Uber has now introduced a cool new feature in its taxi app. It will help the taxi drivers to reach the users by tracking their location, and pick them up. The app will seek permission from the user asking whether they would like to share their location or not. The company says the new feature will help them to increase the speed of the pick up considerably, making them a lot quicker than the conventional method of hinting location.
The app will also ask the user to access their contacts, to send promotional messages to them. This access requires Uber to update its policy, hence the company is out with a new and updated privacy policy.
Uber’s new privacy policy elaborates precisely about the data Uber asks for, and how that data be used for improvement of their services. “Users will be in control: they will be able to choose whether to share the data with Uber,” said Katherine Tassi, Uber’s managing counsel of data privacy.
Uber was pressurized to update its privacy policies as the external review of its earlier policies due to some issues and controversies relating to the location tracking were found inappropriate and difficult to be understood by the users. To recall, there were past incidences of Uber employees tracking a Buzzfeed reporter and also a high-profile venture capitalist, using the God view tracker feature, which is inbuilt in the app. Although the driver did not have any access to the God View tracking feature, company’s corporate employees had its access, and could monitor the user’s activities. This incident faced a lot of criticism of the public, leading to some controversies as well.
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The new privacy policy lists all the data it collects from its users, with or without consent. It is also made simpler for the common people to understand properly. It clearly states that the company keeps a record of user’s transactions that include amount, distance traveled, date and time, and also the information of the device used that include model, OS version, serial number, UDID, mobile network, preferred language and other such stuff.
The new policies come into effect from July 15, and the users who use the app after that, automatically agree to these updated privacy policies. The app will ask you for access to location and your address books before automatically accepting new policies.