“Uber’s Data Privacy Policy” [emphasis mine]

We wanted to take a moment to make very clear our policy on data privacy, which is fundamental to our commitment to both riders and drivers. Uber has a strict policy prohibiting all employees at every level from accessing a rider or driver’s data. The only exception to this policy is for a limited set of legitimate business purposes. Our policy has been communicated to all employees and contractors.

It’s generally not a good idea in trying to clean up a public relations disaster to continue to make obvious misstatements of fact. The very second sentence is a lie. Not just simply because we know of prior instances of people accessing and disseminating rider and driver information for entertainment, but because it would be impossible for Uber to operate if “all employees at every level” were prohibited from accessing the data. How would Uber know what to charge riders, what to pay drivers, how to dispatch drivers, and so on? Making such an overstatement again does nothing but leads folks to think Uber takes the public for fools.

This leads the release to devolve into a list of non-exhaustive examples of business reasons why it’s more likely than not that the majority of people working at Uber would have access to some piece of driver or passenger data. “The only exception to this policy is pretty much to do anything to run the business.”

Of course, the problem was not that Uber has access to people’s use of the service, but that people with that access are not trustworthy. That is the question that remains unanswered by the blog post.