By Maor Rudick

Daily life today seems to consist of a multitude of privacy trade-offs. You want to order a pizza to your house after a long day at work? You need to give them your address, full name, and personal phone number. You want a private car to pick you up so you don’t have to roam the streets alone late at night searching for a cab? You need to give your address, full name, and personal phone number. You need to get to the airport to catch a red-eye flight? You need to give your address, full name, and private phone number. It is a difficult catch-22 situation: do you continue to live life as normal and trust the technology you use to safeguard your privacy, or do you play it safe and abandon the convenience of these applications? There’s no simple answer.

It seems that lately the definition of privacy has become unclear. What had previously been understood as ‘minding your own business’ has now morphed into a belief of ‘what’s yours is mine’. Privacy is a fundamental human right and technology should not be the reason that it is compromised.

Recent problems

Over the past six months or so a multitude of horrifying stories have surfaced about drivers who have abused their access to personal information from their places of employment. Uber, a ride-sharing application, has been raising eyebrows and voices as of late due to their poor privacy policy. The drivers, who are absolute strangers to the customers, are given access to the customer’s full information, including their full name, number, and address. The driver then can retain this information for later use. There have been many instances of sexual harassment and rape due to Uber drivers having abused the customer’s privacy. Uber’s in-app communication ability ended up failing them and compromising the privacy that the customers had depended upon.

Uber has now announced a new feature in which you can change your pick up and drop off points in order to boost user’s privacy and cut back on drivers having access to so much personal information. This still doesn’t void the issues of the driver being able to access your full name and phone number, but it is definitely a step in the right direction.

Just Eat, a popular online food delivery service in Europe, has also been the subject of complaints regarding inadequate privacy measures. The most recent complaint is from a woman in the UK who was harassed by her takeout delivery driver. The driver saved her private cell phone number from the delivery and began to send her unsolicited messages. The entire incident, along with Uber’s many incidents, could have been avoidable had the technology of the application been built towards securing the customer’s personal information.

Simple Solutions

Wouldn’t it be much less difficult to adapt technology to the growing need for better privacy? To have a technology that essentially makes the customers anonymous and protects their personal information? Cloudonix offers all of this and more.

Cloudonix offers a solution for the name and number issue. Many people are hesitant now to provide this information, as they have seen what can happen when someone unsavory has access to such information. Cloudonix technology offers a one-time call ability where the customer’s personal number isn’t used. When a customer connects to the call center you need to know who they are and various personal details. But when the call is between the driver and the customer these need to be anonymous, with no personal names or information shared.