Uber has been battling with lots of scandals in recent time, and a news about privacy concerns shouldn’t have been the latest thing its keen users want to hear. However, it is in the news that the taxi-hailing app is able to “see and record” the screen of iPhone users, even if the app is running at the background, and Apple actually allowed that.
But to make things clear, the two firms didn’t conspire to steal the identity or breach the privacy of users; they only partnered in order to implement the functionality. And according to reports, all these started back in March 2015 when Uber was trying to develop the Apple Watch app.
The news of this functionality was broken by Sudo Security Group, but experts claim the functionality doesn’t work like a regular screen-recording app. Instead, it is only the colours and the pixels display of iPhone’s screen that are being recorded, and not the actual details of the processes running on the screen.
By regulation, only Apple has the right to run this kind of functionality; any developer that uses it in his app usually get banned and the app removed from the Apple store.
But it turned out that Apple granted Uber the permission to use the functionality in order to make Apple Watch Series One map render very well.
When questioned about how it is handling this sensitive permission, Uber said it hasn’t used the permission ever since it has been granted, and that it is totally removing it from the Uber app soon.
However, this answer doesn’t go well with iPhone users, who are still concerned about the possibility of this functionality being decoded into their real information and the possibility of the Uber app being hacked and their details stolen.
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