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Comment by kevinburke | Hacker News Reader

To summarize: An Uber rider in India alleged she was raped by an Uber driver. The driver was already awaiting trial for four other criminal offenses, and was ultimately convicted of the crime. An Uber executive (Eric Alexander) flew to India and (legally or illegally) obtained her medical records, then showed these to multiple executives at the company.

These records were then used by Alexander, Travis Kalanick, and Emil Michael to dispute (internally) the woman's account of the story. They claimed that a local competitor was trying to sabotage them by planting this story, which again, involves an Uber customer being raped by a driver facing multiple (other) criminal accusations. Needless to say they lack the training necessary to decipher a medical record, a rape may or may not have left evidence present in that record, and it's a gross violation of customer privacy, business ethics, and (probably) the law.

This is repulsive conduct and it's unbelievable any of these people are still attached to the company.

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Not even allegedly, she was raped and apparently Uber's background checks were trash and didn't follow proper city laws so they got banned in New Delhi. The guy admitted the rape and claimed he'd raped others, he's serving life in prison and he threatened rape victim with murder and raping her with an iron rod. She was a 26 y/o financial executive and sued Uber and settled out of court. Yeah if you're getting strangers to drive women alone at night, I'd hope you'd follow proper background checks.

Just read some other links in article and they were also sued for having at least 25 riders be former sex offenders, sexual assault, and murderers just in Cali wtf. I seriously want to see how many sexual assaults have occurred in uber vs taxis. I see one every day from Uber just in Cali. If taxis did that they would lose their 250k-million dollar medallion so that's an incentive I guess to an archaic regulation. I know others disagree with me, but I would not hire any felons to be drivers. You're giving them complete power over any passenger with no witnesses. I'm completely okay with felons working anywhere with people, but I wouldn't hire one to babysit my kid. That's the similar level of power they have in a car at night and honestly most rape assaults I've seen, the perpetrators had priors

Can you link to the information re: "having at least 25 riders be former sex offenders, sexual assault, and murderers just in Cali"

Don't see it in the source article.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/DA-major-flaws-i...

The last hyperlink has it and this is them paying the fine

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Uber-settles-lawsuit-...

What's odd to me is those 25 apparently were only found because they had been cited by the police. So the 99.9% that weren't cited by the police could have tens of thousands more at least how I understand it

Please do not confuse "felons" with violent and sexual offenders.

Obviously you do not want to employ people with those kinds of backgrounds in a setting where they could repeat past behaviour, but there is an overwhelming number of felons without violent or sexual records and by denying them employment, you are participating in a system designed to coerce poor, uneducated and misguided individuals into repetitive criminal behavior.

If you already understand this distinction between non-violent and violent federal offenders, please consider reflecting it with your choice of words as to not cause further harm to others caught in this system.

It's ironic that in a post about conflation between violent and non-violent offenders of some class, you seem to have conflated the orthogonal classes of “felons” and “federal offenders”.

I was not aware of any difference in the terms nor could I find anything on the matter after a quick search. Mind explaining the difference to me?

At this point (and really, long before this point) any ethical engineer would have left this company. Those remaining are tacitly condoning this type of activity, and should take a long hard look at their priorities.

That's pretty much what I'm thinking. Leave the company, stop using it, and fuck everything else.

I realize that leaving a job isn't easy but an engineer that makes it to Uber is probably more than capable jumping ship.

> I realize that leaving a job isn't easy but an engineer that makes it to Uber is probably more than capable jumping ship.

Who knows how long that will be the case. Nowadays, I imagine a prolonged employment at Uber is a serious black mark on a resume.

No, this is bullshit.

Since I joined, Uber has been behaving very ethically. Yes, there have been problems, which are mainly with unchecked culture in some groups, but I think things have turned around for the entire company. There have been major issues with a very aggressive culture but unlike most other companies, the management is really trying to change things. We will see if any differences are really made but I'm optimistic.

All you hear about from the media is the shitty things from the past, but if you had visibility into the great things that uber does that I see every day, you would think differently. Case in point, the new exec from Apple and the Harvard business professor who both joined this week. They have complete clarity into what kind of company Uber is right now, and they both joined.

Yes, Uber has made mistakes in the past, but since 2015 I think it has really grown up. It has issues just like any other large company but unlike other companies, they have aired their dirty laundry and is at least trying to change. I have no qualms with working for Uber and i have no trouble with my ethics or morals working here.

If someone has a bigoted view on Uber or Uber employees without knowing all the facts, then I have no issues never working for or with them, because they probably have other unchecked bigoted views as well, and would probably be terrible to work with.

Are these not since 2015? http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-scandal-recap-2017-3/#fr...

I'm a reporter for the New York Times. You are dead wrong. This account is accurate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/world/asia/uber-driver-in...

I imagine you're a lower-to-mid-level employee and don't have knowledge of this incident firsthand.

When did I say that the account was wrong?

I think he read "This is bullshit" and assumed you were referring to the report in the article, not the comment you actually replied to.

Personal attacks are not OK on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Oh, nice cowardly ninja-edit.

In case anyone missed it, employee8000 said something like "on the behalf of Uber employees, I take great pleasure in telling Mike Isaac to fuck himself"

Mike please stay on Hacker News! You're a great journalist!

> since 2015 I think it has really grown up

The lie to this statement is that all of Uber's actions to fix their problems (fire people, outside investigation, hire new HR heads) have come in response to bad PR, not an internal recognition that things weren't OK. Travis Kalanick, who was 37 years old when he sanctioned all of this behavior, is still the head of the company. I am sure many of the people who turned a blind eye when star performers were protected, or women were leaving the company in droves, are still there.

This story is a case in point: Alexander wasn't fired, even after half of the executive team knew what he did, and the legal team ordered him to destroy the documents, until Recode started asking about the incident. If the company had really "grown up" as you suggest he would have been gone before the reporters started asking about him. If the company had "grown up" then one of the many people Susan Fowler talked to (in 2016) would have sounded alarms, before she wrote her blog post about it.

> unlike other companies, they have aired their dirty laundry

It's a well known phenomenon that people tend to overestimate the extent to which their habits and behaviors are shared by others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect. A simpler explanation for the series of bad headlines attributable to Uber and not other companies is that Uber was involved in worse behavior than those other companies.

Yes, star performers were protected in the past. Not anymore. Many top performers were fired due to this recent investigation. Hopefully more are fired after the Holder report.

"Women leaving in droves" is a lie. The recent demographics report shows that, although we could do better, the female ratio is about equivalent to other tech companies. And there is a concerted effort to change our processes and training to reduce or remove unconscious bias in our hiring process to make it even better.

And powerful women are joining as well. We just had two major female execs with a huge list of accomplishments join. They know full well the company as it is today and wouldn't join if it was a piece of shit like many of you think it is.

I can't speak of the Alexander case because I know nothing of it. But it's still in that 2014 era that I was talking about. That would not fly now, and I think his firing is in line with how the company is today in 2017.

Since Susan Fowler, I think there has been a major change in company culture. Travis revealed in an allhands that he himself needs to change. He had strong opinions on what he wanted the company culture to be but he finally understood that he was wrong. He wanted a hard-driving, ultra-logical company that squeezed the best out of every single employee but rewarded them well with stock. But after seeing the unintended consequences, that it didn't work. It worked well when you have a handful of employees that love doing this, but it doesn't scale at 10,000+ employees and he finally admitted that. As well, the qualities that made him a great startup CEO do not translate to a 10,000 person company and he finally realized that in March. These are all things he admitted in the all hands, and it seems like The company is rapidly changing to becoming much more empathetic. He is giving full reins to the New SVP HR and she is doing a great job in my opinions. I really do believe that the changes will be transformational.

Uber can claim to have grown up when they fire people for that conduct WITHOUT having to have the press come to them first.

Travis is 40 years old, I'm really not going to believe "he's going to change" when he is still the CEO and all we've seen is that really bad PR can force him into taking small actions to mitigate it. Last week the head of HR was talking about how there's no systemic harassment and how "the biggest problem is morale" and yesterday we read that 215 different people were under investigation for harassment, and it required the involvement of an outside legal firm. Susan Fowler mentioned that Uber had investigators digging into her personal life and her past, after her blog post; it's 2017.

I think it's unethical to continue to work for a person like that, and to help them make more money. I think it's unethical to continue to work with and for people that have turned a blind eye to harassment and blatantly unethical behavior in the past, no matter what tune they are singing now. In particular one way we as employees can signal to management that their actions are unacceptable (and signal to outsiders that we find them unacceptable) is by quitting.

In particular the actions of Uber employees who have continued to stay despite clear and ongoing evidence of unethical behavior (going back to the Beyonce/ex-girlfriend stalking reports, which are several years old), signal that they'd turn a blind eye, or ignore misbehavior, at your company as well.

Thats your prerogative. I choose to give him the benefit of the doubt. After seeing him speak and seeing the changes that have started to roll out, I believe he is sincere.

215 were investigated and 20 people fired. There are ~15000 employees globally. It's not systemic and most people at Uber would agree. The outside firm was hired specifically to show that they are independent with no bias. If they didn't hire outside firm, you probably would accuse them of bias, so there's no way to win.

They were not digging up her past. They were investigating her claims. She was incorrect in assuming that Uber was "out to get her". But I understand why she is feeling that way, I would probably react the same way. But Uber was in direct communications with her lawyers when they conducted these investigations so it was a miscommunication.

Everything you think you know about Uber is based on headlines, tweets, or biased reporting. If you saw the work that Uber does behind the scenes you would have a completely different opinion. The Harvard professor said the same thing. She said she would probably have been someone who would have supported the #deleteuber campaign based on the media reports, but because she had a view on the inside, she felt completely different about it. The same goes for our new CMO from Apple.

Clearly, Uber did some things in the past that deserve the reputation that it has now. But those are largely in the past. If anyone does something equally wrong these days, they will get fired. The company is expending a lot of energy trying to be more empathic. You don't have to believe it if you don't want to, but that would be hiding your head in the sand and not wanting to seek the truth.

You're making a great case for the continued non-employability of current Uber employees, though I doubt you are intending to.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

Nah. I'm not too concerned about what close minded people with preconceived notions have about me or my employability. I don't think any Uber employee will have problems finding jobs, regardless of what you think.

I'll believe that when you attach your real name to your comments.

Why do you think so? He is making sound, well-reasoned statements IMHO.

Hey, on behalf of people everywhere. Go fuck yourself, repeatedly.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do this with.

"I choose to give him the benefit of the doubt."

After all that he and his company have done? He has long since lost the benefit of the doubt.

employee8000 well spoken!

Why am I seeing all of the comments employee8000 made down-voted? Again, this is what the world does to Uber -- try to suppress all true and positive facts, and only let media's negative opinions based on 0.001% know-how of the company prevail!

You often post here as if your position inside Uber gives you enough insight to exonerate the soul of that company. But how much do you really see? How high on the totem poll are you? How many small "well, that [system/data/etc] could be abused, but I trust us"-es do you live with every day?

Edit: Just realized you're the same guy that said there were scary warnings in the UI when you touched production data, but didn't have a clue if there were actually logs, if those logs got audited, and if those audits could get the C-level fired. But you were still confident enough to assess Uber as taking security seriously.

You can choose to believe the anecdotes of an Uber employee who presumably is drinking from the Kool Aid, or media reports that demonize Uber and don't report on any of the good things that have been going on.

It's easy to understand why you'd want to defend your employer and coworkers, and there's nothing wrong with doing so.

Unfortunately, you've broken the HN guidelines repeatedly while doing it. You've also used this account almost exclusively to get involved in flamewars. For those reasons I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe you'll follow the site rules in the future.

From a moderation point of view this has nothing to do with who you happen to work for. It hurts your employer to have you defending it in such uncivil ways in public, though, so they're probably better off with this account banned, too.

Right. So I civilly answer allegations that uber employees are somehow unethical or complicit in harassment or unethical behavior, and the perpetrators of this libel are safe, and I'm the one that's banned. Got it.

You may not agree with what I wrote but I stand by everything I wrote as being respectful. Except to Mike Isaac who has an agenda against Uber with his reporting. Besides that, can you point to a single comment that was "uncivil"?

Yes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14355444 was uncivil and we warned you about it. In my experience, users that continue to make personal attacks after we ask them not to don't have much desire to use HN as intended (which involves, among other things, being respectful to others). If we've misassessed that in your case, it should be easy enough to clear up. I explained how upthread.

Everything I wrote was civil, even the one about the slave. I didn't accuse them of anything it's just your narrowmindedness. I even had defenders on that thread. Time for a reality check, Dan.

To call my responses to Uber threads as "flame wars" is a joke. I was giving my insider view on things every single time, in the face of wildly ridiculous statements. If those constitute "flame wars" then your "power" has gone to your head.

And, uh, no, I won't be begging for an unban, that is preposterous. I was the only one giving civil and informative posts about inside Uber but I guess since anyone defending Uber is "flaming", then enjoy your echo chamber of Uber hate and misinformation.

Reposting the deleted comment for people who don't have showdead on:

> Right. So I civilly answer allegations that uber employees are somehow unethical or complicit in harassment or unethical behavior, and the perpetrators of this libel are safe, and I'm the one that's banned. Got it.

> You may not agree with what I wrote but I stand by everything I wrote as being respectful. Except to Mike Isaac who has an agenda against Uber with his reporting. Besides that, can you point to a single comment that was "uncivil"?

Reposting because frankly, there hasn't been anything uncivil. Just dang's agenda, as usual.

The account posted Also, it's my pleasure to say "fuck you, Mike Isaac" before editing that out when another user objected. That's obviously uncivil. But in this case the larger problem is that it's (more or less) a single-purpose account for getting into flamewars about Uber. That's not how this site is supposed to be used.

Edit: We'd be happy to unban you as well if you'd simply promise to be civil in the future. One of the tentacles of my "agenda" is personally unkilling your high-quality technical comments so HN readers can enjoy them. It would be nice if we could just publish them in the first place.

"But in this case the larger problem is that it's (more or less) a single-purpose account for getting into flamewars about Uber. That's not how this site is supposed to be used."

So a person cannot give opinion in a civil way, and highlight information which was not known to others? It is "mandatory" to talk about multiple topics at HN?

How do you define "flamewars"? Just giving your opinion about a topic, discussing, debating is flamewars? Then one could say the entire world of comments on HN is flamewars, since most comments discuss and debate topics.

I believe arguing your opinion civilly, giving reasons etc, should be okay, regardless of whether you talk of only one topic -- or have a particular opinion on one side of the debate. Most users of the site typically have some view which falls on one side on any debate. But they defend it and give their reasons civilly. Thats the whole point, isnt it?

I have read employee8000's posts and they all seem civil. Except for the one which was changed. But that particular comment was wrong, his other comments on this thread are very civil IMHO.

This is repulsive conduct and it's unbelievable any of these people are still attached to the company.

As they say, a fish rots from the head. Until the top person is fired/replaced, it will continue to happen, because that person will just replace the fired person with another like him.

> Needless to say they lack the training necessary to decipher a medical record, a rape may or may not have left evidence present in that record

A great many medical reports are written for the eyes of non-practitioners and don't necessarily need a medical professional to decode the information.

Words such as "injuries are consistent with _____" are typically included, because the intended audience is police, judges, lawyers, and other medical laymen who are more interested in the conclusions than the minutiae.

To me, the most important question here is "was this document legally obtained"? If it was, then my follow up questions would involve why, and for what reason the laws allow that legality to occur.

All I can say now is that publicly Uber acted 'okay' after the fact by immediately adding additional safety features, deeper background checks, and never publicly disparaging the victim or her story.

Before the incident, however, they were terrible in the wrong by not following public safety laws regarding background checks, as these laws were created to help prevent the incident that occurred.

As a matter of nuance, Uber rose to prominence by ignoring certain laws and some cherish them for this, but that does not mean that all regulations should simply be ignored.

There is no HIPAA-counterpart in India, so I won't be surprised if the executive got access to the report through something as simple as 'asking for it nicely'.

This is repulsive conduct and it's unbelievable any of these people are still attached to the company.

Unfortunately it's all too believable.

I decided a while back that Uber was a horrible company and they will never have any of my money.

And the shit keeps coming. At some point hopefully others will make the same realization.

It is believable they might be worried about sabotage. Fine. It's more surprising that they'd do this themselves. Why not hire an outside firm of some sort? Hell, they have so much money, they could afford to plant employees at all of their competitors and pay them in an untraceable fashion, or through a third party to do "competition analyzation".

Then today they could say they're Shocked, shocked! At the misconduct of this contractor and they're going to sever all ties and withhold payment until a third party review has taken place. While moving all the actual agents to another third party, repeat.

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