Can We Trust Uber?
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Uber is simply a very old and familiar way to circumvent labor, safety and consumer protection laws. It just happens to have two new elements enabled by tech: an app and dynamic pricing.
There is nothing "cool" or innovative about Uber. Many of the laws and regulations Uber runs afoul of aren't outdated, they exist very specifically because of operations like Uber, which existed in the days before smartphones and the internet.
And Uber brings absolutely nothing new to the table that changes the rationale behind those regulations. What the fuck is innovative about facilitating unlicensed taxi drivers in private cars? Hell, in Dutch we even have a word, "snorders", for such people, a word that has been barely used in decades until Uber popped up and revived it.
Uber is basically the kind of "business" that you would expect from an organized crime outfit, and their other dubious practices should come as no surprise.
I understand that cab drivers have been called hacks, and that of course the term's origin is more general than its current usage. I hear "hack license" but I never hear "hack" as a verb except to refer to doing it illegally.
edit: or as an anything but something before the word "license." You've heard a legitimate taxi driver called a hack lately?
Those aren't the criminal parts, the violations of state and local laws are.
I can't help but question whether the difference is doing something illegal to obtain the money and THAT being the organized crime part or the fact that their means of generating revenue could be viewed as legal but that it isn't legal because of consumer protection and liability laws.
In other words, shaking someone down for protection money is illegal. Driving someone from point A to point B is legal. Doing it as an unlicensed cab is illegal but the actual practice isn't.
I liken what they do to be more closer to how Tesla chooses to sell their cars. Legal in theory and and ethically positive but not legal in some areas due to skirting the line between where the laws come into place.
I don't think RICO statutes would be a very strong case against Uber.
Are you technically an unlicensed cab if you won't drive your friend to the airport unless he gives you gas money?
"The FBI defines organized crime as any group having some manner of a formalized structure and whose primary objective is to obtain money through illegal activities. Such groups maintain their position through the use of actual or threatened violence, corrupt public officials, graft, or extortion, and generally have a significant impact on the people in their locales, region, or the country as a whole."
The difference between Uber's business model and Tesla's is that, unlike Uber, Tesla isn't trying to get other dealerships shut down by wasting their money with fake customers, nor are they poaching and trying to convert employees over to their company. Tesla is trying to get rid of outdated laws that, in today's day and age, only encourage dealerships to screw over their customers. There was a time when those laws served their original purpose, to protect dealers from manufacturers. But the world has changed a lot since then.
> "The FBI defines organized crime as any group having some manner of a formalized structure and whose primary objective is to obtain money through illegal activities. Such groups maintain their position through the use of actual or threatened violence, corrupt public officials, graft, or extortion, and generally have a significant impact on the people in their locales, region, or the country as a whole."
This does not describe Uber's activities. While there is plenty wrong with Uber the hyperbole of describing them as near organised crime is unhelpful.
Uber used fake rides as a recruitment technique; they did not knee-cap drivers for other companies.
It isn't quite the same as committing a planned crime.
I've thought about this quite a bit, anytime I see someone use the phrase 'disrupt an established company,' I assume they're talking about barely skirting the law through the use of hazy, gray areas. And an app.
The only 'innovation' in (most of) these companies is the same 'innovation' that this site screams about when it's on the part of patent trolls; I will do X, but now I will do X with a smart phone or computer. That's not innovative, it's lazy.
It would be super easy for giant companies to meet the same prices if they were able to ignore laws. That's not competition, it's cheating.
Some companies do what you're describing.
Some companies who are trying to "disrupt an established company" are doing so because they're leveraging new technology, changes in the marketplace, and/or the fact that they're unencumbered with politics/contracts/bureaucracy that exist in large companies.
But, for sake of example, take companies like Airbnb and Uber specifically, as they seem to be the hottest touch-points. How is what they're doing not simply breaking the law for sake of price?
What about Dropbox, Snapchat, Square, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Palantir, etc?
Uber has to use the gray areas precisely because regulation was set up to prevent disruption of the cab industry. This regulation inhibits growth and promotes stagnation, evidenced by the fact that NYC cabs did not accept credit cards until 2007 and by how obviously under-served the SF cab market was.
Uber, by skirting the laws that were not serving the consumer but rather entrenching an industry has been able to do more in five years than the entire taxi industry has in 50.
Cabs were dangerous and took advantage of people before regulation, much as 3rd world country cabs do today.
Your argument is not persuasive and is very short-sighted in terms of history.
And to take it one more step: Lead-uber, by skirting the laws that were not serving the consumer but rather entrenching an industry has been able to do more in five years than the entire lead mining industry has in 50.
Does that make you feel comfortable about 'disruption'? What makes mass transportation any different?
Other users rate the drivers, so you can be more sure of their safety than a completely anonymous and unknown driver.
It has been documented that Yelp actively solicits sponsorship fees that not only help earn these stickers but also subsequently serve to boost business rankings and ratings.
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/11/business/fi-lazarus1...
[2] http://consumerist.com/2014/09/04/appeals-court-yelps-ad-tea... <-read the details on what the court defined as "hard bargaining" vs "extortion"
[3] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Yelp-can-give-paying-clie...
> What the fuck is innovative about facilitating unlicensed taxi drivers in private cars?
Again, I'm not really concerned about the term "innovative." But what is good for me, the consumer of these services is that I can get a ride more conveniently, reliably, and inexpensively than I could from a traditional taxi or other commercial car service. And of course ridesharing apps are newer than taxis. If you define "innovative" as "newer and better," then I guess ridesharing services are "innovative."
Other consumers surely have different preferences, which is fine, but I do not care about licenses or who owns the cars. I care about the actual product I get, and I invariably (so far) get a better experience with ridesharing services than with traditional taxis. Now granted, I use Lyft and Sidecar over Uber, mostly just because of UI preferences with their iPhone apps. I'm speaking about the ridesharing industry as a whole rather than Uber specifically.
The gist of your argument seems to be one of two things. Either you dislike companies which violate any regulations, or you dislike companies which violate regulations that you approve of (with taxi regulations being one example). I disagree with both premises.
The ends don't justify the means.
If Uber is actually sharing rider location information, that's an awful awful breach of trust.
1) 'Disruption' is just a code-word for skimming margins in legal grey areas
2) The founder of Uber's twitter avatar used to be the cover of "Atlas Shrugged" (update: it's now a picture of Thomas Jefferson.)
3) Only tourists and transplants believe using an app is in any way better than simply hailing a cab (with exception for storms, bad times, and bad locations)
No idea why this company ever deserved my trust in the first place.
Spoken like someone who never leaves Manhattan. ;-)
That was my first thought as well.
For those who don't live in an "outer-borough", the way you obtained car services was by dialing a phone number, talking to a dispatcher, trying to communicate pickup and dropoff locations through the fog of accents, and then you have a 25% chance of the car showing up when promised, a 75% chance of it showing up no more than 15 minutes late, and sometimes 2-3 additional follow-up phone calls were required.
If I'm going from tribeca to the east village at 11pm, sure, I'm taking a cab. But if I need to come home from New Jersey, being able to press a button and get a car is a huge convenience.
"New York City" is not synonymous and interchangeable with "Manhattan below 96th St".
I also, just last week, took my mom to the hospital lying down in an Uber SUV which was (even at the 1.5 rate) a whole lot cheaper than an ambulance, and more convenient even than their own car which we would have had to get out of the garage and then park at the hospital.
Let's also not forget that Uber started as Ubercab and was forced to change their name. I don't think they ever intended to be a limo service, and their current product offerings are largely not limo services.
I've heard that the bonus of London black cabs is that they have super knowledge of London.
I've found this to not be the case. Sure, it's good. But in all honesty I find google maps to be better.
+1
You don't get taxis very often. From my experience in Chicago. They're everywhere you want them to be. There are huge dead zones for taxis. (Webster/Clybourn, Grand/New Orleans, Western/Armitage anytime before 6pm, Humboldt park, 5am in Old Town [4am bars have a 5am cut off in Chicago on Saturdays]). They tend to be either: a. on the phone the whole freaking time speaking Hindi or b. blasting music.
They also tend to pull shit like: "Oh my CC machine is broken, please give me cash" (which is against the ordinance), they'll try to use their square payment reader instead (which is also a big no-no), etc.
Uber cuts that out. With Uber, despite my bad experiences, they're consistently better.
I'm pretty sure the OP was only referring to NYC.
And even then, only Manhattan. Uber and the like have made it a lot easier to book private cars, though it's difficult to know what the green "Boro" taxis would look like if the apps hadn't launched.
Sure, you can hail a cab pretty easily most of the time in NYC, but I've definitely had enough times where I've had no luck (they were all full) after waiting 10 or 15 minutes that I now prefer Uber.
I think using the app is justified b/c there are way more bad times/locations than good times/locations. If I'm outside in midtown I'd probably grab a yellow cab, but otherwise it's either subway or uber.
I reckon services like Uber are a good way to shake up the in-inefficiencies and built-in-slackness that accumulates within a protected service industry. There is absolutely nothing stopping the "real" taxi industry adopting apps and tech services to counter Uber -- in fact they would be way ahead in other more "background" aspects such as insurance, vetting drivers, heck, even brand name awareness among the general public. For example, we had taxi companies put out apps here in Australia long before Uber. In my experience they have been about 90% reliable (this was in the early days) and I'm certain they have improved now. And the taxi companies definitely have the pockets and data to drive this.
Once the shake-up is complete a set of equilibrium should be established -- as services like Uber would also be forced to implement proper checks on drivers, etc. At which point the idiots spouting off $18 billion figures should wake up from their dreams.
If faced with a choice between money and doing the right thing, corporations are legally obligated (c.f. Dodge v. Ford) to pick money every single time.
Even then, making money and doing the right thing are rarely a strict dichotomy.
Trying to sue start ups out of existence is not the only way to ensure the profitability of an incumbent company. Lawsuits always have the risk of losing and flushing all of those legal costs down the toilet, or potentially inviting countersuits. A company like Fab for instance could've just as easily decided to buy the new competitor or get more aggressive on price or marketing to snuff them out.
Only a publicly traded company would be subject to Dodge v. Ford.
Don't delude yourself into thinking you can trust a corporation. Corporations are sociopathic by design, barely kept in check by threats of lawsuits and bad PR.
What definition of startups are you using here?
> More recent cases such as AP Smith Manufacturing Co v. Barlow[2] or Shlensky v. Wrigley[3] suggest that the approach in Dodge no longer represents the law in most states, including Delaware, which regards the balancing of stakeholder interests as within a director's business judgment. Dodge has not been expressly overruled, but ceased to represent the law in most states.
Courts will bend over backward to defer to an executive's business judgment when there is no conflict of interest or similar wrongdoing in play.
> By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of the Model T, Ford's mainstay product, had been successively cut over the years while the cost of the workers had dramatically, and quite publicly, increased. The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars. In public defense of this strategy, Ford declared:
> “My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business. ”
> While Ford may have believed that such a strategy might be in the long-term benefit of the company, he told his fellow shareholders that the value of this strategy to them was not a primary consideration in his plans. The minority shareholders objected to this strategy, demanding that Ford stop reducing his prices when they could barely fill orders for cars and to continue to pay out special dividends from the capital surplus in lieu of his proposed plant investments. Two brothers, John Francis Dodge and Horace Elgin Dodge, owned 10% of the company, among the largest shareholders next to Ford.
I don't have time to read the actual court documents, so I'll assume this is reasonably accurate.
It seems Ford was trying to say "screw shareholder value, we're doing the right thing because we want to support society." This was of course a losing argument. But it sounds like the whole problem was the argument. Couldn't the argument be "we did the right thing and took a short-term loss, but we believe this is in the company's, and by extension the shareholders', best interest because [it will create tons of goodwill | it creates tons of good PR for us | whatever]"?
I've watched people destroy companies I've built, and the fact is that there is very little you can do to legally stop them.
That is a popular meme, but it is simply not true. More recent court cases[1][2] have found that corporate directors have broad discretion in their decisions as long as there is no fraud or conflict of interest. If the board of directors chooses to prioritize doing the right thing over pure maximization of profit, the shareholders' only recourse is to choose a new board of directors.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shlensky_v_Wrigley
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Smith_Manufacturing_Co_v_Bar...
My favourite, most gregarious example is Privacy Polices. Sure, in certain jurisdictions (i.e. mine) they're legal documents. But equally, a company could bury in their terms of service something along the lines of 'We, the organization, to the best of our knowledge abide by the Privacy Policy. In the case where this is untrue, our liability is limited to XXX'.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Facebook released the full code of their social networking application under the GPL. That promises us very little in terms of our privacy, because they could easily (and perhaps should, from an engineering standpoint) stick all the privacy violation in a separate application for doing the analytics or providing data to 3rd parties.
Open source doesn't even do much of anything to limit what kinds of data can be collected through the front end. The original owner of the code retains copyright, so open source licenses place no legal restrictions on what they can do with the code. There's nothing stopping an unscrupulous company from sharing a squeaky-clean version of the source with the world at large, and running different code on their servers.
If anything, this is where I find Stallman to be at his least useful. He's only got this one hammer in a world where the vast majority of the most worrisome ethical concerns are not nails. His dogged insistence on trying to turn every moral and political issue in computing into one that can be answered by open source[1] is neither realistic nor practical, and only serves to illustrate that his ideas all became fixed long before Berners-Lee came along and changed everything.
[1]: For example: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...
That model - that open source is more trustworthy - was meant to apply to code you could read then compile from source on your machine. But the web is entirely a network of black-box applications you (legally) interact with in a passive sense - send request, get response. You really have no idea what's going on in the back-end, and no control over what they choose to do with what you put on their servers. And you definitely have no way to verify the code, apart from headers and responses.
You also seem to assume a very narrow use case of that FB source code (were it released to public scrutiny).
Free Software licensing only places restrictions on what licensees of the software can do with it. The original copyright holder, by virtue of possessing the original copyright, is not subject to those restrictions. That's why dual Free/commercial licensing is such a common choice for companies who are looking to monetize - it's an easy way to maintain commercial control over a product while still getting to call yourself "open".
"Does it matter?" That's the question that puzzles me, because seems that Uber got the pockets and backers to continue it's aggressive progression towards cabs annihilation.
I had the exact experience that monksy outlined and it happened with Yellow Cab (largest taxi provider in So Cal afaik) and I discovered the next day that my card was used to ring up almost $1000 in gas and purchases almost 80 miles from my house in a city I've never been to in my entire life. This obviously doesn't mean that all taxi drivers are unscrupulous like this but you can't help but appreciate that Uber and Lyft provide something not so trivial as a way to pay without having to factor in an unethical driver.
Can we trust Uber? Not entirely. Shouldn't the question be, can we trust Uber (and by proxy , Lyft) more than the alternatives?
But at that point you still must answer the question: Do you trust Lyft or other alternatives more than Uber? Given the evidence we have, I don't trust Uber to tell me the sky is blue; I'm damn sure not doing business with them.
Über was a breath of fresh air. I rationalized their competitive gaffs with Lyft as "they're just competing" and their syncretic religion of Ayn Rand books and Clayton Christensen as objectionable but tolerable. But I don't use them anymore. I started to use Uber constantly, refer friends and some OSS I've written even powers Uber's node.js components today.
But their support of Urban Shield is the straw that broke the camel's back. And I do not want to line the pockets of anyone accelerating the militarization of the police in the US. Like the author, I can't see myself trusting them to do what's right.
Then what about all the other plethora of apps and OS features that do background location tracking. Can we trust them?
I think this problem really goes beyond Uber and touches on something fundamental about how we can maintain privacy when everyday technology asks for so much more personal information to operate.....
Maybe we need more robust data privacy laws. Maybe we need better technology that allows for identity obfuscation or anonymity. Maybe we need to mature as a society so transparency is less likely to lead to harassment, violence or discrimination. Maybe it is a combination of all of the above.
I just don't think you should leave it up to Uber.
If the allegations are true and there was no miscommunication, Uber violated its privacy policy and should be held accountable. Note I'm not calling for FTC action, but (again, if this is true) Uber's management owes me and other users an explanation, an apology, and a plan for privacy controls to ensure this doesn't happen again. Firing the person responsible would not be inappropriate. You can read the privacy policy yourself here: https://www.uber.com/legal/usa/privacy#3
It's also a little depressing. I've taken pains to try to get privacy "right" when working on http://recent.io/, including being extremely sensitive about location privacy, and examples like this (again, if true) will make folks less likely to trust apps in general. It's a shame because phone owners will assume that if you can't trust the billion-dollar lawyered-up companies to get privacy right, you surely can't trust the smaller ones. So it becomes safer not to install the apps in the first place. :(
Stealth marketing, or "murketing" as Rob Walker calls it in his book Buying In.
Seriously. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced this article is a sneaky Uber marketing ploy. Don't trust it. I call fake.
Hopefully we can agree that Uber doing things like corporate attacks against Lyft might say something about their character that should give you pause on dealing with them. For example, someone willing to unfairly attack a competitor might also think nothing of disclosing a customer's location in real time without permission for promotional purposes. Oh, they reportedly did that too. With a pattern of poor judgment, it only makes sense to question whether you should use them even if it generally just works.
If I can't trust Uber to build a better product instead of sabotaging their competitor, I'll go with their competitor by default.
I'm always wary of Uber manipulating surge pricing since they profit off of surge as well. Without the extra profit motive it's easier to trust that surge pricing really is a supply-management tool instead of a price gouging one.
Don't think for a second Uber will continue to provide useful service at fair price when it finally grows mature and stifles its competition. With its continued disrespect for human values, such as honesty and decency, it already shows us the shape of things to come. We know this beast will not be friendly to men.
Uber needs to be slain now, while still young and weak.
I don't think for a second that Uber wants to continue to provide its service at a low price, but barrier to entry in the market is relatively low. Unless something changes on the legal front, I don't see how Uber can stifle its competition.