Uber to let parents watch teens' rides live via in-car video

Uber began rolling out live video streaming for its teen accounts on Monday, giving parents and guardians the ability to watch their child's ride unfold in real time through the front-facing camera on the driver's phone. The feature, confirmed by the company to ABC News's "Good Morning America" as a network exclusive, is the most significant addition to Uber's teen-safety toolkit since the accounts launched three years ago, and it lands amid mounting state and federal scrutiny of how rideshare companies protect minors and record their trips.

The tool works alongside the existing suite of teen-account safeguards, which include live trip tracking, PIN verification and optional audio recording. Those features are automatically switched on for every teen trip and cannot be disabled by the rider, the driver or the parent, according to Uber's own description of the teen accounts program. Video streaming is opt-in for viewing: once a trip begins, the linked guardian receives a push notification that live video is available and can tap into the stream from inside the Uber app. Both the teen and the driver are separately notified the moment a guardian starts watching, and the stream cuts off automatically when the ride ends.

How the streaming works

Uber says the video is encrypted end to end while a trip is underway and that the company itself cannot view the live feed. After the ride, the encrypted file is retained on Uber's servers for up to 14 days and then deleted automatically, unless it has been flagged as part of a safety report, in which case it is kept under the company's standard data-retention rules. Uber told ABC News that its own staff can access a decryption key only to investigate a reported safety incident, not to browse footage at will. Drivers who are eligible to carry teen riders are given onboarding instructions on how to position their phones and can preview their own camera angle through the app's Safety Toolkit before ever picking up a young passenger.

The rollout is starting narrow. Live video is initially available in nine U.S. markets: Atlanta, Phoenix, Orlando, Raleigh-Durham, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland, Rhode Island and El Paso. Uber says it intends to expand the feature nationwide over the coming weeks, following the same city-by-city pattern it used when teen accounts themselves first launched.

• Teen accounts, for riders aged 13 to 17, debuted in 2023 and are now available in more than 50 countries.
• Uber says teen-account users have completed tens of millions of trips since the program began.
• Only drivers who meet enhanced screening and ratings thresholds are eligible to receive teen trip requests.
• The new video files are auto-deleted after 14 days unless tied to a safety report.

Why Uber is adding a camera now

The announcement does not arrive in a vacuum. Uber is currently defending itself against thousands of sexual-assault lawsuits consolidated in a federal multidistrict litigation, a wave of claims that has made passenger safety, and driver conduct in particular, one of the company's most persistent legal and reputational liabilities. Regulators have taken notice of the specific question of recording rides involving minors. In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis signed the Colorado Rideshare Safety and Accountability Act in June, a law that the state's Public Utilities Commission says imposes new audio and video recording standards on transportation network companies along with driver background checks every six months. Colorado was the first state to regulate rideshare companies at all, back in 2014, and its PUC now oversees six licensed operators, including Uber and Lyft, that together provided roughly 37 million rides statewide last year.

Video recording inside rideshare vehicles is not, on its own, a new idea, and it has generated its own friction. In 2025, Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Peter Welch introduced the bipartisan Safe and Private Rides Act, which would require transportation network companies to disclose when a driver is using a recording device and let riders decline trips on that basis, with enforcement handled by the Federal Trade Commission. That bill targeted driver-installed dashcams rather than a company-run streaming product built for parents, but it reflects a broader unease, shared by privacy advocates, about who can watch inside a car and for how long the footage is kept. Uber's design choices for the new feature, encryption, automatic deletion and restricted company access, appear aimed squarely at that concern.

Who the change reaches

The feature is aimed at a specific audience: parents managing teenagers' independent travel to school, practices, jobs and social events without being able to drive them personally. Uber has leaned on that pitch since the program's 2023 founding, when the company said the accounts grew out of requests from families who wanted a supervised way to let teens book their own rides. Teen-account rides account for a small but growing share of Uber's overall business, and the company has periodically added features, most recently spending limits for guardians, to keep pace with parental demand and, following several publicized incidents, with mounting safety concerns.

"It's another way we're helping parents feel confident while giving teens the independence to get where they need to be," said Ashu Manohar, Uber's director of product management, in comments to "Good Morning America."

Manohar also addressed the driver side of the arrangement directly, telling the program that a driver is notified in-app the instant a guardian begins watching, and that the alert does not interrupt the driver's navigation or other in-app notifications. That detail matters to drivers, who have separately organized around concerns about surveillance and unpredictable account actions tied to safety technology; Uber's message is that the camera is meant to reassure parents rather than to monitor drivers covertly.

What happens next

Uber's stated plan is to widen availability past the initial nine markets over the next several weeks, though the company has not published a full city list or a firm completion date. How quickly that expansion proceeds may depend in part on how the feature performs in its first markets and on regulatory response elsewhere: Colorado's new recording standards took effect this year, and other states have introduced or passed similar rideshare-safety measures in 2026, meaning Uber's rollout could soon intersect with a patchwork of state-level rules rather than a single national standard. For now, the company is treating live video as an extension, not a replacement, of the trip tracking and PIN verification tools already built into every teen account, betting that a real-time look inside the car will do more to reassure parents than tracking dots on a map ever could.