Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Employee's Letter
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
> Uber “used undercover agents to collect intelligence against the taxi groups and local political figures. The agents took rides in local taxis, loitered around locations where taxi drivers congregated, and leveraged a local network of contacts with connections to police and regulatory authorities.”
> the things Uber was doing overseas “needlessly exposed Uber and its employees to severe risk — including the likely termination of Uber's operations and possible imprisonment of its employees — should capable security services in many overseas locations discover Uber's espionage.”
> Uber hired at least one CIA-trained contractor to collect "mobile-phone metadata either directly through signal-intercept equipment, hacked mobile devices, or through the mobile network itself.
Or, perhaps, a nation-state.
Employees and other people sign contracts to keep company information private, but nobody else (including journalists, competitors, investors, or just anyone curious about them) is required to help them. We can share what we know and gossip about it.
This is often sold to staff under the guise of "but everyone does it" and "there's no way to be 100% compliant/legal".
It’s stupidly simple to run afoul of the CFAA and federal wiretapping laws, not to mention the expectation of privacy standard in California.
Well ... guess that's why the phrase "damning with faint praise" exists ...
From competitors like Lyft:
>"Uber had successfully obtained trade secrets with the complete download of its driver database ... It contained approximately 35,000 taxi driver records"
>"Uber used driver and customer impersonation to steal competitor trade secrets. This conduct not only violated the trade secrets law discussed above but also wire fraud law"
From regulators:
> "In January 2017, contacted Jacobs on Wickr and advised they had a bug in a meeting with transport regulators and that they needed help cleaning up the audio."
> "Jacobs heard about the practice of bribing foreign government officials. Based on his knowledge of targeting foreign officials to identify those with influential power, and the rapid insights into new markets"
If you look at how that is described in the document it appears that such data was actually obtained just by using the API and perhaps some scraping. Not so sure this actually has any legal issues. The API requests being spread over a 2 month timeframe also makes it hard to accuse them of causing any sort of burdensome load on the server.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
That link to the CFAA page on Wikipedia does not substantiate your claim.
“Uber accessed a protected computer database to lure drivers away to work for the company even though "the database was protected by 'Captcha' to prevent the sort of automated downloading that Uber's MA team intended to carry out. MA was ultimately successful in hacking the system and obtaining the driver database. Because Uber knowingly accessed a protected computer in order to fraudulently capture its valuable contents to gain a competitive advantage, the hack violates the [Computer Fraud and Abuse Act], as well as California Penal Code Section 502."”
The CFAA is broad by design unfortunately. We’ve jailed people for enumerating customer data by incrementing a query parameter.
Then I read that Uber paid him 4.5 million ... umm Uber paid that much to an extortionist for claims that aren’t truthful? Ok yeah right .. whose pays that much to silence a lier?
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-oreilly-settlement...
For this kind of scandal, my armchair opinion is that you still have to do something at least a bit murky in order to allow yourself to be black mailed.
It seems a bit more obvious, to me at least, that Uber was and still is doing whatever it can to try to get to final valuation / being bought out / IPO before the severity of the scandal was fully known. I also think that we've reached the point of no return for that matter so I'm definitely interested to see how Uber and this entire debacle winds up.
(1) Taxi industry has been using medallion system to create artificial scarcity and scam passengers by providing low quality service at higher prices. And, this scam has been running with the help of local politicians at false pretexts (too many taxis ruin the look and appeal of the city etc.). What exactly are Uber's options in a city where the scam is supported by politicians?
(2) I personally know a lot of cities where Uber sued or used other means to force the local politicians to open up the city for ride sharing services. This benefited not only Uber, but other ride sharing companies too such as Lyft. If we believe that Uber used unethical means to get in many of the cities, what ethical responsibilities do we expect from Lyft? Should Lyft stay away from these cities or is it ethical for them to take a dip in these unethical gains provided by Uber?
The management could always open up a pizza company.
If your business model sucks because it depends on regulators giving you a break, that’s on you. No business has the right to be profitable, that’s how capitalism works.
If Uber however lawfully changes the regulations with the help of the court system, they need to understand they aren’t a special snowflake that are the only ones allowed in on the market.
(2) Suing isn't illegal, and a valid form of getting things changed. And sure, others can benefit from this way of working with instead of against the system, just like a ruling on gay marriage isn't limited to the one couple that sued. Or like civil rights aren't limited to the few that caused problems. Asking Lyft to stay away because the market was helped by someone else doing things isn't exactly fair (Lyft has been going into markets as well and trying to change things, so I refuse to give all credit to Uber. Uber simply gets more press).
Lawsuits aren't really the thing that is unethical, though. We expect companies to not spy. Not outright break the law. Treat people equally. and so on. This applies to lyft as well as Uber.
How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...
It's obviously possible they'll limp through the deadline, or sell some assets like the brand. But I want to believe a company driven by ethics this bad from the top down, and which loses this much money month on month, can't survive. Bring on the fragmented second-movers in the space.
The core Uber business seems to still be doing well
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2017/12/14/why-cant-...
Tell it is Instagram.. haven't generated single dime yet sold for billions.
Google integrates Uber in their maps long time ago.. wouldn't be surprised they would want to buy it regardless of their financial situation.
Also, in the court of public opinion, the punishment for breaking laws depends a lot on what the law was, to what effect was it broken, in what circumstances it was broken, and so on.
For Uber, since their business model seems to be completely unrelated to their inherent untrustworthiness, it’s unlikely that a criminal conviction would have such dramatic consequences. The FBI doesn’t fuck around with bribing foreign officials though, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see someone go to the pokey over that.
You never know, though. That might be enough to get local governments to ban them.
Also some states can apparently sue to have corporations dissolved. https://www.wired.com/story/equifax-deserves-the-corporate-d...
I've used Uber a couple of times in the UK, but only on a company-account. Here where I live there is a presence, but I've never used it personally, nor do I intend to. (Same goes for competitors.)