Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Employee's Letter

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/ric-jacobs-uber-letter-allegations-waymo

by danso • 9 years ago

251 62 9 years ago

paul7986• 9 years ago

Even though I loathe Uber I read their lawyer saying the ex-employee was extorting them.

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?

joering23• 9 years ago

Here is one for $32MM

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-oreilly-settlement...

jlgaddis• 9 years ago

Really, Uber paid $7,500,000 to "settle" that little dispute -- although his lawyer got a 40% cut, leaving him with "only" $4.5MM. To me, at least, it seems even worse when you think about it that way.

on_and_off• 9 years ago

The theory is that you might be inclined to pay in order to avoid a scandal that would be costlier.

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.

scoggs• 9 years ago

Agreed. Back when the news of the payoff first became public things were a lot murkier in terms of the broad picture but now that we've had the lid peeled back and we can see a bit more.

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.

CodeWriter232• 9 years ago

Perhaps there's an undercurrent of it being easy to spend someone else's 7.5M (ALL of Uber's money is VC money) to avoid the scandal.

DonHopkins• 9 years ago

http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/365036-the-...

NelsonMinar2• 9 years ago

It never fucking ends with this company, does it?

nightcracker• 9 years ago

Why would it end? It won't just go away with time.

furioussloth2• 9 years ago

Is this a bot which comments exact same thing on every Uber story? Just an observation because of how most of your comments make sense but every uber story has exact same question.

cududa• 9 years ago

It's my observation that Uber deserves this response with each revelation

enraged_camel• 9 years ago

Here's the comment I post every time another Uber fuckup is made public: we need corporate death penalty.

NelsonMinar2• 9 years ago

HELLO HUMAN. I AM A ROBOT. I HAVE A SENSE OF GOBSMACKED ETHICAL OUTRAGE I CAN ONLY EXPRESS WITH ONE SENTENCE. EOT

foobar1962• 9 years ago

The pain is excruciating and almost unbearable... I hope it NEVER ends.

Apocryphon• 9 years ago

This is what the behavior of a wannabe megacorp looks like:

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.

JumpCrisscross• 9 years ago

Taking rides in taxis and loitering where they congregate isn’t necessarily illegal. Bribing foreign officials and illegally tapping peoples’ phones is. There is a bright line between hustling and plainly violating the law.

solatic• 9 years ago

IANAL but definitions of espionage are typically broader than that - if the information isn't published with the intention for it to become public knowledge, or at least somehow knowingly divulged (e.g. EULA/contractual), then it's private, and collecting (i.e. recording) the data which is private to a company or society is espionage.

subway• 9 years ago

Sadly that bright line is pretty dim in some companies. As soon as there is one "hard-to-fix" transgression, the organization finds a way to internally justify it. The first transgression makes additional transgressions feel easier.

This is often sold to staff under the guise of "but everyone does it" and "there's no way to be 100% compliant/legal".

tyingq2• 9 years ago

There's some in-between behavior as well. Like where Uber finds a way to programmatically identify drivers that are also working for Lyft via API calls.

toomuchtodo3• 9 years ago

Oh my, the FCC does not look kindly on private companies using Stingray cellular intercept devices that masquerade as legitimate towers.

jsmthrowaway• 9 years ago

Nor does law enforcement, for that matter. Operating a Stingray-like device to capture cellular user information is very, very illegal in the United States without proper authority to do so. Even capturing open Wi-Fi that you do not control is legally perilous and has divided courts on its legality, which seems counterintuitive on its face given the simple physics of radio, but is a fact.

It’s stupidly simple to run afoul of the CFAA and federal wiretapping laws, not to mention the expectation of privacy standard in California.

shas3• 9 years ago

Just wannabe mega-Corp. Believe it or not, most mega-Corps are pretty ethical by Uber standards.

B1FF_PSUVM• 9 years ago

pretty ethical by Uber standards

Well ... guess that's why the phrase "damning with faint praise" exists ...

s73ver_3• 9 years ago

So when do we finally get to say, "You're too slimy to be a company anymore."

circadiam• 9 years ago

When another company employs more people than them

kinkrtyavimoodh2• 9 years ago

And provides more customers more value than them.

geofft• 9 years ago

As soon as our culture decides that sliminess, or literally anything other than profitability, is relevant to whether you can be a company.

CodeWriter232• 9 years ago

IOW, never.

s73ver_3• 9 years ago

So they get to break the law as much as they want, and it's not going to make a difference.

kuschku• 9 years ago

The big issue with multinational companies is that this isn’t that simple anymore.

davidmr• 9 years ago

It’s pretty rare, but it does happen every now and then. Arthur Andersen was convicted of criminal obstruction of justice. Because their entire business model was predicated on being trustworthy, they imploded really quickly. (Ironically the damage was mostly done before their conviction was overturned, but they were still guilty as hell.)

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...

curiousDog• 9 years ago

I doubt that's ever going to happen. Too much money at stake here. And despite all this, they'll have a blockbuster IPO

0xmohit• 9 years ago

Seems to remind of "Greyball".

How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...

WisNorCan• 9 years ago

Wow. I can see why Uber did not want this document to come out. It appears that Uber was operating their own intelligence agency with bribes, surveillance, breach of systems, impersonation, etc. I can see it opening further lawsuits from many other angles.

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"

willstrafach2• 9 years ago

Regarding this: “Uber had successfully obtained trade secrets with the complete download of its driver database”

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.

toomuchtodo3• 9 years ago

This is a violation of the CFAA, a criminal offense, if the API owner did not authorize Uber to access it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

JacobAldridge• 9 years ago

I have a long-bet that Uber will be out of business by August 2020. A friend and I have a decent bottle of wine (Grange Hermitage) riding on the outcome. And with every passing month I feel more and more confident!

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.

nikcub• 9 years ago

Has a company ever gone bankrupt due to bad ethics where it wasn't also a financial fraud? The core Uber business seems to still be doing well and resetting the taint of bad ethics is as easy as putting up a "under new management" sign - which what they've done

tyingq2• 9 years ago

I don't think it's bankrupt, but the LiveStrong Foundation is a shell of it's former self due to the Lance Armstrong controversy.

CaptainZapp• 9 years ago

  The core Uber business seems to still be doing well

I wouldn't call a business, which loses billions "doing well".

joering23• 9 years ago

Risky bet. Majority of Uber users don't know what Hacker News is. Even less heard about negative press they getting. Don't even mention about these few that care so long as cheap ride fairly safe is provided to them.

msmith10101• 9 years ago

Revenue/user growth are irrelevant if your business model is to raise money for goods/services that cost you more money than you can charge from random users who have no brand loyalty. Uber's in a market in which there are no barriers to entry. It's a race to the bottom and waymo/lyft have better strategies thus far. (Lyft: raise less money at a reasonable valuation - stick with a crappy product in markets that actually matter, Waymo: Go fully autonomous using Google tech). Uber is the worst of both worlds. 2020 sounds reasonable to me after a snap-style IPO - Uber burns a lot more money than Snap :-)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2017/12/14/why-cant-...

fstuff• 9 years ago

I'm no uber fan but I don't see them ever going away. It may downsize or it may merge with a competitor but I don't see the uber app ever going away. Plus they have a lot of paper assets. 20% of Didi is 10B alone. And they have a piece of that Russian company. Also who knows how much all that user data is worth. It seems they have more assets than just cash on hand. I think they'll end up merging with a competitor and operating in the US under the uber brand. Or they'll sell of those assets, and scale way back and hope to partner someone with a working self driving.

diebir• 9 years ago

Isn't this the same old news from a week or two ago? Something about a letter from lawyers of guy that worked at Uber, that contains various allegations, some of which the guy now refuses to acknowledge. Very confusing.

Fricken• 9 years ago

It came out in 3 news items. First it was reported that Alsup had received evidence from the DOJ which prompted him to delay the case. Earlier this week parts of the letter was made available to the public, and today much more about the letter, and where it came from was revealed.

eh78ssxv2f• 9 years ago

May be I am being too naive, but can somebody answer two questions for me here (note: I have no personal relationship with Uber or Lyft except that I like ride sharing services more than traditional taxis):

(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?

pimmen• 9 years ago

”What exactly are Uber's options in a city where the scam is supported by politicians?”

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.

Broken_Hippo• 9 years ago

(1) Only some cities use medallions. Many do not. Many more have little to zero taxi presence - you won't see cabs waiting on city streets to pick folks up. Gotta call to get one and wait. But there is a slew of other regulations to follow - such as having a special category of drivers license. The options for Uber are to follow laws or work on changing them if they want to work legally. In my opinion, this is Lyft's greatest strength. They tend to work with others.

(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.

bitmapbrother• 9 years ago

The similarities between Uber and E Corp are getting closer by the day.

Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Employee's Letter

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