Uber is in the news again for all the wrong reasons (Uber accused of letting staff spy on celebs and exes, Uber told to stop self-driving in California and Is Uber getting too vital to fail?). I recall some time ago finding this link (on Matt Palmer’s blog) to an article posted on Uber’s own official blog. As Matt pointed out, the article had been removed from the Uber site, but a copy was saved in the Wayback Machine.

What struck me about the various comments I found relating to the Uber articles was that they seemed critical of Uber for various relatively minor reasons but seemed to miss what I consider to be the main message.

So for example:

• Uber does not (or did not) have adequate user privacy controls on its internal systems (too many staff had access to something called ‘God View’).

• Uber were initially oblivious of the implications of allowing a blog spokesman (the article seems to have been posted by Bradley Voytek, Assistant Professor of Computational Cognitive Science and Neuroscience at UC San Diego) to describe using their collected data to analyse the frequency of apparent weekend liaisons by their users. We have no way of really knowing if Uber removed the article due to adverse comment, a spontaneous realisation of how inappropriate it was or because of a routine re-vamp of their site - you can draw your own conclusions.

• Uber has apparently replaced the controversial ‘God View’ tool with something they’ve named ‘Heaven View’ - a rose by any other name…

• That Uber’s blog focussed on a salacious interpretation of their data - no suggestion of any illegal behaviour, but you can almost hear Nanny tutting in the background. Well, OK, maybe that’s just me or maybe it was a failed attempt to be funny.

• That Uber is getting too big for its boots and not applying relevant regulations.

For me, the main message is right there in full view in the Uber blog.

The author seemed genuinely enthusiastic and keen to demonstrate how he could take some collected data and analyse it in order to gain an insight into the data subjects’ behaviour. Never mind that data protection legislation requires that data should not be used for a purpose for which it was not collected - this guy demonstrated that collected data can be interesting.

No doubt Uber’s lawyers could waste a court’s valuable time and demonstrate that:

• Uber was a young company then but has now learned its lesson Yeronner.

• Uber didn’t break any data protection regulations because they had used a broad enough definition of what information they were going to collect and what they were going to use it for to beat any prosecution.

• Uber didn’t do it - it was the nutty professor.

• Uber is really, really sorry and won’t do it again - not that it actually did anything, of course.

But please note - data gathered about our behaviour is interesting. It can be used in ways that we can’t envisage at the moment. Some interesting uses may be for our own benefit but often our data will be used for the benefit of advertisers and marketeers - and that is only the legal uses of our data. If our collected data is used illegally (that is to say, by criminals) then very bad things can happen to us. Let’s start with fraud or theft and go on to bribery, stalking, blackmail and physical violence - and those are just the crimes that I can envisage, the (smart) bad guys may have moved on from such trivia long ago.

Now, how do I turn off location tracking on this thing?

But of course, you needn’t really worry. Nobody is illegally gathering your data. Every single Uber employee who had access to ‘God View’ is fully vetted, trustworthy, careful and above reproach. Nobody is trying to hack into Uber’s systems or use your data for interesting projects. Besides which Uber’s systems are unhackable… You’ll be fine.