Uber ‘shared trip’ data leaked into Google search results
Zack Whitaker reports:
Dozens of trips taken using private car service Uber have been cached by Google, making them available to anyone with a simple search term.
By site-searching “trip.uber.com” in Google, a list of past trips appear in the search results.
These trips are shared by the user from the mobile app, allowing others to track their current location, and other information associated with the ride — including the driver’s name, and car registration — from a single link. Many tweet their location and estimate arrival times. After a hiatus, Google recently started picking up tweets again in search results.
Read more on ZDNet. It’s important to note that by posting this story, I am not suggesting that Uber leaked the data. It appears to be the case that users are sharing their data and it’s getting picked up by Google. If that’s the case, that’s not Uber’s fault or responsibility.
Thanks to the Canadian reader who submitted this link.
2 comments to “Uber ‘shared trip’ data leaked into Google search results”
skim - September 5, 2015
This is still Uber’s responsibility. Uber should have set up robots.txt for trip.uber.com to deny all robots. This will tell Google and other search engines to not crawl that particular website. http://www.robotstxt.org/
Dissent - September 5, 2015
Good point. That’s why I love when readers comment on this site. It makes me think.