That Uber could have a bug that sends all location data is irrelevant. Google, Apple, Lyft, Yelp, Foursquare, Microsoft, or any other company that has any app that accesses and transmits location data could have an identical bug that presents an identical problem, and Google and Apple already regularly collect and transmit that data all the time without it being a bug. And being a bug of biblical proportions, it'll get resolved very, very quickly because it would be causing a hugely expensive outage.

Uber also only uses strong TLS for connections, so "the powers that be" will have a heck of a time taking a real heap of gigabits (terabits?) per second of encrypted data and doing anything particularly useful with it.