Privacy Policy

Version 2.3 · in effect from 2026-10-10

UDrive ("we", "us") is a ride-hailing and tourism app. This policy explains what we collect when you use the UDrive app, why, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do about it.

This English version governs. The Roman Urdu version is provided for convenience; if the two ever disagree, this one applies.

The short version

We collect your phone number and name so you can have an account, your pickup and destination so a ride can happen, and — if you drive for UDrive — your CNIC, driving licence and vehicle registration so we can check you are who you say you are and that the vehicle is real.

We use your identity documents for verification and nothing else. We do not sell them. We do not rent, trade or share your data with advertisers, data brokers or anyone who wants it for their own purposes.

UDrive contains no advertising, no crash reporting and no third-party analytics or tracking software. We do not read your advertising ID, your IMEI, your MAC address, your SIM's phone number or any hardware fingerprint. The one thing the app reports is our own basic usage record — which phone model and app version it runs on, and roughly which city it is opened in, worked out from the IP address, never GPS (see section 2). It stays with us and is deleted after at most 180 days.

1. Who we are

UDrive is a ride-hailing and tourism platform for Azad Jammu & Kashmir. We decide what is collected and why, which makes us responsible for it.

Contact us about anything in this policy on WhatsApp: 0335-6823975.

2. What we collect from everyone

Your account

• Your mobile number. This is how we identify your account.
• Your name, as you enter it.
• The language you choose.

Signing in

• A 4-digit code we send to your number on WhatsApp. We store only a one-way scrambled form of the code, never the code itself.
• The IP address the request came from.
• Your app or browser's user-agent string.
• A device identifier the app generates for itself — a number based on the moment you first opened the app, stored on your phone. It is not your advertising ID, your IMEI, or any identifier that follows you between apps. It resets if you reinstall.

When the app is open (app usage)

When the app starts, when you come back to it, and every 30 minutes while it is open, it tells our server it is in use. That record holds:

• a random install number the app creates for itself (it resets if you reinstall, and is not your advertising ID or IMEI);
• your phone's make and model, Android version, and the app's version and build;
• the type of connection (Wi-Fi or mobile) and the mobile network's name;
• the language and timezone set on the phone, and the screen size;
• the IP address it came from, and the approximate city we work out from that IP address. This is not GPS and is often wrong by a town or two;
• your account, if you are signed in.

We use it to see which phones and app versions UDrive must keep working on, and in which areas it is used, so we know where to add drivers and fix problems.

Photos you upload are re-saved by our server in a smaller format, and any location or camera details embedded in the photo are removed.

3. What we collect from customers

• Where you are going: pickup and destination, as both a place name and coordinates.
• Trip details: date and time, seats, number of adults and children, luggage, and any note you write for the driver.
• Your preferences for a trip, if you set them — for example women-only or family-only travel.
• The fare you offer, the offers drivers make, which one you accept, and the full history of what happened during the booking.
• Messages you send the driver in the trip chat.
• Ratings and any review text you write.
• Complaints, disputes, the files you attach as evidence, and support tickets.
• Trusted contacts you add for safety: their name, phone number and relationship to you.
• An emergency contact name and number, if you add one to a booking.
• For tours: passenger names, gender and age group, and a partly hidden phone number for each passenger.
• Hotel bookings: dates, number of guests and rooms.
• If you register a business or hotel: its name, address, phone number and position on the map.
• If you add a hotel in Hotel mode: your name, business name, contact / WhatsApp number, email (if you give one) and photographs of the front and back of your CNIC. The CNIC photographs are seen only by the UDrive team that checks hotels; they are never shown to customers. The hotel and room photographs you add are public — customers see them.

4. What we collect from drivers

Everything in section 3 that applies to you, and in addition:

To verify you

• CNIC number.
• Driving licence number and its expiry date.
• Date of birth.
• Residential address.
• An emergency contact's name and phone number.
• Photographs: a selfie, a selfie holding your CNIC, the front and back of your CNIC, and the front and back of your driving licence.

To verify your vehicle

• Registration number, make, model, year, colour and seating capacity.
• Photographs of the registration book, front and back, and photographs of the vehicle.

To pay you

• Bank account title, the name of the bank, payout method, and a partly hidden account number.
• When you top up your commission balance: the amount, the reference number from your own payment receipt, and the screenshot you upload.

While you work

• Your position (see section 5), and your phone's battery level during a trip.
• Your rating, completed trips and current status.

5. Location — exactly when

We never collect your location in the background. The app does not ask for background-location permission and does not run a background service. When the app is closed, nothing is collected. You can check this yourself: the only location permissions the Android app declares are ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION and ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION. There is no ACCESS_BACKGROUND_LOCATION and no foreground-service permission.

Customers. While the app is open, we read your position to centre the map, show vehicles near you, turn a pin you drop into an address, and fill in your pickup. This is used and discarded — we do not keep a history of where you have been. Your position is saved only when it becomes part of a record you created: the pickup and destination on a booking, a safety report, or an emergency alert.

Drivers, while online and waiting. About every 15 seconds we record where you are, so a nearby customer can see that a vehicle is available. We keep one row per driver and overwrite it — there is no history of your waiting positions.

Drivers, during a trip. Every couple of seconds — the exact interval is set by us and is between 1 and 60 seconds — we record your position, accuracy, heading, speed, your phone's battery level and whether location permission is granted, so the customer and our operations desk can see the trip is progressing. This trail is deleted after 30 days.

Location collection during a trip starts when you accept and stops when the trip ends. If you lose signal, pings are held on your phone and sent when you are back online.

6. Safety and emergencies

If you raise an SOS in the app, we send a WhatsApp message to the trusted contacts you have added and to our safety number — up to twelve numbers in total. That message contains your name, your exact coordinates, a Google Maps link to that position, the accuracy of the reading and the time. We also record an emergency case with those coordinates so our team can act on it and so there is a record afterwards.

This is the whole point of the feature, but you should know precisely what goes out and to whom before you press it.

The app does not record audio. The microphone is not used.

7. Why we use your information

We do not profile you. Nothing in UDrive watches how you behave and builds a score out of it, predicts what you will do, or makes an automated decision about you. A driver's rating is the average of the ratings people gave, and nothing more. Drivers also carry a safety score, which is shown to customers and helps order who is offered a trip; today it is the same starting value for everyone and nothing in the platform changes it. If that ever stops being true we will say here what moves it.

8. Who else receives your information

We use a small number of service providers. They process data on our instructions, for the purposes below, and for nothing else.

Google — for maps and addresses.

• When you search for an address, your search text and your approximate position go to Google Places.
• When you drop a pin, those coordinates go to Google's geocoder to turn them into an address.
• When a route is drawn, the start and end coordinates go to Google's routing service.
• The map tiles themselves are fetched from Google's tile service, which implies the part of the map you are looking at.
• The map is drawn by Google's Maps SDK inside the app, which talks to Google directly from your phone. When the blue dot is showing, Google sees your position. This is true of every app that uses a Google map.

WA Engine — our own WhatsApp relay, which we run on Railway. It receives the recipient's number and the message body. For a login code, that means the code itself. For an SOS, that means your name and your coordinates.

OpenStreetMap — used for address search and map tiles when Google is not available. It receives the search text or coordinates, and your IP address.

Google Fonts — the app downloads its typeface the first time it runs, so Google sees your IP address at that moment.

Apple — on an iPhone, one screen (picking up for a tour) turns coordinates into an address using the phone's own geocoder, which is Apple's. On Android the same screen uses Google's.

Railway — hosts our servers, our database and the files you upload.

ipinfo.io — receives the IP address from an app-usage record, once, and tells us the approximate city, region and internet provider. Nothing else about you is sent to it.

That is the complete list. There are no others.

9. What we never do

• We never sell, rent or trade your personal information.
• We never give your identity documents to anyone for marketing, credit scoring, background-check resale or any other purpose.
• We do not run advertising in UDrive and we do not share anything with advertising networks.
• There is no third-party analytics tool, no crash-reporting tool and no attribution tool in the app, the website or the admin system. The app-usage record in section 2 is our own and is never shared for marketing.
• We do not use your data to train any product other than UDrive itself.

The only circumstance in which we would hand your information to someone else is a lawful order from a court or a competent authority in Azad Jammu & Kashmir or Pakistan, or where it is necessary to protect someone's life. If that happens and we are permitted to tell you, we will.

10. How long we keep things

We are not going to promise you a tidy number of years for the records in the last two rows, because we would have to keep them for as long as a dispute or a tax question about that trip could still arise, and we would rather tell you that plainly than print a figure we do not honour.

11. Your rights

Pakistan's general data-protection legislation is still being finalised. We give you these rights as a matter of our own policy, not because a statute currently forces us to, and you can hold us to them:

• See what we hold about you. Ask, and we will tell you.
• Correct it. Most of it you can change in the app. Anything else, ask us.
• Delete your account — see section 12.
• Object. If you think we are using something for a reason you did not expect, say so and we will explain or stop.
• Complain. To us first, on the WhatsApp number below. If that does not resolve it, you may approach the courts at Muzaffarabad, Azad Jammu & Kashmir.

We will answer within 30 days. There is no charge.

12. Deleting your account

In the app: Settings → Delete account, then type DELETE to confirm. You can also ask us on WhatsApp.

You cannot delete your account in the middle of a live trip. Finish or cancel it first.

What is erased

• Your email address is deleted outright. Your name and phone number are replaced with placeholders, and your number is freed immediately, so you or anyone else can register it again.
• Every session everywhere is ended.
• Your trusted contacts are deleted outright.
• Any emergency notes on your profile.
• For drivers: CNIC number, licence number, date of birth, residential address, emergency contact and bank details are erased, your saved payout account is deleted, and your uploaded CNIC, licence, selfie, registration book, vehicle photographs and wallet top-up screenshots are deleted from our storage.
• For hotel owners: your owner name, email and contact number on the hotel profile are erased, and both CNIC photographs are deleted from our storage.
• Your last known position is deleted.
• Your app-usage records — the phones you used and the IP addresses and approximate cities they came from — are deleted.
• Your vehicles are taken out of service and their registration numbers are freed for use again.

What remains, and why

These survive, but without your name on them:

• bookings, fares and payments;
• ratings and reviews, and any dispute you were part of, including files attached to it as evidence — that evidence belongs to a case with another party to it, and removing one side's would rewrite a dispute somebody else still relies on;
• messages you sent the driver or the customer in a trip chat;
• any emergency alert or safety report you raised, including where it was raised from;
• our internal log of what our own staff did.

A driver's location trail from trips is not deleted immediately; it ages out on its usual 30-day schedule.

We keep these because the other person on that trip has a right to their own record of it, our accounts must balance, and a dispute or a tax question can arrive months later. What is left is a trip that happened, not a person.

13. Security

• Everything between your phone and our servers travels over HTTPS. The app refuses plain HTTP outright.
• Passwords for staff accounts are stored scrambled with PBKDF2, never as text.
• Login codes are stored as a one-way hash, so nobody — including us — can read a code from the database.
• Uploaded documents are stored under random file names. They are served to the person they belong to, to the staff who do verification, and — for a dispute — to the staff handling that case. Two of them are shown more widely on purpose: a driver's photograph and the vehicle's photograph are shown to the customer on that trip, so you know who is picking you up.
• Every action a staff member takes on someone's record is logged with who did it and when.

We should be straight with you about the limits: your documents are stored on an ordinary encrypted server disk, not in an encrypted vault with separate keys. No system is perfectly safe. If something goes wrong that affects you, we will tell you.

14. Children

UDrive is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child. Children travel as passengers on a booking made by an adult, and in that case we hold only what the adult tells us — the number of children travelling, and for a tour, a name and age group.

If you believe a child has created an account, tell us and we will remove it.

15. Changes to this policy

If we change something that matters, we will raise the version number and the effective date at the top, and tell you in the app before the change takes effect. The current version is always readable in the app, without an internet connection, at Settings → Privacy Policy.

16. Contact

UDrive WhatsApp: 0335-6823975

Write to us in Urdu or English, whichever is easier.