Consider the chaos on the streets of Los Angeles. An unprecedented number of cars idling in traffic. Drivers working for the ride-hail apps Uber and Lyft zooming about, picking up and dropping off fares. Buses rolling by, and commuters ambling to train stations. Cyclists, some aboard bike-share cycles, swerving to avoid everyone else. And now, scooters waiting on what seems like every corner, sometimes haphazardly piled on top of each other. Eight scooter- and bike-share companies are permitted to operate up to 36,170 vehicles within Los Angeles county.

Aarian Marshall covers autonomous vehicles, transportation policy, and urban planning for WIRED.

The madness will only grow. Delivery robot companies have designs on sidewalks. Drone startups want to fill the skies with prescriptions and burritos. Companies pin their hopes on “electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles”—autonomous, flying taxis. Others pour money into developing self-driving cars, which might one day operate as robotic taxi fleets.

Cities like LA want to master the mayhem. They want to keep streets safe for everyone, and traffic at bay. They want to fight pollution and climate change. They want to know where to spend money on infrastructure and where they can skimp. They want to ensure that companies allowed to use public streets and sidewalks make products available to as many residents as possible, regardless of income or color or community. And they want to ensure that the companies they’ve permitted to operate on their streets are following the rules.

All of that requires data. And Los Angeles officials think they’ve found an unlikely place to begin collecting it: scooters. Scooters use public sidewalks, so they require permits from municipal officials. Data on where those scooters are parked, and where they travel each day, could help officials plan for the future. Over time, the data also could provide the foundation for an app offering residents real-time info about their favorite transit modes. Bike? Scooter? Jet pack? An air traffic control of the ground.

But LA’s strategy for getting that data is making privacy advocates---and companies like Uber and Lyft, which operate both scooter and ride-hail services in the city—nervous. The resulting tussle has implications well beyond Los Angeles, and scooters.

Last summer, Los Angeles began work on a new data standard, called the Mobility Data Specification. At its core, MDS is just a standardized way for cities and private companies to share data about their operations. To operate in Los Angeles, a city whose placid weather and flat-ish streets make an appealing market for scooter and bike companies, the firms had to agree to share data with LA’s Department of Transportation through MDS. They had to agree to share anonymized trip data, updated every 24 hours, on where each scooter or bike trip starts, where it ends, and its route through the city. And they had to agree to allow the city to send them information—where, say, scooters are banned from operating, or where, because of increased congestion, they might be needed soon.

“MDS solves a real problem, and it fills a real need, because it’s an elegant tool that’s easy to use,” says Seleta Reynolds, the general manager of LADOT. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the data standard has caught on elsewhere. Cities including Columbus, Ohio; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Omaha, Nebraska; and San Jose, California, are demanding companies use MDS if they want to operate on those cities’ streets. Others are considering doing the same.

To assuage privacy concerns, Los Angeles officials issued a set of legally binding “data protection principles.” The city promised to aggregate the anonymized data, de-identifying and destroying the information it did not need. It would only allow law enforcement access to the info through subpoena. And the city pledged to be very careful before releasing any trip info to the public.