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Cab hailing app, Uber accidentally leaked personal details of hundreds of its drivers through a newly launched app. Social security numbers, scans of driver licenses, tax forms, and other data, online of hundreds of its drivers were leaked.
The data leak is linked to the company’s newly launched “Uber partner” app, “designed to give drivers more information so Uber works better for them”.
The design flaw in the app gave drivers more information about each other by allowing anyone access to nearly 1,000 sensitive scanned documents, including social security numbers, tax forms, insurance documents, driving licenses and taxi certification forms.
Uber drivers noticed the leak yesterday and began alerting others on Reddit and other forums.
One of the Uber driver partner said that he found number of documents loading itself on page refresh, while he was uploading one of his documents.
He added that there were lot of taxi certification forms and livery drivers licenses and W-9 forms with Social Security numbers for taxi cab companies.
The development was first reported by Gawker.
Uber however, commented that the data leak affected not more than 674 drivers in the US. The issue was though fixed under 30 minutes after the bug was reported.
Well this is not the first time, Uber has faced such issue, in May 2014, a hacker stole the company’s database containing the details of thousands of drivers, which were then posted to GitHub which was noticed by Uber in September.
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