Posted on 28/07/26 09:12 am
Every time you open a ride-hailing or food delivery app for the first time, the sign-up screen asks for the same thing: your phone number. It feels routine, even trivial. But your number is doing a lot more work inside these platforms than simply receiving a one-time verification code — and as regulators are now starting to confirm, the stakes are higher than most users realise.
Every ride-hailing app requires a user to provide some personal identifiers at sign-up: name, email address, phone number, and payment method. The phone number specifically serves several overlapping purposes from the platform's perspective.
First, it anchors your identity. A phone number is harder to fabricate in bulk than an email address, which makes it the preferred tool for tying one real-world person to one account. Verifying phone numbers, email addresses, and payment methods helps platforms reduce the risk of fraudulent or ghost accounts — a genuinely reasonable goal.
Second, it enables in-trip communication. Most ride-hailing apps use masked chat and voice calls so passengers and drivers can coordinate without exposing their personal numbers to each other. In other words, the number you hand over at registration is partly used to keep your number hidden during the ride itself — a somewhat ironic arrangement, because your real number is still sitting in the platform's database the whole time.
Third, and less discussed, your number becomes part of a growing data profile the moment you tap "confirm."
Most passengers don't appreciate the full scope of data collection involved in using ride-hailing apps. Beyond the phone number itself, platforms routinely collect real-time GPS location, pickup and drop-off points, route history, device information, and behavioural data such as ride frequency, ratings, and travel patterns. Your phone number is the spine of that profile — the field that ties your payment method to your home address, your pickup history to your workplace, and your device ID to your name. Remove or change it, and the profile starts to fragment.
That profile doesn't necessarily stay with the platform that built it. Depending on the service, your name, email address, phone number, home address, and registration details may be shared with the workers who operate on the platform, as well as with advertising partners, analytics vendors, and insurers — entities you've never heard of and certainly never agreed to share data with directly. Research has found ride-share companies to be particularly susceptible to third-party tracking and opaque data-sharing arrangements, and the complexity of their disclosure practices makes it difficult for users to understand exactly where their information goes.
This isn't a theoretical concern. Ride-hailing companies have faced significant data breaches. In 2016, a major incident at one of the largest ride-hailing platforms exposed 57 million users' data — including names, email addresses, and phone numbers — which hackers subsequently used for extortion. The legal fallout included $148 million paid to settle lawsuits in the United States and a £385,000 fine from the UK Information Commissioner's Office.
There have also been cases where drivers accessed more passenger data than necessary, and instances of harassment using contact details obtained through the platform. The in-app masking described earlier is the platform's answer to this problem, but masking only protects you during the ride. Your real number remains in the database regardless.
This pattern isn't unique to ride-hailing. As we've explored in what food delivery apps do with your phone number at sign-up, the same dynamic repeats across the gig economy: your number is collected for one stated reason and quietly used for several others.
The privacy conversation around gig platforms has moved from commentary to formal enforcement. In mid-2026, the California Privacy Protection Agency announced the launch of its first formal CCPA compliance audit targeting gig economy tech platforms operating in California. The audit is examining whether major platforms are honouring their obligations around consumers' and workers' privacy rights — specifically how they collect, use, and share geolocation, behavioural, biometric, and communications data.
The agency has described the gig sector as ripe for a compliance audit precisely because platforms can use this data to make consequential decisions about both workers and consumers, often without meaningful transparency. Regulatory attention is welcome, but enforcement moves slowly. Waiting for regulators to protect your phone number is a poor strategy when you can take a simple step right now.
Most people use the same mobile number for every ride-hailing app, every delivery platform, and every gig service they try. This makes intuitive sense — it's the number you know by heart. But each new platform holding your number is another potential point of exposure. As we discuss in one number for every app quietly compounds your risk, the individual risk from any single app might seem manageable. When five or ten services all hold the same identifier, however, and any one of them suffers a breach or sells data to aggregators, that number becomes a master key to your digital life.
The practical answer is the same logic that frequent travellers apply to throwaway email addresses: use a number that's real enough to pass verification, but not the one attached to your bank, your family, and your primary identity.
A virtual number from SMS Pin Verify is carrier-registered and non-VoIP, which means it passes the phone verification checks — including carrier lookups — that ride-hailing and delivery platforms run at sign-up. You receive the OTP, complete verification, and the number on file belongs to an account you control rather than your personal mobile. If a platform later sells that number to a marketing partner or it surfaces in a breach, it leads nowhere sensitive.
If you're signing up for a platform once to test it, or creating an account for a specific trip, a per-use number is the most cost-effective option. You pay a small fee, receive the SMS code, and the number isn't retained indefinitely on a device tied to your everyday life. There's no long-term commitment and no persistent identifier sitting in the platform's database connected to anything else you own.
If you're actively using a ride-hailing or delivery app on a regular basis, a number rented for a longer period — up to 25 days — keeps your account accessible for re-verification prompts, account recovery, and in-app SMS notifications without ever involving your real mobile number. You stay reachable through the app while keeping your personal number entirely off the platform's systems. For property managers or business owners using gig delivery services operationally, this approach becomes even more useful — one purpose, one number, clean separation, mirroring the thinking behind Airbnb phone verification for property managers at scale.
A virtual number at sign-up is the most effective single step, but a few additional habits compound the protection. It's worth reviewing the app permissions you've granted: ride-sharing apps often request access to your contacts, microphone, camera, Bluetooth, and fitness data. Going through each permission and disabling anything not strictly needed for booking a ride is straightforward — contacts, microphone, and camera permissions can usually be safely revoked without affecting core functionality.
Most major platforms now offer options to download or delete your data, driven by newer privacy regulations. Checking the privacy settings in any app you actively use — particularly around third-party data sharing and personalised advertising — takes a few minutes and can meaningfully reduce ongoing exposure.
None of these steps are complicated. But the first one — controlling what phone number you hand over at the moment of sign-up — is the one that matters most, because once a platform has your real number, that decision is very difficult to reverse.