It’s Data Privacy Week: Introducing Uber’s new Privacy Center and more
By Zach Singleton, Group Product Manager, Privacy & Anurag Naidu, Engineering Manager, Privacy
Data Privacy Week is an important time of the year, and for the last few years, we’ve participated with others in the industry to raise awareness among our users about the choices they have to manage their privacy, and remind them of our commitment to taking a principled approach.
This year we are taking things a step further, and we’re excited to announce Uber’s new “Privacy Center”, as well as multiple other new features and enhancements. Privacy Center is our new centralized hub for riders, drivers, couriers, and delivery recipients to manage their privacy preferences, available in-app and on the web. We’re also launching “View What Powers Your Experience”, which shows riders how their data works for them to power core aspects of their Uber trip experience. For drivers and couriers, we’re launching “Self-Service Driver Account Deletion”, and we’re also making some major enhancements to our “Privacy Overview Page” and making it more accessible in the app. We’ve just begun rolling out all these features across the US and Canada, and they will be rolled out globally over the next 6 months.
Below is a more in depth look at each feature and what they will enable our users to do:
Privacy Center
The Uber Privacy Center is a central hub for riders, drivers, couriers, and delivery recipients to learn more about, and manage, their privacy preferences. Within the Privacy Center, users will be able to explore a summary of their use of Uber, request a copy of their data, view what info drivers can see about riders, manage their advertising preferences, and exercise their personal data rights.
Why we built it. Privacy is not a one and done campaign at Uber. It is a continuous investment by cross functional teams to ensure we live up to our privacy principles as our products and businesses evolve. So, although we’ve had privacy settings in our apps for years, making them easy to find and use requires diligent oversight as new product features and capabilities emerge. We built Uber’s first Privacy Center to maintain an easy user experience as a growing number of users need to manage accounts across different Uber apps (Rider, Driver, and Delivery Services). Additionally, it gives users a single place for reliable and easy-to-find privacy resources as our business continues to evolve through acquisitions and the introduction of more apps and services.
How we built it. The architecture for the Privacy Center is extensible and adapts to the surface and platform chosen by each user. As illustrated below we used a modular design that shows the relevant privacy features depending on which Uber app you’re using. The core functionality was built with a Responsive Web Design (RWD) model to ensure a consistent experience for web and mobile users.
This approach helped us build all available features in the codebase but only show the ones appropriate for each platform. Using RWD also shortened the build and test time, effectively simplifying the coordination of future releases and bug fixes for these features across our mobile apps. The web implementation required integration with multiple mobile apps and in some cases re-architecting the menu system to provide a consistent feel for our users across apps.
Privacy Center gives our users more control and provides a scalable foundation for us to build more privacy features in the future.
View What Powers Your Experience
For many of us, the first time we took a ride on the Uber platform was a magical experience. You enter a destination, press a button, and off you go — from the time of request you can see your trip on a map and how much time it’ll take, and there’s no need for you to pull out your wallet to pay at the end in most markets. With the View What Powers Your Experience feature, we lay out how Uber uses user data to make core aspects of that experience possible. Rather than leave it to the user to guess how we’re using information such as location, name, and payment data, we built this feature to be more transparent about how a user’s data works to power their trip experience, as well as how we protect their data along the way. This feature is available in the Rider app and on the web, and we’ll continue to update it with new information as the Uber app evolves.
Self-Service Driver Account Deletion
We have long offered Self-Service Account Deletion to riders and delivery recipients, and now we are pleased to offer the same convenient control to drivers and couriers. Within the Privacy Center in-app and on the web, drivers and couriers will be able to request account deletion with just a few clicks. Previously this process was manually handled by Uber’s support team upon receiving a written request via support ticket or email from a user. This was challenging to automate as it required innovations in engineering, data processing, security and policy enforcement.
Privacy Overview Page Enhancements
We originally built this web page because we know privacy policies can be hard to understand. Our Privacy Overview is a web page dedicated to summarizing Uber’s approach to privacy and the choices users have to exercise their privacy rights and preferences in easy to understand language. With this launch, we are updating the Privacy Overview page to include Uber’s Privacy Principles, a more detailed explanation of the data we collect and how we use it, and an entry point to the newly launched Privacy Center.
Looking Ahead
As we move forward, it is clear to us that privacy will be increasingly important and challenging to navigate. We don’t know what the future will bring, but we can promise that at Uber we have a bevy of passionate professionals across Legal, Policy, Design, Data Science, Product and Engineering who are committed to doing the right thing no matter where it all ends up.
We have long used conversations with our users and observations of how they use our products to inform our innovation, and this will continue to lead the way for our roadmap as we move forward.
We hope you enjoy our new privacy products, and that you stay tuned for what we do next.
Happy Data Privacy Week,
Zach and Anurag
