All mentioned information is Open Data, IIRC because NYC has a pretty progressive policy in place that anything that ties into public transport - like citibike - has to publish this type of stuff. As it should be. The "scraping" this guy does is most likely using the provided API, if only because if you pinged everything Citi Bike entity manually every minute the DDoS-Protection would block you out.

Removed from any specific case, throwing out accusations and tipping off the NYPD is garbage. I'm pretty sure somewhere in the 13 gajillian dollar budget they'll find someone who can go to the NYC Open Data Website and check this.

I don't think the answer to someone doing this bullshit is to walled garden it all. The list of publicized data as shown here is just basically shit you need to track anyways to keep the service operational, this'd exist anyway. The choice then is to either abolish Citi Bike and anything like it (including if it was run by the municipality, they'd need the same data) or alternatively only citi bike has the data, which means the cops still get it, but you don't.

[–] Rojo27@hexbear.net 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Ok, that makes sense. I had no idea that CitiBike data was publicly accessible.

[–] 7bicycles@hexbear.net 15 points 3 weeks ago

Even if it wasn't him scraping the data is not the issue here for the aforementioned reasons. It all exists anyways, neatly organized on centralized server infrastructure. This Data cannot not exist unless you want to turn back the clock to like thousands of dudes on rikshas. Given that, it's either only the state can see it and use it, or everybody can.

What this guy did is dumbass witchhunting. Even removed from the idea a guy doing a planned assassination would stoop so low as to fuck with a citibke to disable or futz it's tracking, the expanded post simply shows this is the only bike taken from a nearby station and going northbound and dropped off there. Guy might've gotten it from one like half an hour away.