Uber has been quietly assisting countries with contact tracking for months

• For months, Uber has been providing health officials with data to help them with their contact search efforts, Reuters reports.
• The carpool company has designed a portal specifically for health officials to request user data.
• The new service received 560 applications from 29 countries in the first half of 2020.
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Uber has been quietly assisting health officials around the world with tracing contacts, the company told Reuters.

The carpool company has created a special portal for health officials to request access to driver and driver data. Uber has provided user data to officials before, for example, with police departments investigating a crime.

Officials may request data based on the names of passengers on travel receipts, with the idea that it could help them contact someone they need to quarantine.

Company officials told Reuters that the service has been active for months and that the company can provide relevant data within hours of receiving a request. In the first half of 2020, the company received 560 coronavirus-related requests from 29 countries. Of the 560 applications, 158 came from the United States.

The service was already in process before the pandemic hit the United States, Uber told Reuters. In 2019, the company began receiving requests from U.S. health officials after a measles outbreak.

Unspecified company executives held a meeting with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and local health officials in Los Angeles in January 2020 to discuss how Uber data could be used for health purposes. The coronavirus was discussed at that meeting.

“Our timing turned out to be beneficial as it allowed us to move ahead before COVID began to scale globally,” Uber chief global law enforcement officer Mike Sullivan told Reuters.