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Responsibly collecting roadway data

Learn how Uber and our partners use video footage collected from vehicles operating on public roads to advance ​​the development of safe autonomous vehicle technology.

What data Uber collects

For this research, outward-facing cameras are mounted on regular vehicles driven and owned by third-party operators on public roads. The same cars may collect additional data using lidar, radar, and other outward-facing sensors.

The video footage Uber and our partners collect focuses on observing real-world roadway scenarios—such as the flow of traffic, cars, and pedestrians—as they naturally occur.

Advancing autonomous vehicle safety

Uber and our partners use this data to support research and development of safe self-driving technology. The footage helps:

Train AI systems

to better recognize and respond to complex traffic situations

Validate safety models

by testing them against real-world scenarios

Improve navigation

in challenging driving environments

Reduce accident risk

by enabling vehicles to handle unpredictable situations

Our commitment to privacy

Our cameras may collect your personal data, which we use to understand real-world driving patterns, support self-driving models, and improve autonomous vehicle safety for everyone on the road. Neither Uber nor our partners uses such data to identify, track, or profile individuals.

Submit a privacy request

Select the link below to request access to or deletion of your personal data from Uber’s video recordings.

Submit a request

Frequently asked questions

  • Uber is working with partner companies to develop safe autonomous vehicle systems. Data about the locations, traffic patterns, and environments in which autonomous vehicles will be driving is essential to train these systems to navigate the world safely. We’re using the collected data to enable this training.

  • We take appropriate steps to protect the privacy and confidentiality of your personal data. These include encrypting the data collected by our cameras and sensors, tightly limiting internal access to such data, and storing the data for only as long as necessary to train and improve self-driving models.

  • The sensors collect a mix of radar, lidar, and camera data, combined with location and time information. The video footage Uber and our partners collect focuses on observing real-world roadway scenarios—such as the flow of traffic, cars, and pedestrians—as they naturally occur.

  • Externally facing sensors capture images from the vehicles’ near surroundings, which would include people when they are present. Uber does not use these images to identify or profile such people.

  • Uber is working with partner companies to help develop safe autonomous vehicles, and we will share this data with those partners.

  • Images of faces are necessary to train autonomous vehicle systems to recognize natural faces when they navigate streets. In order to create autonomous vehicle systems that can safely operate in environments with pedestrians, we do not blur faces in the training data.

    Seeing unblurred footage lets perception models read the same fine-grain cues—for example, eye contact or a quick head turn—that human drivers rely on in naturalistic studies to infer a pedestrian’s crossing intent. Such signals would be missed if faces were blurred. Retaining raw data directly boosts intent-prediction fidelity and widens safety margins.

  • Depending on where you’re located, you may have the right to request access to or deletion of the data captured in the recordings. If you’ve encountered one of the data collection cars and you’d like to access and/or remove any recordings of your face or license plate, you can place such a request by selecting Submit a request on this page.

  • When an individual requests access to or deletion of their data through the designated web portal, we’ll make our best effort to determine whether the individual was captured by our cameras based on the information the individual submitted. If we cannot identify the individual based on the request, we may ask for further description of the individual to help identify them.

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Additional resources

Privacy notice for road video collection

This notice describes how Uber uses video footage collected from vehicles equipped with outward-facing cameras operating on public roads to support research and development of safe self-driving models in the field of autonomous mobility. This notice does not describe how Uber and our partners collect and use your data when you request or receive rides or deliveries (including by autonomous vehicles) through Uber’s apps or websites. Uber’s notice describing our collection and use of such data is available here.

  • Uber Technologies, Inc. (“UTI”) is the controller of the personal data contained in the video recordings collected globally except for the data collected in the European Economic Area (“EEA”), UK, and Switzerland, where UTI and Uber B.V. are joint controllers of such data. UTI and Uber B.V. are collectively referred to as “Uber” in this notice. If you are located in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, you may contact Uber B.V.'s Data Protection Officer at uber.com/privacy-dpo or by mail to Uber B.V. (Burgerweeshuispad 301, 1076 HR Amsterdam, the Netherlands) regarding issues relating to Uber's processing of your personal data and your data protection rights.

  • Uber uses video recordings collected from outward-facing cameras mounted on vehicles. These recordings primarily focus on roadways and the driving environment but may incidentally capture personal data such as facial features and license plates. Uber may also use data collected using lidar, radar, and other outward-facing sensors at the same time as these video recordings. This sensor data cannot be used to identify individuals.

    Public roads and driving environments are filmed for the sole purpose of capturing traffic situations as they happen in reality. While the video recordings captured are not intended to personally identify individuals, such video recordings might still fall within the scope of data protection laws such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

  • Uber and our partners use video recordings collected from public roads to support research and development in autonomous driving technology. This includes training and validating of AI-based perception systems to help autonomous vehicles better understand and safely navigate complex real-world environments. The recordings focus on capturing actual traffic situations as they naturally occur and are not used to identify pedestrians, drivers, or other individuals. High-quality traffic footage is critical to reducing the risk of accidents and improving traffic efficiency for all users and enhancing the development and overall performance of reliable autonomous driving systems.

  • We share video recordings only with selected autonomous driving technologies partners who have agreed to use the data strictly for their own research and development required to power self-driving vehicles. This includes improving their self-driving systems’ accuracy at recognizing and reacting to external objects, such as other vehicles and pedestrians. These partners are contractually prohibited from using the video recordings to identify or profile any individuals whose data is captured in the video recordings. Please contact us if you’d like to learn more about Uber’s autonomous driving technologies partners.

    We may also share the video recordings with our subsidiaries, affiliates, and service providers, including cloud storage providers. These recipients process the video recordings on our behalf and solely as necessary to allow us and our partners to achieve the purposes described in this notice.

    Uber will process all law enforcement requests in accordance with Uber’s Guidelines for United States Law Enforcement and Guidelines for Law Enforcement Authorities - Outside the United States.

  • Data protection laws in some countries and areas, such as the EEA, United Kingdom, and Switzerland, only allow us to process your data when certain circumstances defined under those laws apply. This is called having a legal basis for using your data. Our legal basis for processing this data is our legitimate interest in supporting the safe and effective development of autonomous driving technologies. We also rely on our partners’ legitimate interest in training their self-driving technologies used in vehicles deployed on roads around the world. The technological advancement of self-driving vehicles ultimately also serves the public interest in safe and widely available mobility technologies in Europe and beyond.

  • Uber and our partners retain the video recordings only for as long as necessary for the purposes outlined in this notice or as otherwise required under applicable laws. We apply safeguards to limit access, protect the data from misuse, and securely delete the data when it’s no longer needed.

  • Uber operates and processes data globally. While Uber stores the video recordings collected in Switzerland, the EEA, and the United Kingdom exclusively on servers located in those jurisdictions, for technical reasons, we may enable access to the data from other countries, such as the United States, in order to process the data or share the video recordings with our self-driving partners. Uber is committed to protecting your personal data against unauthorized access regardless of where you’re located or where, or by whom, your personal data is processed. This includes implementing global measures to protect your data, such as:

    • Securing data when it’s in transit, including through encryption, and at rest
    • Mandating company-wide training regarding privacy and data security
    • Implementing internal policies and procedures to limit access to, and use of, personal data
    • Limiting government and law enforcement access to personal data, except where required by law; there are imminent threats to safety; or individuals have consented to the access

    When we transfer video recordings from the EEA, UK, and Switzerland, we do so using transfer mechanisms such as the Standard Contractual Clauses adopted by the European Commission (and their approved equivalents for the UK and Switzerland), and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (“EU-US DPF”), the UK Extension to the EU-US DPF, and the Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework (“Swiss-US DPF”), as set forth by the US Department of Commerce and the European Commission. Such data remains subject to the GDPR or equivalents after such transfer. You can learn more about the EU-US DPF and Swiss-US DPF in Uber’s user Privacy Notice and view Uber’s certification, including the scope of personal data subject to our certification, here. You may also contact Uber with questions regarding the above or to request copies of applicable Standard Contractual Clauses here.

  • Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have rights under applicable privacy laws to request access to—or deletion, rectification, or restriction of—your data and to obtain more information about the partners Uber shares your data with. Under the GDPR, you also have the right to object, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to the processing of your personal data in the context of our data collection in accordance with this notice. If you believe you may have been captured in a video clip and wish to exercise your rights, select Submit a request on this page and please fill out the form providing as many details as possible (such as date, time, and location) so we can identify you. In addition, depending on your location, you may have the right to file a complaint relating to our handling of your data with the data protection authority in your country.

  • If you have questions about this privacy notice or how we handle your data, contact us.

  • We may occasionally update this notice. We encourage you to periodically review this notice for the latest information on our privacy practices.