Announcing SharedStreets’ Trusted Data Exchange
Mobility technologies are reshaping the way people move around cities across the world. As more private mobility options arrive on city streets, cities are asking for data to understand the impacts of the new mobility options. This data allows cities to plan for new services, make adjustments to existing mobility services, evaluate access, highlight emerging safety issues, verify compliance with any permit or regulatory condition, and more.
At SharedStreets, we think cities need data to manage their streets, and that everyone is entitled to location privacy. That means cities need data about the companies who use their streets and they need to know that data is correct and consistent. This needs to be accomplished in a manner that doesn’t expose individuals’ behavior patterns or personal location data. To support oversight, we don’t just need data, we also need trust and accountability.
Right now, there is no standard way to exchange aggregate mobility data that can be trusted by regulators and governments to be complete and consistent. We’re going to change that and we need your participation.
This fall, with the support of the New Urban Mobility alliance (NUMO), we’re working to build technical infrastructure that supports a trusted data exchange designed to protect personal privacy, deliver complete and consistent data, and help cities reconcile when that doesn’t happen. And we’re excited to announce that the first piece of that infrastructure is available for your city to use.
What Mobility Metrics V3 does now:
Transparent, predictable data processing enables trusted aggregation and analysis. Aggregation methods depend on trust in input data and assurance that data can be reprocessed in the future to generate new analysis. Hash manifests allow changes in historical data to be detected and analyzed by city staff and officials.
The SharedStreets Mobility Metrics aggregator now signs each report with a reproducible receipt or hash. This means that when the underlying data changes for any reason, the hash will change too. This allows a city to compare versions of daily reports run on one day with another and understand if anything has changed by simply looking at the hash.
This reproducible report receipt is generated by hashing the individual pieces of raw data that are used to generate the report. This means that if one piece of the report changes, like the number of scooters on the street or a single status change, the hash receipt will also change. This allows cities to see if any changes are made without maintaining record of all raw data because each piece has its’ own hash.
The version of the aggregation code is also embedded in the signature. This means that if SharedStreets changes the way any metrics are calculated from one version to the next, the hash will change. This allows cities to make sure that the right version is run for the metrics they want.
This can allow the data to be reconciled between cities and companies. If historic data changes over time, reports are now versioned, and these reports let a city know which aspects of the data changed. All of these functions are performed without storing sensitive trip information.
You can find the newest version of Mobility Metrics on GitHub.
Still have questions? Please e-mail us. This is part of ongoing work and we want to be sure we’re explaining it so everyone can understand what happens under the hood.
Work with us!
We can’t do this without the input of people who want to use this data. If you’re a city or regulator and want to be a part of creating this software, we’d like to invite you to be part of the Trusted Data Exchange Technical Committee. We will have monthly calls to get your thoughts, report out what we’re doing, and explain how it works. If you just want to follow along, stay tuned here and on twitter @sharedstreetsio, we’ll be sharing our work there as well.
