Uber’s ‘God View’ Was Once Available to Drivers

Uber’s ‘God View’ Was Once Available to Drivers:

I reached out to Chris Parsons, a cybersurveillance researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, to discuss Uber’s God View and the ramifications for users.

“Uber understandably has infrastructure in place to monitor where its drivers are and a business case can be made for some degree of monitoring of how, and how often, their clients use the service,“ he said. “However, such data must be carefully controlled with strict security, privacy, and access safeguards. At this point it doesn’t appear that such have been stringently developed or applied.”

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“We know that national security and intelligence agencies are deeply interested in where people travel to, and in understanding the movement patterns of individuals regardless of their being identified as ‘targets’ of government surveillance,” Parsons continued. “And Uber’s seeming failure to secure its data—to the point where developers have already found ways of querying the data by reverse-engineering Uber’s mobile client software—would suggest that an intelligence or security service that was sufficiently motivated could do the same.”

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“There’s no evidence that such a security or intelligence service has ‘cracked’ Uber but past Snowden revelations have revealed that the NSA and its partners are voracious collectors of all kinds of tracking data,” Parsons concluded. “There’s no reason why these agencies wouldn’t be as interested in Uber’s data as other services’ data that could identify where, and how often, people travel around their cities and around the world.”