Following in the steps of other major tech companies, ride-hailing service Uber released on Tuesday its first transparency report.
In the report, Uber (UBER) outlines the requests and information it has provided between July and December 2015 to U.S. State and federal agencies including regulatory bodies, airport authorities, and law enforcement agencies. In total, Uber received 33 requests from regulatory agencies, 34 from airport authorities, and 408 requests for rider account information and 205 for driver account information from law enforcement agencies.
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In the case of requests from regulatory agencies, Uber says that it sometimes “pushes back” on reporting requirements, meaning that it attempts to negotiate the scope of the information it shares. According to the company, that’s because it feels the information requested is “commercially or personally sensitive” and it doesn’t believe the agency needs it in order to do its job. This isn’t surprising given ride-hailing companies’ usual resistance to sharing too much with regulators. Uber was able to negotiate this in 42.4% of the cases, the report shows.
When it comes to airports, transportation services, including ride-hailing companies, directly agree to each airport’s own rules and regulations. As such, Uber’s report shows that it’s fully complied to all reporting requirements, presumably in order to continue to ferry passengers to and from them, a lucrative portion of its business.
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As for law enforcement-related requests, most came from state authorities, according to the report. Subpoenas were the most common form of these requests, and Uber produced data in 82.8% of the cases. The company says that most requests are related to fraud investigations or the use of stolen credit cards, though some are also related to safety incidents. Uber also notes that as of the date of the report, it has not received any national security-related requests.
Going forward, Uber will release a report every six months, a company spokesman told Coins2Day. Uber rival Lyft has not released its own report, but we’ve reached out to the company about whether it intends to and will update if we hear back.
Other companies that regularly release reports on government requests for data include Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo.
The story has been updated to show that Uber will release a report every six months.
