From what I can tell, the worst thing Uber did was not be sufficiently cooperative with the police investigation. This part of the narrative is extremely muddled and unclear, so it's hard to take a strong position on their behavior here.
"The Uber department responded that they had no record of a trip from the vehicle with that license plate on December 5th, 2016, just after 11 PM, and the driver had not driven with them for 2 years."
"Sufficiently cooperative" (per you) and outright lying are two very different things.
FTA:
"Why would Uber not have the information on the driver for the police? Uber asserted that they don’t have the ability to look up the drive information of my trip with the information provided (license plate, car make and model, name of driver, time and date of trip, and pickup and drop off location of trip) as it was a violation of privacy. "
Uhhh... what? It violates privacy? Your either complying with the police or you aren't. "There was no warrant" would have been an OK answer, but that wasn't what they said.
They aren't being muddled or unclear here, they are literally avoiding giving answers that would make them look bad. Maybe if they had been more honest and responsive the items could have been recovered rather than the blame falling on Uber.
This kind of thing worries me a bit.
This past week I've taken two Lyfts where the license plate provided in the app didn't match what the driver was actually using. One of my drivers claimed they had just gotten a new car, but that's a bit odd to me since when I bought a new car it took several weeks to get my license plate.
So there should be ample time for a good driver to ensure their record is up to date.
It's just a bit odd to me that the driver wouldn't think to update the plate number in the app, or that uber/lyft would be so slow to update it.
I doubt it's a human in the cloud who sees a notification that a driver would like to update their plate number and then adds it to a queue to work on.
Having used Lyft countless times over the last few years I know I have personally never checked the checked that the plate matched.
However, usually that's the way I identify the correct driver. For instance Priuses are the more common car and sometimes it's easier to memorize the first 4 or so digits on a plate than the make/model/color that my driver is driving.
But on the other hand, it's still a small issue at least because in some rare circumstance somebody could use it maliciously.
First and foremost for your own safety.
Second just send them to CS. If something terrible ever happens and it shows up on the 11pm news, at least you can say "I tried" and the company can't run and hide from its bad policy
That can happen, you don't even need a new car for it. I've bought a car with one license plate missing, and when I went to DMV to ask what to do with it, I just was issued a new set. One other time, on another car, my back license plate disappeared - still have no idea what happened to it, I suspect it was stolen, but I have no idea where (how often you check the license plate on your own car?) or why. It's very easy to steal it, it's just two screws, so it was gone, and I went to the DMV and got another set. Some of my documents still list the same car under an old license plate. So it's not impossible to have several sets of plates for the same car, and it's very easy to get a new set.
Getting license plate btw can be very fast - at least in California, once you're in the DMV they just have a stack of plates sitting there and they take one from the top and give it to you (obviously, after you waited in the line and paid and filled in the documents, etc. - that may take time :) Brand-new car may take longer or if you get them by mail.
I sent an email to support asking for my full ride history, and I asked what was the date which I created my account as I wanted to know how close to the birth of Uber I signed up...
I was told that I couldn't have any of that info as it was a violation of privacy.
I found this bizarre as it was my account info I was seeking.
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When Uber had the "party" thing happen, I thought it was going to be an interesting lottery to attend an Uber corporate as a user.
Turned out it was simply a ploy to measure how many people they could get to tap on the lottery button, then deliver them to Harlot, a club in SF which typically charges a cover to enter, but there was no cover - the bar was still full price and at the end of the lame party, everyone was just standing on the corner like any other schlepp.
I was amazed that Uber had arranged this "secret party lottery" where the driver only knew the location and would pick you up and drop you at the party... but they didn't arrange for any pickups from the party to take you back home.
I had asked some Uber party planners that were there at the time if they intended on sharing any of the user behavior data gathered from this experiment, they laughed and said "not a chance"
It was the lamest secret party ever - and given that they didn't even cover Uber rides home after taking people free to a bar, I thought it was very poor on their part.
Does seem bizarre. Do other companies provide this information? I can't imagine Amazon or Facebook not telling you. But I've never tried. Facebook and Google have their data take our services (I know neither provide everything especially FB), but maybe that includes the info. Amazon at least shows you your entire purchase history, equivalent to ride history.
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The party stuff just seems funny in a sad way. I never heard of it before.
Uber is maybe in a little different position because they're in danger of outing a cheating spouse if they give up that info. Maybe a better option would be to let you access all of your trip info, but have an option to hide certain trips? Sort of like private browsing mode in your browser?
Yeah there should be some solution.
The cheating spouse was only one example. Another might be a girl in a repressive social setting getting information about contraception. There are legitimate, lawsuit baiting reasons why this information is risky to disseminate too easily.
However, if Uber claimed they can not do the lookup, that would be a lie. They definitely can, they may not want to do it for some reasons (e.g. that may be sued by the driver if it turns out it was a scam on the part of the passenger, and maybe even in case it's even a simple misunderstanding - people have been suing for less), but no question they can. If they lied to the police and the court, that would be a huge mistake.
> "The Uber department responded that they had no record of a trip from the vehicle with that license plate on December 5th, 2016, just after 11 PM, and the driver had not driven with them for 2 years."
How do we know this is a lie? It could be true due to driver fraud (driving a different car than the one they have registered with Uber). Or it could have been some kind of mixup on their support team.
> Uhhh... what? It violates privacy? Your either complying with the police or you aren't. "There was no warrant" would have been an OK answer, but that wasn't what they said.
"It violates privacy" and "there was no warrant" aren't mutually exclusive, feels like you're splitting hairs here. If a request violates privacy, that's a good reason to ask for a warrant.
Also, you left out this confusing paragraph:
"It was later asserted that they reached out to the police detective to clear this up. They found the information and tried to contact the detective with all the information. If you are curious as to when this happened, it was April 9th. Uber did everything in their power to make the investigation successful and cooperate with the detective, on April 9th, 2017, four months after the incident. They also only reached out to the detective with the correct information once they were caught obstructing the investigation."
It's still unclear to me how exactly Uber obstructed the investigation but maybe my reading comprehension is lacking.
Im terrible with dates so stuff like this slips by me ALL the time!
- Monday, December 5th, 2016, the crime
- Uber tells police that they "don't have a record of a trip..."
- March 3rd, 2017. first court date
- April 9th, uber amends statement to the police. We do have records but won't share due to privacy...
You know, telling the driver that they are a matter of a police investigation and that they would be sharing data with them (aka cooperating) would have given uber a leg to stand on. Uber saying "We gave all the info to the police, it is out of our hands, we don't control our contractors" goes a long way in court. Lying, changing your story, tends not to.
This is literally how you get charged with "obstructing justice" --- you shut up or you tell the truth.
"The Uber department responded that they had no record of a trip from the vehicle with that license plate on December 5th, 2016, just after 11 PM, and the driver had not driven with them for 2 years."
This still leaves a lot of open questions and is IMO not even a compelling allegation of obstruction of justice, let alone proof. As I said before, it's entirely possible that the actual driver/car were not the ones registered with Uber on the account. It's also possible that somebody erred when looking up records, or a million other things.
What we do know is that by the time this made it to the first court date, Uber was not denying that a trip or a theft took place.
I'll reiterate my fundamental argument since this has strayed a little bit: this article is muddled and confusing with regards to cataloguing bad actions by Uber.
"this article is muddled and confusing"
Reality is muddled and confusing. Real life never has the clarity of an omniscient third-person narrator telling the reader the actual facts of the matter.
"It was later asserted that they reached out to the police detective to clear this up. They found the information and tried to contact the detective with all the information."
"If you are curious as to when this happened, it was April 9th. Uber did everything in their power to make the investigation successful and cooperate with the detective, on April 9th, 2017, four months after the incident. They also only reached out to the detective with the correct information once they were caught obstructing the investigation."
How exactly did Uber obstruct the investigation? What incorrect information did they give? Maybe I'm thick, but it's not clear to me at all from the article.
Which lead to them only being found 50% liable the first time.
"The one good thing that he did was he did not deny the contents or existence of my backpack."
"One point the Uber rep gave was that I should have heard the car driving away and chased after him."
"The Uber representative said that their drivers are independent contractors and as such, they are not responsible for making sure that they respond to any phone calls, and actually had zero control over what they do."
"Uber said that the driver had a good standing, but was very evasive when asked if he had taken any more trips that night. The Clerk made him answer that there was only one more ride given. This alluded to the possibility that the other passenger could have taken the bag from the backseat."
Lol, as if that's acceptable for any company in an investigation. I'm not sure if you're playing coy, but your words are trying to insert doubt into his story when there really is none.
They blatantly tried to make this guys life much more difficult than it needed to be and their track record has shown they really have a culture of not caring about this stuff no matter the "narrative".
Quite frankly, I'm surprised this comment was voted to the top.
The driver seemingly didn't get reprimanded or properly investigated by Uber. We don't know this for sure, but based on what went down, this seems to be the case. Uber lied to the police. Uber tried to turn it around against the victim for having so much evidence. When the victim was incredibly lucky to have a few of his evidence items (like photo on plane and security camera).
The victim (and police) were never able to get in contact with the driver. Shouldn't Uber have some sort of way for a customer of a driver to get into contact with said driver? The current way made it far too easy for the driver to get away with robbing the victim. This is possibly most damning against Uber -- they don't seem to be doing anything to change things. Perhaps they are. Changes don't happen overnight and they don't have to be transparent if they are trying to better things. So I'll definitely be humbled and retract my assumptions that Uber isn't trying to better things if they do in the coming months.
Sure he did. He got a 1-star rating - surely this will weed out the bad agents from the system.
> Uber said that the driver had a good standing
They could've been lying of course.
I honestly can't imagine what else you would call it, except maybe "belligerent incompetence".
If a contractor for a public utility like a phone company comes in your house on a repair call for said phone company and pisses all over your couch and takes a dump in your fish tank, do you think that the phone company has no liability for setting up the whole thing and sending someone like that into your house?