When Uber launches its black car and ride-sharing service in a new, large city, it likes to mark the occasion with a lavish launch party. The company invites the local tech glitterati for craft cocktails, canapes, and a presentation by Uber's brash CEO Travis Kalanick. One of the go-to Uber party tricks for the events is to treat the attendees to Uber's "God View," which lets them see all of the Ubers in a city and the silhouettes of waiting Uber users who have flagged cars. When it's anonymous, it's a cool trick. But Julia Allison, an attendee at a launch party in Chicago in September 2011, says Uber treated guests to Creepy Stalker View, showing them the whereabouts and movements of 30 Uber users in New York in real time. She recognized half of the people listed and texted one of them, entrepreneur Peter Sims, revealing that she knew his current whereabouts. He was pissed when he found out, eventually quitting the service because he felt like he could no longer trust it. His post about being publicly stalked by the company has now gone viral, but Uber refuses to comment, and another two other guests at the event says they don't remember it happening.
Attendees at Uber's Boston launch party enjoying 'God View' (Photos via Uber's Facebook page)
This was back in 2011, when a casual disregard for user privacy may still have been cool in some circles. The $18.2-billion car-ordering behemoth was still a scrappy start-up then trying to make a splash; was it desperate enough to chum the waters with its users' private information? Allison says her memory is "not photographic" but that she recalls that Uber showed the whereabouts of about 30 "notable" Uber riders in New York.
It was 9 p.m. Chicago time, so 10 p.m. in the city that never sleeps. "I recognized about half of the names," she says. She had recently met one of the tracked users, Sims, and thought it would be funny to text him. Sims got the text "from someone he hardly knew," he recalls in a Medium post, asking him if he was in an Uber car at 33rd Street and 5th Avenue. He was on his way to Penn Station to catch a train to D.C. "She continued to text with updates of my car’s whereabouts," he recalls, which freaked him out. When she revealed how she knew where he was and that it was being broadcast at an Uber party in Chicago, he was "outraged." Oddly, it took him three years to express that outrage publicly, but he's now demanding an explanation and an apology from Uber, in a Medium post and in a letter to Kalanick and co-founder Garrett Camp. "I am not a professional journalist," Sims tells me by email of the reason for the delay.
"I texted him because it was innovative and exciting, but he obviously didn’t agree," says Allison. She doesn't recall the other people whose locations were broadcast, but thinks there was at least one Uber employee in the bunch and other "tech celebs." Another attendee at the event, Harper Reed, the former chief technology officer for the Obama campaign, said he didn't remember this happening, tweeting that there were "usage visualizations" in Kalanick's presentation but that he doesn't remember "names or photos." He does add a caveat that he left the event early.
@markbao fwiw I was at that party, sitting next to said socialite (ugh) and don't remember this happening. But I left early. So ymmv
— harper (@harper) September 29, 2014
@markbao I do not doubt that it happened in some regard. I don't remember a granular display. But there was usage visualizations
— harper (@harper) September 29, 2014
@markbao I don't remember names or photos
— harper (@harper) September 29, 2014
Update (10/6/14): Another attendee, Power of Reviews CEO Matt Moog, says he also doesn't recall seeing this.
@kashhill no I don't remember it happening and I was sitting right next to @harper if I recall
— Matt Moog (@mattmoog) October 4, 2014
But Allison did know where Sims was in real time. Did Uber do it intentionally or was it a slip-up, revealing an Uber "More Powerful God View" admin screen? I followed back up with Allison after hearing from Moog. "In that this was 3 years ago, I don't remember the specifics," she says. "It was flashing between screens. I don't think it was during the main presentation."
“Some people get so bent out of shape over nothing. I see the potential for misuse but it’s not like they were going to release the information," Allison says. But they did release the information, to her and ostensibly to other people at the party, some of whom are included in this Facebook album from the event, spotted by a sharp-eyed Ashkan Soltani. (I've been unable to get accounts from other attendees besides Reed, though I would love to hear from them.) Those non-Uber employee partiers are all "third parties" in legal terms, and according to Uber's privacy policy, it won't release information about users and where they've traveled to third parties unless the po-po come calling, it's needed to stop something illegal, or because you've granted Uber permission to do so. Otherwise, it will only give third parties "non-personally identifiable information, such as aggregated user statistics and log data." Even that can be a lil creepy, as when it made a "Rides of Glory" post showing in which cities users most often get laid on the weekend. (It playfully called these users "RoGers;" they took Ubers at party-o-clock on Fridays and Saturdays, and then took a second ride from a point nearby the bar the next morning.)
The GPS party trick would be an illegal sharing of location information, with Uber breaching its contract with users like Sims. Uber still regularly trots out "God View" at launch parties, but a source familiar with the matter said 'Creepy Stalker View' is not a regular offering. Uber's press team did not respond to a request for comment.
"Much like Gcreep [ed note: the Google engineer who spied on teens' chats] or the OKCupid trends blog, this is another example of the ways individuals at these organizations can freely access and use consumers' personal information for their marketing (or in this case, entertainment) purposes," says Ashkan Soltani, a security technologist. "If a malicious employee at one of these companies wanted to stalk you or simply embarrass you or expose your romantic relationships, they could."
Sims, like many an Uber rider, loves the promise of ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft, but he sees the privacy violation as symptomatic of Uber's wider arrogance and dirty business practices, such as sabotaging Lyft and squeezing drivers' earnings. "I don’t expect that Travis Kalanick will ever apologize to me for using my Uber location data to promote his brand at a launch event without my permission, but I haven’t given up hope in the Uber board’s ability to step up and lead," writes Peter Sims. "Now is the time to act, before Uber disappoints the public markets at the IPO and after."
Allison still thinks it's weird that people are freaking out about the party trick from three years ago. "I can see the concern but people need to chill out."
GPS data being used as party confetti seems to be an anomaly, but it's a reminder of the creepiness that comes with a company having a "God View" into your travel patterns. With uber power comes uber responsibility. Users expect that companies won't be completely cavalier with their data. Uber may have (legal) fun offering up an aggregated and anonymous breakdown of which cities have the most users going out to bars and going home with a new friend, but that means Uber also has the power to build an internal list of its sluttiest users. Let's hope that never winds up on a screen at a party. Or at least hope that our names aren't on the list if it does.
* Updated with comment from Matt Moog and additional comment from Julia Allison.
