in the real world, where you go, and what you do there. They know the bar you left from at 1 AM, the doctor’s office you visit weekly, and the cheap lunch spot you rely on. It’s a continuous stream of offline behavior that other platforms can only guess at. Combining that with delivery data tells them what you eat at home, too. It’s a staggeringly complete picture of a person’s life. And now, that picture is for sale.
The Profitability Pact
So why now? The timeline is pretty damning. As VICE reported, they started selling location data in 2022. They turned a profit in 2023. Now in 2024, they’re doubling down with this advanced system. It directly fulfills that 2019 leak about exploiting “wildly successful data collection” to become profitable. The ads business isn’t a side hustle; it’s looking like a core pillar. Edwin Wong’s hiring and that $1.5 billion revenue projection, which Digiday covered, show this is a serious growth engine. The ride-hailing was just the data collection mechanism. The real product, it seems increasingly, is us and our patterns.
A Regulatory Collision Course
But Frank also warned about the trust and regulation problem. And he’s right. People might tolerate ads for pizza based on a web search. But will they tolerate their insurance company potentially inferring risk from their travel patterns? Or employers seeing hints about their lifestyle? This feels like it’s on a collision course with privacy laws like GDPR and various state laws in the U.S. The “clean room” might meet current industry standards, but those standards have a habit of changing quickly once the public and legislators get creeped out. Uber is betting that the seamless, catered ad experience will be worth the privacy trade-off. I’m not convinced users will agree when they fully understand the depth of the profiling. Tread lightly? They’re already sprinting. The backlash is probably just a matter of time.
