Uber facing questions over how it knew Transport for London boss used app
The former London transport commissioner Sir Peter Hendy has questioned whether Uber unlawfully accessed his journey records after the Guardian revealed leaked company files contained a reference to trips he had taken on the app.
Hendy’s name was included on an “outreach grid” of Uber’s key lobbying targets, including Boris Johnson, the then mayor of London, contained in the Uber files, a leak of data to the Guardian.
The files also reveal how a senior London employee used a surveillance tool codenamed “Heaven” and “God View” to track the journey of a colleague. The app allowed Uber staff to monitor movements of people travelling in an Uber vehicle.
The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian by Mark MacGann, Uber's former chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant's most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, duped police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world.
To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ.
In a statement, Uber said: «We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour that is clearly not in line with our present values. Instead, we
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