The Minneapolis City Council voted Thursday to delay implementation of a wage hike for rideshare drivers from May 1 to July 1, allowing more time for competing transportation network companies to launch their services in light of the threatened departure of Uber and Lyft.

“This is about refining this policy,” said Minneapolis Council President Elliott Payne, addressing the council. “This is not about starting from scratch. … We’ve done a lot of deep work here.”

The decision offers a temporary reprieve for St. Paul and the surrounding region, where business leaders, advocates for the disabled and others have waited anxiously to see how the vote would play out.

Minneapolis council members said only four rideshare companies have submitted applications to get licensed by the city of Minneapolis. Only one company — Wheels, LLC, operating as “MyWeels” — had submitted a complete application to the city of St. Paul as of mid-week, according to a spokesman for the St. Paul Department of Safety and Inspections.

The added time also opens the door to additional changes to the Minneapolis wage ordinance, which is designed to guarantee that rideshare drivers recoup at least the equivalent of the city minimum wage, with benefits, by earning $1.40 per mile, $0.51 per minute while they operate within the city limits.

The new implementation date was approved 13-0 and included in an ordinance amendment proposed by Minneapolis Council Member Katie Cashman, co-sponsored by Payne and Council Member Aurin Chowdhury.

Two additional amendments that would have reduced or rescinded the wage hikes altogether failed on a 10-3 vote, respectively.

Prices temporarily surge

A spirited discussion took up the majority of the two-hour meeting, at times drawing heckles from the audience.

“Uber and Lyft are not just exploiting drivers, but also riders too,” said Minneapolis Council Member Jamal Osman, noting most drivers logged out around 7 a.m. Wednesday to pray during the Muslim holiday. “Uber and Lyft were hiking the price. For a seven-minute trip they were charging customers…$76 or $80. Less than a mile — and I have screen shots — was $70.”

In a letter this week to the Minneapolis City Council and the Minneapolis City Attorney’s office, the Insurance Federation of Minnesota urged the city to ensure that any new transportation network companies seeking licensure either offer the correct insurance or require that their drivers get their own business auto insurance, the appropriate level of coverage for “livery services” that transport goods or people.

Liveries are not included in personal auto coverage.

Uber, Lyft to delay departure

Uber indicated this week it would delay its departure from serving the Twin Cities until the Minneapolis wage hike takes effect.

“If the effective date is moved, we will continue to operate,” said Josh Gold, senior director of policy and communications for Uber, in an interview Tuesday. “We’re having conversations with state lawmakers. We’re open to having conversations with council members.”

CJ Macklin, a senior policy manager with Lyft, forwarded a statement from the company on Thursday indicating they would also continue to operate in Minneapolis until July 1.

Lyft has said it will continue to serve St. Paul and the surrounding region, but it will not honor rides beginning or ending in Minneapolis once wages go up. “The fundamental facts remain the same,” reads the letter. “This ordinance will make rides too expensive for most riders, meaning drivers will ultimately earn less.”

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Shawn Wen | (TNS) Bloomberg News

In 2012 a 15-year-old girl died in Berlin after being hit by a subway train. Her bereaved parents asked Facebook to turn over her private messages in hopes of understanding whether her death was a suicide or an accident.

Facebook refused. Her death had already been reported to the social media site, which then converted her profile to a “memorialized account.” According to the company’s policy at the time, no one could access memorialized accounts, even with a password. After years of lawsuits and appeals, Germany’s highest court in 2018 ordered Facebook to turn over the profile.

The “Afterlife of Data” (April 11, University of Chicago Press), a slim book by Carl Öhman, an assistant professor of political science at Uppsala University in Sweden, takes on the central question of whether Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., as well as companies such as Alphabet Inc. and Apple Inc., should have the power to decide what happens to our data after our deaths.

Modern-day societies have many rituals and customs for handling the dead’s physical remains but no established practices to deal with digital ones. Öhman argues that “the data we leave behind upon death can be regarded as nothing less than an informational corpse.”

Can we allow such a responsibility to fall, by default, to the Big Tech companies? Öhman tells us this is one of the most pressing questions of our era, because anyone with internet access generates massive quantities of data, much of which will continue to exist after the originator’s death.

The book builds off a study that Öhman and his co-author, David Watson, published in 2019 estimating that Facebook would have the profiles of almost 5 billion dead users by the end of the century. (That number assumes the site will keep growing at current rates, a very big if.)

Öhman says large tech companies’ possession of deceased user data is a collective problem, because they would own “a truly global archive of human behavior,” constituting the historical artifacts of generations of users. In these companies’ servers, they would have the data patterns of entire populations of people and the documentation of contemporary events and movements such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Arab Spring.

There’s also no financial incentive for these companies to act as a responsible estate manager. They may look for ways to monetize profiles of the deceased, sell their data, or simply get rid of it for reasons as arbitrary as saving server space.

Facebook’s “memorialized” accounts, which turn the profile into a tribute page where friends can visit and post, are designed to be static. In 2015 the company added a feature that allows a user to arrange for a “legacy contact” to manage the page after the account holder’s death. But the contact can’t log in or read messages; they are able to curate tribute posts or request that accounts be removed. Öhman finds this solution inadequate, posing a rather obvious question: What happens when the legacy contact dies?

Öhman’s book is the work of an academic, and at times, his attempts to reach the general reader feel clumsy. He asks us to imagine Napoleon Bonaparte’s Facebook messages and feels the need to explain that Karl Marx’s “influence on socialist thought cannot be matched by any other thinker.”

A bigger issues is that his urgency feels shortsighted to the casual news reader, at times, given that tech companies are reckoning with more immediate, equally pressing social concerns: They routinely make decisions regarding free speech, the workings of democracy and the mental health of a generation of young people.

The stakes can be life or death. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year found that the suicide rate among American teen girls is up 60% from what it was a decade ago, a jump that correlates with the growing ubiquity of smartphones. In 2018, Facebook admitted to culpability for the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, writing in its report that the company allowed its platform to be used to “foment division and incite offline violence.”

Despite all of this, no legislation has meaningfully curbed teen social media use or the tech platforms’ influence over political speech. Yes, they may one day decide to sell or destroy the data of the dead, but they already abuse the data of the living.

As with much academic writing, Öhman poses a lot of questions and offers little in the way of solutions. He posits that no business should have the responsibility of deciding what to do with our digital remains, nor should any public institution.

Instead, he says this problem should be dealt with collectively, with “as many people and perspectives as possible be part of the question.” He exhorts us, “Now is the time to start building such systems.” But what those systems look like is still mysterious to him.

In one evocative section, however, Öhman comes close to an answer. He details the death practices of an early Paleolithic people called the Natufians, who lived among the skulls of their loved ones that they decorated with plaster and seashells. Before them, hunter gatherers left the bodies of their loved ones to decay in the wild. But once people occupied permanent dwellings, they had to invent funerary practices. “Like the Paleolithic tribes before us, we must learn to live with a new kind of presence of the dead,” he says.

“We are the new Natufians,” Öhman writes. I take this to mean that we are entering an era where we will be surrounded by the digital remains of our friends and family whether we like it or not.

It suggests that we are in the nascent stages of reckoning with an uncomfortable truth: The people we love will die, but their data will continue to live indefinitely, digital ghosts in the cloud. At the moment, there’s nothing stopping the Metas and Googles of the world from exploiting them—or perhaps worse, erasing them permanently.

___

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Interim Col. Christina Bogojevic. (Courtesy of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety)

Interim Col. Christina Bogojevic will be the Minnesota State Patrol’s next colonel, the Department of Public Safety announced on Thursday.

Bogojevic, who has been with the State Patrol for more than 20 years, served as second in command since December 2022.

“Interim Col. Bogojevic brings a wealth of knowledge, leadership and dedication, not only to the organization, but to law enforcement as a whole,” Department of Public Safety Commissioner Bob Jacobson said, in a statement. “She embodies the State Patrol’s core values and cares deeply for the people with whom she works with and serves. I am confident she will continue to make a positive impact within the State Patrol and communities across our state.”

Bogojevic joined the State Patrol in 2003. Before she was named lieutenant colonel, Bogojevic served as captain of the Rochester district, mobile response commander, lieutenant in the Commercial Vehicle section, investigator, recruiter and as a crash reconstruction specialist.

“Working for the State Patrol is so much more than a job to me. It’s a passion. I care deeply about our people and our mission. I’m honored to have the opportunity to serve as chief,” Bogojevic said in a statement. “I look forward to working with Minnesota State Patrol staff and allied agencies who work so hard to keep residents safe on Minnesota roadways.”

Bogojevic said she looks forward to working on efforts to lower Minnesota’s traffic fatality rate. The rate is up this year compared to last year. She said she is also passionate about developing innovative ways to recruit and retain troopers.

Bogojevic was named interim colonel after Col. Matt Langer’s announcement that he was leaving the State Patrol for a position with the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

She officially takes over as colonel on May 2.

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