The CEO of luxury ride-hailing service Wheely has told Spear’s he is prepared to take his fight against New York City all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing a city rule requiring every ride to be logged puts his ultra-wealthy clients at risk.
The rule requires every licensed for-hire vehicle operator to submit a monthly, unaggregated record of each trip taken. The data includes pickup and drop-off locations to within three feet, exact timing, as well as driver and vehicle details which are retained indefinitely.
The recording and storage of the data poses particular risks to wealthy people, who make up a significant proportion of Wheely’s clients, the company’s CEO, Anton Chirkunov, told Spear’s. ‘Privacy is an asymmetrical risk for the wealthy,’ he said, citing doxxing and the consequences of government data being ‘shared, leaked or stolen.’
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‘A record of a person’s rides is a record of their life,’ he added, pointing to ‘the business meetings they take, the homes they return to, the schools their children attend.’
Wheely, a London-founded chauffeur service built around discretion for executives and UHNW clients, has been locked in a legal battle since the spring, when the company entered the New York market. Almost immediately, Wheely took the city to court, arguing the requirement amounts to a warrantless and permanent surveillance record of its clients’ movements. Having been dismissed by a US District Judge in the Southern District of New York in April 2026 the case is now before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
Wheely was founded in London in 2012 and has expanded to Paris, Dubai and now New York. The company models itself as a high-end hospitality brand rather than conventional ride-hailing business, as drivers train at what it calls a ‘chauffeur academy’, sign non-disclosure agreements, and operate without CCTV in the vehicle.
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‘Customers feel free to talk on the phone in a way that they don’t in black cars and limos in New York,’ Chirkunov told Spear’s, adding that some competitors record audio or video inside their vehicles, sometimes without clearly disclosing it.
Wheely says it collects location and trip data only to fulfil the journey itself, does not sell it, and resists demands to hand it over, but that New York’s rule removes that discretion.
The risk is not merely hypothetical. In 2014, New York City released 173 million taxi trip records under a public records request.
The records were not sufficiently anonymised, so researchers were able to reverse the process using publicly available photos and celebrity gossip blogs. One data analyst was able to trace a specific cab ride taken by actor Bradley Cooper in 2013, including that he paid $10.50 with no recorded tip. According to one blog, the analysis and the press coverage around it gave the impression that ‘Bradley Cooper is a bad tipper’ (although it should be noted the actor may have tipped with cash).
However, the more serious danger for wealthy or high-profile people is that repeated trips could reveal patterns in their movements that put them, their families and their privacy at risk.
‘Repeated pickup and drop-off locations can be analysed to identify a client’s home address, office, family residences, schools, gyms and other regularly visited locations with a high degree of confidence,’ Mike O’Neill, managing director of security firm Optimal Risk, told Spear’s. Once that pattern is established, he added, ‘a threat actor can begin to predict where an individual is likely to be at a specific date and time’.
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O’Neill also warned that agentic AI tools could allow a bad actor with access to historical journey data to automate this kind of pattern analysis at a much larger scale, making intelligence work that was previously impractical far easier. That could expose routines and vulnerabilities, he said, creating opportunities for ‘surveillance, stalking and kidnapping,’ and even make burglary ‘less risky during known absences.’
In the wrong hands, he added, this kind of exploitable information would ‘aid targeted criminal activity against wealthy individuals and their families.’
Cameron Colquhoun, CEO of cybersecurity firm Neon Century, told Spear’s the risk is growing as analysis tools improve. ‘With the right open source intelligence, anonymised data can be reverse engineered relatively easily, in order to work out which journeys belong to which customers,’ he said.
‘The threats to the UHNW are widespread,’ he added, also pointing to other risks such as Strava’s running-route leaks and private jet tracking as further evidence that ‘the amount of data that hostile parties can collect on UHNWs is growing exponentially.’
For Chrikunov, ‘the question is not whether it leaks, but when.’
Only this week it was reported that hackers breached Liechtenstein’s government-maintained register of beneficial owners, accessing data tied to around 31,000 companies, foundations and trusts in one of the country’s most serious cyber incidents to date.
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The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) says its trip log rule is necessary to enforce driver-fatigue and passenger-safety requirements, and that it takes its responsibility to protect the data seriously.
While Wheely knew about the rule before it launched in New York, Chirkunov says that did not mean the company had to accept it. ‘Even if there’s a rule in place, [it is about] whether that rule is constitutional or not,’ he said.
He argues the rule predates a decade of Supreme Court rulings that have reshaped how location data is treated under the Fourth Amendment.
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Wheely has taken a similarly tough stance on customer data in the past. In 2020, having operated in Moscow for some time, the company’s product was removed from app stores in Russia when it refused to comply with local regulations.
‘If [the New York rule] was [constitutional], then we would have no choice but to comply,’ Chirkunov said. ‘But we have the right to challenge the constitutionality of the rule.’
‘And if we have to go all the way to the Supreme Court, this is something we will do.’
