Facing allegations for tracking their passengers, Uber settles for $20,000 but not without making sure to take some different safety measures.

Back in 2014 a reporter accused the company for following her rides without her consent. The company was tracking its clients through the ‘God View’ tool that showed the locations of customers and drivers.

Besides the scandal regarding the customers’ tracking, the attorney general accused Uber for hiding a data breach for over five months. The data breach occurred in May 2014 and exposed the personal data of over 50,000 drivers. An unauthorized third party has gained access to drivers’ names and license numbers.

Despite discovering the problem in September 2014 the company announced the drivers and made the problem public only in September 2015.

Since then, Uber said that all the personally identifiable data has been removed from its location system. Following the data breach the company has undergone a privacy audit to make sure that no other breach has occurred to expose data of the company’s drivers or clients.

Uber advised the drivers affected by the data breach to monitor their credit reports to make sure their data won’t be used for fraudulent transactions. Besides that, the company offered all of these drivers free one-year membership to Experian’s ProtectMyID Alert and has also set up an info line.

The currents settlement asks Uber to encrypt any location information based on GPS data and also to authenticate all of its employees who are allowed to access the location data for business purposes.

Uber has recently been in the middle of another scandal after its New Year’s surge prices outraged thousands of customers who had to pay from three to eight times the price of a regular ride.

Another huge scandal hit the company in November 2014 when Emil Michael, Uber’s CEO told BuzzFeed that he would hire some researchers to make Nixonian dirty tricks on some journalists he did not like.

Besides that, CNN revealed a while ago that Uber employees were trying to recruit drivers from its rival company Lyft by submitting false orders. Other times they were ordering and cancelling rides.

PCmag interviewed drivers from both Uber and Lyft and it turned out that Lyft is a much ethical company for which many Uber drivers would leave their current gig. Unfortunately drivers need money and Uber has a much better marketing strategy so drivers make more money here.

Image source: flickr/Jason Newport