The driver said, that while he was trying to add or edit information in Uber’s Partners App, he came across a screen that contains documents for complete strangers, a legion of Uber drivers around the United States.
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A screencap of the leaked info, posted on an Uber driver forum. Speaking to Motherboard, one driver said that he was presented with thousands of confidential documents from other drivers when he tried to upload a document of his own, saying that he saw “a lot of taxi certification forms and livery drivers licenses” in addition to “W-9 forms with Social Security numbers for taxi cab companies”.
As many of you will already know, Uber has something of a poor reputation when it comes to protecting user and driver data.
Uber accidentally exposed the personal information of hundreds of US drivers during the Tuesday release of its “Uber Partner app”.
This is not the first time the U.S. company has had to tackle a security issue involving its drivers.
The leak exposed data on no more than 674 drivers in the USA, which resulted in fewer than a thousand documents exposed. In all, Uber says up to 1,000 documents were exposed.
The company, however, said in a statement that after being notified of the issue, its security team fixed in 30 minutes the cause of the bug.
An Uber driver, who asked Motherboard not to reveal his identity for fear of the company retaliating against him, found the bug while uploading a document. We’d like to thank the driver who drew it to our attention and apologise to those drivers whose information may have been affected. “Their security is incredibly important to Uber and we will follow up with them directly”. One user wrote: “This info is worse than credit card information… this info can be used to create accounts and verify identities online”.
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The issue is the latest security problem to affect Uber as its stock continues to rise across the world. And earlier this year, Uber users had complained for months that they were getting charged for trips they didn’t make.
