Parents can now watch their teen’s Uber ride live, through the driver’s phone

Uber is rolling out live video streaming of teen rides in the US, using the driver’s phone as the camera and sending the feed to linked parent accounts. Other passengers in the car appear on the stream and are given no way to opt out.

Uber is putting a camera in the car, and it belongs to the driver. The company is rolling out live video streaming of teen rides in the US, taking the feed from the driver’s own phone rather than any installed hardware.

It is live in nine markets including Atlanta and Cleveland, with a nationwide rollout promised over the coming weeks.

The controls are reasonable as far as they go. A linked parent gets a notification and chooses whether to open the stream, and both the driver and the teenager are told when someone is watching.

One group was not consulted. Anyone else riding in the car appears on the feed too, and Uber provides them with no way to opt out.

The encryption claim also stops short. Uber says the video is encrypted and disappears after the ride, but has not said whether it is end-to-end, which is the distinction that would prevent Uber itself from watching.

None of this is confined to America in principle. Teen accounts launched in the US in 2023 and now operate in more than 50 countries, and Uber’s European record on driver data is expensive, most recently a €825mn Dutch fine.

That penalty, issued last week, concerned automated systems deactivating driver accounts without human review, which the regulator found breached the rules on automated decision-making.

It was not the first. The same authority fined Uber €290mn in 2024 over transfers of driver data to the United States, after smaller penalties in 2018 and 2023.

The new feature points a camera at those same people. A driver is filmed during work, on their own device, by a customer’s parent, in a relationship where declining is not a straightforward option.

A child is the other subject. Children’s data is precisely where European regulators have been most willing to act, with a third of GDPR fines against social platforms linked to protecting minors.

Uber has not said whether this is coming to Europe. The passenger who never agreed to anything is the question it would have to answer first.