argia.eus
INPRIMATU
Glovo spies its riders even when they are not working
  • In addition to spying on employees, an investigation concludes that the company’s app sends personal data and geolocations.
Izaro Villarreal Lauroba 2023ko urriaren 11
Argazkia: Kauldi Iriondo - ARGIA

Glovo shares your personal information with third parties without the consent of the worker, as reported by El Salto. Even when the worker is outside his working hours, he displays his location, email address, telephone number and other data obtained from the employee's device. The research team Tracking Exposed has found that the well-known distributor spy on its riders, even when they are not connected and working.

In July 2021 and September 2022, this team of researchers used the phone of a registered rider at the Italian company Foodinhon, a subsidiary of the company Glovo. We analyzed the access of the applications to the user's personal data, the geolocation and the way the data was sent to other companies.

Both analyses gave the same result: Glovo not only monitors its riders, but distributors depend on an internal ranking of the company. In the first test of the research they found a field called “rating” – repositions and in the second one a data sent as “experimental”. Researchers say they have no “declaration” about the purpose of this value, but stress that it is an “important discovery”.

Jesus Acevedo, a lawyer for digital law, pointed out that this attitude of Glovo is a very serious violation of workers' privacy and should have consequences. In this regard, he stressed how the action of the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) should be: “As Glovo’s parent company is in Spain, AEPD should act ex officio and lead the research together with agencies from other countries that continue to operate through the same application.”

If they work this way with the workers, who tells us that they are not acting the same way with the users? Who shows that they are not spying on anyone using the app? Acevedo confirms that AEPD should extend the research to users in order to respond to all this.