You might think of Uber as a ride-hailing company or a lawsuit-ridden self-driving car developer, but at its core, Uber is a big data company. It has to constantly crunch location coordinates, traffic data, payment information, and tax rates-and putting all that data in Uber's hands sometimes makes users nervous .

But now Uber is debuting a differential privacy tool that it will use to analyze its vast data stores. Differential privacy allows for analysis of large data sets without revealing the identity of any individual included in the data, and is used by companies like Apple and Google to gain insight from user data without compromising privacy. Uber's new tool will let its data analysts know the likely privacy implications of any queries they make on Uber's data before they make them.