An Uber ride to a Planned Parenthood clinic. A weekly ride to an address that hosts AA meetings. Early morning pickups at your coworker's address. Ride-hail company Uber knows intimate information about its millions of monthly active users in the United States, and, following a widely shared tweet by analyst Doug Laney of tech research company Gartner over the weekend calling attention to a clause in Uber's US Terms of Use, privacy-minded customers began to worry that this data could soon be publicly shared or sold to third parties. Not so, says an Uber spokesperson. Rather, when reached for comment by SFist, the spokesperson explained that the "user content" in question pertains to things like driver feedback and does not include your ride history.

The paragraph of note, buried within the Uber's Terms of Use, is as follows:

Any User Content provided by you remains your property. However, by providing User Content to Uber, you grant Uber a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, modify, create derivative works of, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, and otherwise exploit in any manner such User Content in all formats and distribution channels now known or hereafter devised (including in connection with the Services and Uber's business and on third-party sites and services), without further notice to or consent from you, and without the requirement of payment to you or any other person or entity.

In a world where Facebook uses your "Likes" to advertise to your friends, it is perhaps too easy to imagine a scenario where Uber — which in its latest update seeks access to your phone's contacts — advertises your late night dalliances to your boss. "John Doe loves the Power Exchange! You might too!"

Thankfully, it appears that this latest fear is unfounded.

In the same Terms of Use paragraph, Uber also gives itself the right to "sublicense" out your "User Content" to third parties. This was taken by some to mean that Uber may sell your data — a charge also denied by the company.

Consumerist picked up the story and noted that this update to Uber's Terms of Use actually occurred back in January of this year, and that the language is relatively standard across the tech industry.

Although this latest incident appears to be a bit of a false alarm, one can forgive customers for assuming the worst. Uber has stepped in privacy hot water before, perhaps most notably when in 2014 Uber senior vice president of business Emil Michael floated the idea of investigating the private lives of journalists in an apparent effort to intimidate the press. Michael quickly walked back the comments and apologized, and BuzzFeed reported that Uber claimed it "has clear policies against executives looking at journalists’ travel logs, a rich source of personal information in Uber’s possession."

Related: Sen. Al Franken Takes Uber And Lyft To Task Over Bias Report