Uber to assist officials with coronavirus test and trace scheme
Uber has launched a service to give health officials access to data on its drivers and riders as part of coronavirus test and trace schemes.
Offered free of charge in any country where Uber currently operates, the service will provide health departments with data about who used Uber’s services and when, and allows health agencies to contact affected users about isolating.
Meanwhile Uber customers with a confirmed infection are automatically blocked from the platform for at least 14 days.
Information on an individual can be accessed within a few hours, Uber officials told Reuters.
In the new portal, data can be sought based on trip receipts or passenger names. Health officials are then prompted to specify what action they want Uber to take as part of the service.
However experts warned the service could pose a potential threat to user privacy, with the data involved being very valuable to cybercriminals.
“As Uber begins to roll this service out globally, they must abide by stringent UK data protection laws here, where breaches could lead to Uber facing significant fines,” said Aman Johal, director and lawyer at Your Lawyers, which previously represented claimants in data breach cases against British Airways and Ticketmaster.
Personal data in the UK is protected by GDPR where breaches could result in an organisation being fined up to €20m or up to four per cent of their annual worldwide turnover for the preceding financial year – whichever is greater.
“In Uber’s case, this could see them issued with a fine of over €143m —based on its turnover last year — which they would do well to take heed of,” he added.
In the first half of the year, Uber said it had received a total of 560 coronavirus-related requests from public health departments in 29 countries, most of which were processed by the company within two hours.
That compares to only 10 requests from health departments globally in 2019.
“We want to make sure that they are the experts and we follow their recommendations” on whether to block temporarily a driver, rider or courier from using Uber’s service, its chief of global law enforcement Mike Sullivan said.
The UK’s Department for Health and Social Care this morning admitted that NHS Test and Trace scheme operates in breach data protection laws, after it was launched in May without a privacy assessment.
The government’s legal team said that “there should have been impact assessments in whatever form in place addressing all of those aspects”.
Education secretary Gavin Williamson said this morning: “At no stage has any of this information gone out, nor will it go out. It is treated with the utmost greatest and highest security.
“But you will understand that to beat this virus we had to create a track and trace system and we had to get that up and running at incredible speed.”