Ensuring Consumer Privacy While Making Every Mile Count
Privacy is an important focus area for us at Miles, and core to our promise to users
Our vision at Miles is to deliver value for every mile traveled, across every mode of transportation — with greener forms of travel rewarded even further. When people first hear about Miles, often the first questions they ask are “How does it work? How does it know what mode of transportation I’m taking?” and “how are you keeping my data private?”
Our immediate and unwavering answer is Miles does NOT share any personal data with any third parties. Trip information is used anonymously and in aggregate to help cities and transportation providers understand traffic behaviors and transit usage to reduce traffic congestion, and foster sustainability and greener modes of travel.
Using our proprietary AI engine, the Miles app automatically identifies your mode of transportation and rewards your travel seamlessly — all while keeping data completely private. Users can view a log of their trips from point A to B, and see how many Miles they earned for each trip, but at no time is that individualized information shared with any 3rd party.
To better explain how the Miles platform works, imagine there are a hundred Miles’ users within 0.3 miles of a downtown shopping area. By looking at mobility, travel and visit patterns in aggregate, the Miles platform can predict how many customers are likely to buy a coffee, need a meal or need gas, or could enjoy another type of product or service in the near future. Based on these ‘Near Future’ predictions, we can surface relevant rewards from brands and local merchants inside the app, which users can sort and review by category or location.
The Miles platform also helps cities and transportation partners to meet their goals of promoting greener travel and reducing traffic congestion, thus improving air quality, by incentivizing carpool trips, transit, biking, and other alternative and sustainable forms of transportation.
“The app’s journey data, which is opt-in and anonymized, is insightful and powerful,” notes Alex Kaufman, Investment Principal at JetBlue Technology Ventures. “The data can inform not just merchants and consumers, but also cities looking to incentivize public or alternative transportation. Already Miles is teaming up with several cities including Sacramento and the Contra Costa Transportation Authority to offer rewards that encourage users to choose public transit or stay off of highways during commute time.”
As its core mission, Miles rewards consumers who choose alternate forms of transportation while ensuring total privacy for our growing community of users.
