FREENOW

Is FREENOW safe to use?

Mostly, yes. FREENOW books licensed taxis and private-hire cars in European cities, and we found no privacy fine or reported breach against it. The privacy side is weaker. Apple's label lists your purchases, precise location, email, search history and device identifiers as data that may be used to track you across other companies' apps, which is as broad as Lyft, the company that now owns FREENOW. We score it 55/100, between Lyft (52) and Bolt (59).

What changed when Lyft bought it

Lyft completed its purchase of Intelligent Apps GmbH, the Hamburg company behind FREENOW, on 31 July 2025, for a final price of €205.9 million according to Lyft's filings. FREENOW gave Lyft its first business outside North America: 9 countries and more than 180 cities. The app is now listed as "Freenow by Lyft" and still runs as a separate service from the Lyft app.

For your data, the main change is a new recipient. The UK passenger privacy notice, updated on 24 July 2026, says data is shared with Lyft, Inc. and its affiliates under a group data protection agreement. Data is mainly stored in the EU, the EEA or the UK, and transfers to Lyft in the US rely on standard contractual clauses and a transfer impact assessment.

What the app tracks

The Apple label is broad. Purchase history, precise location, email, search history, user and device IDs and usage data are all listed as used to track you, and purchase history and identifiers are linked to you for third-party advertising. Google Play says approximate location and device IDs are shared with other companies, among other things for advertising.

The privacy notice explains the advertising. Without your consent, FREENOW shows non-targeted ads on other sites. With your consent, it uses "custom audiences" and "lookalike" targeting, which can mean sending your email address to social media platforms so they can find you or people like you. It names AppsFlyer for ad attribution and Braze for marketing messages. You can turn this off with the "Personalised Advertising" switch in the app.

Location is handled more narrowly than the label suggests. The notice says FREENOW sees your GPS position only while you are logged in and using the app, that live location sharing with the driver runs from booking to pickup and can be switched off, and that the driver's phone records the route so overcharging can be checked.

Security

We found no reported breach of FREENOW rider accounts. The notice says data sent from your phone is always encrypted, that FREENOW is PCI DSS certified for card data, and that phone numbers are masked between riders and drivers.

FREENOW gives security researchers no obvious route in. We found no FREENOW bug bounty on HackerOne, Bugcrowd, Intigriti or YesWeHack, and no security.txt file. Lyft runs a private, invitation-only bounty on HackerOne whose scope is not public. A 2024 entry in the US National Vulnerability Database, CVE-2024-11026, reported a hard-coded default keystore password in version 12.10.0 of the Android app; VulDB, which filed it, rated it hard to exploit and says FREENOW did not respond.

Ride safety

Unlike Uber or Bolt, FREENOW grew up as a taxi app. Most rides are with taxi drivers licensed by their city. In London, its private-hire licence from Transport for London comes with extra conditions: FREENOW must check every driver's and vehicle's London licence with TfL's Licence Checker before giving them bookings, send TfL weekly reports on suspected fake documents, and report data breaches affecting UK customers to TfL. That does not remove the risk of assault or bad driving, and FREENOW, unlike Lyft and Uber in the US, publishes no figures on incidents reported during rides. We score ride safety close to other ride apps for that reason.

Has FREENOW been fined?

Once, and not over data. In July 2022 Italy's competition and consumer authority (AGCM) fined Mytaxi Italia, the local FREENOW company, €400,000. From November 2021 it had added an €0.80 "clean air fee" to taxi rides paid in the app in Milan, Turin, Rome and Naples, which riders could avoid only by paying the driver directly, and the authority found the app did not make that clear. It also found that only a small part of the money was meant for the green projects the fee was named after. The fee was later renamed an intermediation charge. Its owner Lyft paid a US$2.1 million FTC penalty in 2024 over driver pay ads, which does not involve FREENOW.

How to use FREENOW more safely

1. Check that the plate, car and driver name match the booking before you get in.
2. Turn off "Personalised Advertising" in the app, and on iPhone tap "Ask App Not to Track".
3. Turn off live location sharing once the driver has found you if you do not want it running.
4. If you think you were overcharged, ask FREENOW for the route record; the privacy notice says riders can request it.
5. If you stop using the app, ask rider support to delete your account instead of waiting three years for automatic deletion.

How we scored it

Regulatory record (82) is FREENOW's strongest factor: one €400,000 Italian consumer fine in 2022 and no privacy fine. Privacy (38) is the weakest, because Apple's label lists trip, location, contact and identifier data as used to track you. Security (58) reflects a clean breach record held back by the lack of any public way to report bugs. For another European ride app, see Bolt.