Uber to stop tracking customers after ride is over

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Uber is turning off a surveillance feature that enabled the ride-hailing company to track customers even after their rides had ended.

The company last year began tracking customers from the time they requested a ride until five minutes after it was over. The surveillance strategy, Uber said at the time, would allow Uber to analyze whether people were being dropped off and picked up properly-like on the correct side of the street.

That five minutes of post-ride monitoring is being discontinued first with an update to the iOS app this week, and was abandoned months ago for Android devices. An Uber spokeswoman tells Ars that Uber "never collected" post-ride data on iOS devices.

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