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Not 100% sure, but I think the access to contacts is so that you can split ride fares with other people.

> Not 100% sure, but I think the access to contacts is so that you can split ride fares with other people.

There's a standard intent to select a contact for purposes like that, and then the app only gets access to the information of that contact. Apps requesting access to contacts get all contacts.

It's actually probably so you can autocomplete a contact as a destination address for your Uber. The same is true in Maps for navigation. Unfortunately UX wins over privacy so launching an intent to pick a contact probably wasn't as elegant as using a unified autocomplete field.

Aha! So maybe they need a variety of permissions in order to apply machine learning so as to enhance the UX.

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