MANILA, Philippines – Uber accidentally leaked the personal data of hundreds of its US drivers on Tuesday, October 13. The data leak included social security numbers, drivers’ license scans, tax forms, and other data.

Motherboard reported that the leak was noticed by Uber drivers on Tuesday, with some of those who saw the leaked information alerting other people through the UberDrivers Reddit page and the UberPeople forums. 

Speaking to Motherboard, one of the drivers who saw the leak said he saw thousands of documents from other drivers when he tried uploading a document of his own.

The data leak appeared to be linked to Uber’s new “Uber partner” app, which was meant to give drivers more information about Uber, while allowing drivers to also provide more information to Uber.

Uber confirmed the leak and fixed the issue as soon as the company became aware of the issue. Message timestamps, however, point to the data having been available for at least a few hours, according to Motherboard.

The company, however, said in a statement that after being notified of the issue, its security team fixed in 30 minutes the cause of the bug. 

The statement went on to say, “We’d like to thank the driver who drew it to our attention and apologize to those drivers whose information may have been affected. Their security is incredibly important to Uber and we will follow up with them directly.”

Uber added that the data leak affected no more than 674 drivers in the US, with fewer than 1,000 documents exposed.

Still, the breach should be a cause for concern for Uber drivers who have had their details exposed, especially if a malicious individual managed to scrape the details during the leak. – Rappler.com