Staff reports 1:52 p.m.
Thursday, September 27, 2018 1:53 pm

Uber officials delayed telling their drivers about the hack for a year. (Courtesy photo)

CONCORD - New Hampshire Uber drivers will receive some $673,000 as part of a settlement agreement for having their personal information compromised as part of a 2016 data breach, the state's Attorney General said today.

Attorney General Gordon J. MacDonald announced the agreement, which involved the other 49 States and the District of Columbia.

Nationwide the settlement agreement with the California-based ride-sharing company totaled a whopping $148 million.

New Hampshire will receive $672,822.71 as part of the settlement for the 763 Uber drivers in the state whose personal information was compromised.

In November 2016, Uber learned that hackers had gained access to driver files, which included the personal and driver's license information for approximately 600,000 drivers nationwide.

New Hampshire law requires that companies dealing with a breach of personal information must notify affected New Hampshire residents within a timely manner. Uber violated the law by failing to report these issues to New Hampshire Uber drivers until last November.

Uber tracked down the hackers and obtained assurances that the hackers deleted the information.

As part of the agreement, Uber offered affected drivers free credit monitoring and identity theft protection and has also agreed to strengthen its corporate governance and data security practices to help prevent a similar occurrence in the future.

The settlement between the state of New Hampshire and Uber requires the company to:

• Comply with New Hampshire's data breach and consumer protection laws regarding protecting New Hampshire residents' personal information and notifying them in the event of a data breach concerning their personal information;
• Take precautions to protect any user data Uber stores on third-party platforms outside of Uber;
• Use strong password policies for its employees to gain access to the Uber network;
• Develop and implement a strong overall data security policy for all data that Uber collects about its users, including assessing potential risks to the security of the data and implementing any additional security measures beyond what Uber is doing to protect the data;
• Hire an outside qualified party to assess Uber's data security efforts on a regular basis and draft a report with any recommended security improvements. Uber will implement any such security improvement recommendations; and
• Develop and implement a corporate integrity program to ensure that Uber employees can bring any ethics concerns they have about any other Uber employees to the company, and that it will be heard.