ON 10 JULY, The Guardian published a leak of more than 120,000 documents accusing the ride-hailing app Uber of lobbying governments,"duping police" and breaking the law.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has admitted that the company made "mistakes and missteps" between 2013 and 2017, and has asked the public to "judge us by what we've done over the last five years, and what we will do in the years to come".

Nevertheless, a little over a week since the Uber files were published, data from YouGov BrandIndex does show a strong public reaction to the controversy. Buzz scores, a measure of whether consumers have heard anything positive or negative about a brand recently, plunged from -0.7 to -11.7 (-11) between 10 and 17 July. It's a story that has received a lot of attention on platforms such as the BBC and the Daily Mail, and consequently Impression scores (which measure overall sentiment towards a brand) have declined from 2.5 to -4.6 (- 7.1). Perceptions of the brand's Quality fell from 2.7 to -2.6 (-5.3), and metrics tracking value for money fell from -0.5 to -6.7 (-7.2).

With Recommendation scores tumbling from 5.5. to 0.4 (-5.1), and with Reputation scores (which measure whether people would be proud or embarrassed to work for a brand) seeing a similar 5.3-point drop (from -8.9 to -14.2), brand perceptions for Uber have taken a hit as a result of the story.

But despite these decreases, other metrics have remained unchanged or even seen improvement. Purchase Intent - which asks consumers to pick the brand they're most likely to use in a given industry - saw a mild increase, rising from 5.4 to 6.4 (+1). Customer satisfaction, which went from 10.0 to 9.8, also barely moved (-0.2).

The story is yet to fully unfold, but so far it has not dented the nation's desire to use the service.

(c) 2022 City A.M., source Newspaper