SerpApi.Org
High-end taxi company Wheely whisks its celebrity and business clientele around in unmarked vehicles and makes its drivers sign nondisclosure agreements. But in New York, there is a big hole in its plan for complete discretion: A city requirement that hired vehicles provide detailed data on where they drive customers.
The company entered the New York market in March but is now locked in a legal battle over a longstanding city requirement that all for-hire vehicles submit monthly records of every trip, including the time and location of every pickup and drop-off, as well as the driver identification and vehicle license number. Wheely argues that this amounts to a widespread system of state surveillance, affecting millions of riders each year.
“We believe that riders have the right to travel in their city without their movements being tracked by the government,” Wheely founder and Chief Executive Anton Chirkunov said in an interview.
Chirkunov, a Swiss-Russian businessman, started Wheely in London in 2012. It has since also expanded to Paris and Dubai. The company’s drivers attend a “Chauffeur Academy” to learn proper etiquette, dress and discretion. Once they graduate, drivers make up to $12,000 a month.
Its fleet of mostly Mercedes, Cadillacs and Range Rovers comes stocked with chargers, water and hot towels. “We design our products and services to protect people’s privacy because only DNA is harder to anonymize than human movements,” the company’s website says, quoting Georgetown law and privacy expert Paul Ohm.
The city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, which collects the taxi data, says the rule is necessary for drivers’ safety to ensure they aren’t traveling unreasonably long distances in a day, which can lead to fatigue and accidents.
“Our longstanding data provision rules are vital to driver and passenger safety, corporate accountability, and our ability to make informed decisions as we regulate the largest industry of its kind in the United States,” TLC spokesman Jason Kersten said.
Wheely sued the city earlier this year, arguing its rules violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches that place limits on the government’s ability to demand sensitive customer data. Wheely also says that advances in technology have meant that the data—some of which the city makes public in anonymized form—can be more easily combined with other sources and used to identify individuals, including where they live, work or worship.
Those concerns aren’t entirely theoretical. More than a decade ago, a local data nerd was able to obtain taxi commission data and cross-reference it with photos on celebrity gossip blogs to purportedly show that some celebrities didn’t tip their drivers.
Wheely is currently appealing its case after a judge this spring said the relatively modest privacy intrusion of asking Wheely to provide the data was outweighed by the city’s legitimate safety concerns. The company was well aware of the reporting requirements when it decided to enter the city’s highly regulated taxi industry, the judge said.
Wheely is free to leave the New York City market—as it did in Moscow over similar demands—or play by the city’s existing rules, Judge Colleen McMahon wrote. “What it cannot do is persuade this Court that any of its arguments for why the TLC Rules are unconstitutional, or otherwise unlawful, has the slightest merit,” she wrote.
The company hopes that its case could get a boost from a recent Supreme Court decision regarding the hurdles police need to clear to search cellphone location data. The court found that location data in general is more sensitive than other business records.
An unlikely coalition of supporters has lined up, from the libertarian Cato Institute to the Legal Aid Society to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“The district court’s decision could subject many New Yorkers to the possibility of long-term and continuous surveillance,” the Cato Institute wrote in a legal brief.
Write to Greta Reich at [email protected]