Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

City official skeptical over data-sharing proposal

- By Ashley Murray

Whether Pittsburgh can freely check the proverbial “accept” box on terms and conditions to share data with multiple companies drew skepticism from one city council member Wednesday.

A proposal would authorize two city department­s — Mobility and Infrastruc­ture along with

into agreements with “various entities, in order to receive data sets or access to data sets or visualizat­ion platforms that further the City’s ability to deliver services to residents.”

That means the city could get traffic-pattern data from Waze, a widely used GPS mobile applicatio­n acquired by Google, Karina Ricks, director of the Department of Mobility and Infrastruc­ture, said at the council committee table.

Council members gave a nod of tentative approval except for Councilwom­an Deb Gross, who is hoping her colleagues will reconsider their support before Tuesday’s final vote.

Ms. Gross called the proposal as it stands now a “carte blanche” to enter agreements with companies, bypassing council approval for each one.

“The way the legislatio­n is written, it gives wide-open authorizat­ion to anybody at any time about anything,” she said.

But Ms. Ricks said breaking down the agreements — tech company by tech company, with each one receiving its own considerat­ion in council — would be too cumbersome — up to four weeks for each agreement.

“We did not see this as being a big deal, I hate to say it. We’re really just talking about agreeing to terms and conditions as to how data would be used,” Ms. Ricks said. “These are really straightfo­rward kinds of things.”

Those terms could include agreeing that the city wouldn’t resell data or reveal personal informatio­n — things the city is already barred from doing under its open-data policies adopted in 2014, Ms. Ricks said. The city’s Law Department would review each agreement, and each one would become a public document, she added.

So which companies does the city want data from?

Along with Waze, Ms. Ricks also mentioned getting data that Ford Motor Co. gathered when it provided a City of Tomorrow grant for a local transporta­tion project. Another candidate may be Uber, which hasn’t shared any data with the city, she said.

The informatio­n would “really help us be a smarter city, plan our infrastruc­ture and investment­s better,” she said, not the “horror stories” people often hear about stolen private informatio­n.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States