In a sudden and rather unexpected turn of events, Uber has suffered a minor data breach, wherein IRS Documents and Driver licenses for over a thousand of its driver partners got leaked — courtesy its newly launched partners app.
Reported first by Gawker, the incident came into light when a driver partner, while registering for the app came across data and high-quality scanned photographs of other river partners. The driver said, that while he was trying to add or edit information in Uber’s Partners App, he came across a screen that contains documents for complete strangers, a legion of Uber drivers around the United States.
Clear, high-resolution pictures of drivers licenses, W-9 tax forms, livery car company articles of incorporation, and other sensitive personal documents—many of which contain social security numbers—can be easily viewed and downloaded.
Here are a few screenshots (source : Gawker)
While thousand may seem a smaller number, when compared to the number of driver partners Uber has, the kind of sensitive data that has been leaked, is what’s generating concern. And just to let you know the scale and amount of data leaked, 179 pages of documents for drivers from Washington to Virginia were inadvertently exposed in this breach.
A representative for Uber told Gawker
As soon as we were made aware of this we immediately fixed it.
We have separately contacted Uber to know more on this data breach, though no reports of any misuse of the data have come so far. We’ll update this story as and when we received more info from Uber on this.
