MP promises to grill UK.gov over revelations that Uber handed '2,000 pieces' of user data to London cops a year Conservative backbencher David Davis has vowed to ask questions in Parliament over Uber's seemingly unregulated sharing of data with police and transport regulators as it battled to save its London private hire operator's licence. The outspoken one-time Brexit Secretary took to Twitter on Friday, sharing a story from The Times …
Passing the information onto the police or TfL without a valid warrant or the informed consent of the identifiable persons whose data is being shared is a grave breech of GDPR.
I guess that their only hope is that Brexit goes through and the UK data protection laws are castrated, before this gets to court.
@Gordon 10
"Errr. Because Uber was the data controller - hence the responsibility to guard the data was theirs."
Ok thats fine. No dispute. So the public regulators say 'nice business you got there, shame if we hobble it'. Under the pressure of having the weight of the state applied against you and rolling over as demanded by said state which is most likely for most people and businesses?
My surprise alarm did not go off with this. Which is strange because it has also never gone off with any revelations of companies sharing information with the authorities and being allowed to continue in their nefarious activities. One day I may yet be surprised. I also doubt it will go off when it is ruled they can continue their business.
However, do we have any evidence that the conversation wasn't a combination of:
"We were rather hoping you could share some information on this individual." "Sure, no problem."
and
"Hey, this chap's been flagged several of our fraud detection systems. You couldn't take a look, see if he's being naughty could you?" "Well, we'll be able to do him for money laundering at the very least, so sure, it'll help boost conviction rates."
No corruption, no illegality.
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Well duh. The Police these days are just an extension of the NSA - they want all the data they can get whether it is pertinent to the case or not.
And it's very nice to know that Uber sends thousands of user data to the police - how much of that sharing actually brought a condemnation ?
How much of it was actually useful in court ?
That's the other problem I have with all this data sharing going on. Law enforcement all over the world now steadfastly declares that it is very useful to them, but never declares how many cases they won because of it.
>How much of it was actually useful in court ?
It is necessary to protect against viking invasions - the details of which we can't tell you about for national security.
1st millennium - no warrantless wiretaps = lots of viking invasions
2nd millennium - increasing number of privacy violations = significant decrease in viking attacks
3rd millennium - total police surveillance = no viking attacks !
Why would any Police organisation, or "unit" support Ubers appeal? Surely at best, Police should only ever be objecting or not objecting? It's not the place of Police to support any commercial organisation, be it a taxi operator or a pub. They should be consulted and if necessary lodge an objection to a licence application, but that is all.
@John Brown (no body)
"Why would any Police organisation, or "unit" support Ubers appeal? Surely at best, Police should only ever be objecting or not objecting?"
Yup. But if you give a little power they always want more. 'Nice business you got there, shame if it was banned. We can put in a good word... for a price'
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