Hi, and welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we review a new scooter craze for mobility options in cities and the legal issues they are creating.
Just this past week in my own town of Cincinnati, the company Bird descended upon us with a slew of rentable motorized scooters that people can use to easily transport from one part of town to another. Bird is one of three electronic scooter companies, the others being Lime and Spin, to hit the streets in recent weeks and months in major cities. It's basically a more advanced version of bike share programs available in many cities, or a less advanced version of electronic car rentals available in some cities.
The rentals are fairly inexpensive as well, typically costing $1 plus a few cents per minute. Thus, many people have immediately taken advantage of this new option for mobility in cities, but this has already begun to raise some legal issues and concerns.
First, electronic scooters are much like bikes in that it can be unclear whether they belong on the roadways or on the sidewalk with pedestrians. This lack of clarity has led to some accidents, and liability issues for such accidents can be hard to sort out in a new context where the rules are not clearly established. Furthermore, cities are needing to adjust just like they have with rentable cars and bikes to dealing with problems such as scooters being left in inconvenient places around the city.
But the biggest potential issue actually relates to privacy law for the consumers, which is something most users will not think about when deciding to rent a scooter. All three of these companies persistently track your whereabouts when on the scooter, so as to protect themselves from loss of the scooters. This comes with the downside that these companies know exactly where their consumers have been, which could include information on attending things like political protests or certain religious services. As of now, the companies have not disclosed how long they reserve this information, and they have explicitly reserved the right to share the information with third parties.
Organizations like the ACLU are already expressing concerns with these practices from the scooter companies, and they may be able to pressure the companies to at least better disclose their privacy and information policies. But if you plan to take advantage of this new mobility option, you should do so with the knowledge that they are tracking you, associating your movements with the identity information they collect such as driver's license and credit card information.
The Bottom Line is, new technologies can make things like mobility within a city much easier, but they often come with new legal issues to figure out. While in the early phase of things like the scooter craze, consumers need to stay as informed as possible of the risks involved before agreeing to use the new technology. That being said, I suspect many of these issues will be sorted out and it will be for the better for all who have this new additional option.
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