Federal judge rips Uber apart over dirt-digging investigation | Hacker News Reader

Federal judge rips Uber apart over dirt-digging investigation

theintercept.com

60 pointsunfunco31 comments

I wish that more of silicon valley would penalize people for reprehensible behavior. If Uber execs were ostracized rather than lauded... if investors pounded the table about legal risks and the importance of ethical business rather than cheering along any behavior that makes the numbers grow (temporarily)... we might not have Zenefits melting down, nor sociopathic exec teams at major companies that are held up as scions of the tech world. If this is one of the best and brightest companies the tech industry has to offer, we have a deeply worrisome problem. If pursuing paper growth absolutely trumps ethical concerns, we are feeding into a horrible system. If nobody calls this shit out and there isn't actual financial and social/cultural consequence, things will only get worse.

I don't see what's so wrong about using an investigator to find out more about the guy who is suing you.

Can someone explain that to me? Is it against the law to find all publicly available information about someone or to follow them around?

The big criminal act that I can see here is that "Ergo" (the company that Uber hired) wasn't licensed in NY. Seems like that would be on Ergo, not Uber.

"Investigation" covers a wide range of activities, and many things one would do while investigating can themselves be chilling, intimidating, or harassing; and using investigation to chill, intimidate or harass can be the point. The Church Of Scientology is famous for using "investigation" to destroy its critics. In this case, the judge clearly felt that Ergo's investigations were far beyond routine due diligence on a plaintiff.

Remember, there was previously an incident where an Uber exec bragged at a party about using investigators to destroy journalists who might investigate them. [0]

[0] http://www.dailytech.com/Uber+Exec+Threatens+to+Spend+Millio...

Interesting. Thanks for elaborating.

If investigators don't have any power to do anything that a normal public person can do, like finding public information or digging through someone's trash...then I don't see why anyone should be barred from employing that. However, I know that in many states you must be licensed to advertise yourself as a Private Investigator.

I don't know why that would be the case though unless PIs have special authority to do things that normal people can't do. I mean, I do know why - it's political for one thing since you can't even be a PI in some states without having police or military experience.

Looking around, I don't see any special privileges that a PI has that a normal person does not. They cannot trespass on private property, they cannot wiretap a phone or gain access to private records. The only special privilege that they enjoy is that they generally won't be subject to harassment or stalking laws if they follow someone around in public.

You're not barred from investigating someone or using investigators to do so in a trial, but the prohibition here is about the effect created by the investigation (just like it's the effect of 100 phone calls a day that constitutes stalking, not using the phone itself). Legal proceedings have a well developed decorum/civility to them that the judge can enforce at her discretion, including criminal penalties.

If Uber/Ergo had limited itself to not interviewing the plaintiff's family, friends, and acquaintances, they'd probably have been fine; but going around to everyone you know and asking a lot of dark questions is pretty clearly going to intimidate a plaintiff and chill other potential plaintiffs, and that's obviously the point--especially when interviewing is unlikely to surface anything not already found through records searches and the discovery process.

Thank you. I can totally see why that kind of behavior should be prohibited.

People are doing it in their own, quiet way. I know plenty of talented folk who have been heavily recruited by Uber and the main deterrent to them joining has been the perceived lack of culture fit.

I don't get it. Uber are offering an extremely good service, one that I'd pay more money for than they're asking. They don't need to be terrible humans to be successful so why do they do it? This seems to be par for the course of them in terms of shady shit they've been accused of or caught doing.

They don't need to be terrible humans to be successful so why do they do it?

That's what gets me, too. Though it can be easily copied, their service model is such a night-and-day improvement over the state of things previously that they should be universally loved for what they're doing.

And yet they keep pulling these asshat antics, and gratuitously making a bad name for themselves -- over and over and over again.

I think that to some extent, companies -- especially relatively young companies -- reflect their founders. And Travis Kalanick seems like he's just kind of a dick.

But more so, remember that everything's on a margin, here. Uber can obviously be very successful on the level of "a company that provides taxi services in a lot of cities." But they've taken in more than $10B in funding on the premise that they can be much more than "a company that provides taxi services in a lot of cities."

So even though it seems like they should be coasting into victory, they're actually super tense and worried, because what they could coast into victory for is not what they're now obligated to become, based on the money they've taken in and the promises they made to the people who bought them.

They should try being successful first. Burning VC w/o making a profit isn't really success.

> They don't need to be terrible humans to be successful so why do they do it? This seems to be par for the course of them in terms of shady shit they've been accused of or caught doing.

Because they are a bunch of rich people who simply do not give a shit and the rules do not apply to them?

A snotty bully gets the lesson "there will eventually be somebody bigger" beaten into him. A snotty rich bully never actually encounters that.

Their starting point for the product was to barrel through (read: ignore) a widespread municipal regulation in order to manufacture a new market opportunity. This fact alone should be enough to understand their ethos.

Creepy. My city local taxis are a mafia. The global one is even worse. I'm afraid about what would happen when they became a de facto monopoly.

Did anyone go to jail? No? Well then... it'll happen again.

I was going to type a reply about how I'll never take another Uber (not only due to this, but everything else associated with that brand too), but I realized I'd be lying. It's too convenient and available in locations lacking alternatives. My moral outrage won't stop me drunk and wanting to get home to give them more money.

If it makes you feel any better, most taxi companies are even more reprehensible than Uber. They just operate at much smaller scale, so nobody notices.

The reprehensibility of taxi companies is a big reason why Uber was invented. That said, as with their drivers and corporate practices, Uber and taxi companies are converging on a mean behavior level that in my case has rendered Uber expendable.

I deleted Uber off of my phone a long time ago. Everywhere that I've traveled to since then has had perfectly decent Lyft coverage. I'm under no illusion that Lyft is a saint of a company, but they're a hell of a lot better than Uber.

Try Lyft. The drivers make more money too!

I'll step in an Uber in exceptional cases (basically only when someone else is ordering and I don't want to start a scene), but that's about it. Otherwise, I'll use Lyft or whatever local alternatives might be available, if at all possible.

Also, why was no mention made of the "avoid discovery issues" discussion?

I'm sure plenty of people would like to "avoid discovery". Few would be stupid enough to commit those words to text.

I wondered that at first when I came to these comments, but then it dawned on me that anyone with a strong opinion on that (read, has personal experience) is unlikely to post comments about it.

How did this meme come about that the only possible penalty for any kind of offence is jail? There are so many more ways to influence human behaviour, all of them much less violent.

Because for several years now there has been a much stronger meme in place in the business community -- particularly among "disruptive" technology startups -- that you don't really have to pay attention to pesky things like laws and ordinances.

And not only that -- if you can just eat the petty civil fine they slap on you, you're actually doing a positive moral good in presenting a middle finger to law if it enables you to bring your desperately needed innovations to a wider audiences.

So that's when people start to say -- "OK then - if they won't get the message, it's time to start locking a few of 'em up."

Just like you'd do with any other criminal gang.

Meh. I can think of better uses for my tax money than using it to lock up people for running an unauthorized ride-sharing service.

I think the same about drug dealers, although I disagree that rich tech boys breaking the law isn't a big problem.

(Shrug) Given the set of "big problems" in the world, I'm having trouble agreeing with you that this is one of them. But I don't own any taxi medallions, so I may be biased.

The original article refers to harassment of opponents in a civil litigation case -- not running a grey-market service, per se.

I really wonder if Uber will stop doing these shady shenanigans before their business runs into the ground. I guess they'll be around for a long time with the enormous amounts of money they're been given through investments, but I feel like, at least in the US, where consumers prefer companies that aren't blatantly distasteful, people will start switching to other companies that have better PR or go back to the traditional taxi services. If what was said in February was true, that they're profitable in the US (which is difficult to believe because I doubt Uber uses GAAP), then they will eventually find themselves in a difficult position with one of their primary markets losing interest in their product. But, on the bright side, at least they're unlikely to have to worry about losing billions of dollars in China as much considering the new law that passed about ride hailing since they won't be providing the same incentive for drivers anymore[1].

1: http://qz.com/745337/china-finally-made-ride-hailing-legal-i...

> Jed Rakoff, has now, in a 31-page order, called “blatantly fraudulent and arguably criminal.”

So? It's Uber, they are above the law. Silly judge.

or is this finally the line? Ignoring regulations all over the place, fine. Questionable "Contractor" status for employees? That's cool. Sharing economy man.

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