British and Dutch Data Protection Regulators have fined Taxi firm Uber over failing to inform customers of a mass data breach which lead to the private details of customers and drivers being lost.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined the multi-national mobile taxi-booking operator £385,000 for failing to protect customer and driver data in a large scale breach which happened in October and November of 2016. The breach has put Uber’s customers and drivers at an increased risk of serious fraud against them.
“A series of avoidable data security flaws.”
The full data breach covered more than 57 million customers and drivers worldwide. According to the Financial Times, the records of almost 82,000 drivers in the UK have been compromised with journey details, their amounts of pay and their tip collections at risk. In a very small number of cases
The ICO described the data breach as “a series of avoidable data security flaws.” Going on to say they allowed the personal data of nearly 3 million UK customers to be accessed and downloaded from their cloud-based storage systems. The data taken from Uber’s cloud storage included customer’s full names, email addresses, phone numbers and in some cases their sign-up locations.
Uber took the decision not to notify the people affected by the breach, only to monitor their accounts for unusual activity for 12 months following the cyber attack. This was compounded following information revealing Uber paid the hackers $100,000 to keep the story out of the media and destroy the data they had obtained. The ICO was also critical of this decision.
Data Security Breach
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