Our core company value is to stand for safety. As a global platform, Uber has a tremendous opportunity to help create a safe experience for all users. One of the many ways we demonstrate our deep commitment to safety is to support law enforcement investigations.
To help facilitate this, we’ve built a dedicated portal for local law enforcement officials to securely submit requests to Uber. These requests include such public safety matters as investigations related to carjackings, financial fraud, human trafficking, and missing persons. Our portal supports seamless emergency request submissions; our team is staffed to make sure we can respond to emergencies 24/7.
We firmly believe that Uber has a crucial role to play in supporting the community and that our ongoing partnership with law enforcement agencies continues to achieve public safety objectives for our users and the communities in which we operate. In doing so, we’re continually looking for opportunities to ensure that we’re equally responsible data stewards to our users and that relevant legal principles guide our practices around the handling of user data. We believe that transparency with our users is a crucial part of the trust they place in us.
Today, Uber released our annual Government Transparency Report. We began publishing this report in 2016. The report includes the number of data requests we received from law enforcement agencies in the US and Canada in the preceding calendar year, including the total number of data requests we received as well as the total number of accounts produced in relation to those requests.
By publishing this data, we’re aiming to strike the right balance across safety, privacy, and fairness. We hope this report contributes to a public conversation around the type and scope of data that law enforcement agencies should have access to. In particular, our regulatory landscape in this area continues to evolve to respond to unprecedented and growing complexities of criminal activity in the digital age. With such evolution, we also expect these laws to reflect the shifts in our users’ expectations regarding data protection and stewardship by technology companies such as Uber.
We hope to contribute to the conversation about user privacy and continue to serve an important function of our communities through supporting law enforcement investigations in a way that’s lawful and consistent with the strong culture of safety embedded at Uber.
Mike Sullivan, Senior Director and Head of Global Public Safety, Uber
Posted by Uber
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