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Uber used undercover agents, court letter says
- bpanon 9y agook
- sschueller 9y agoIt's like Uber is run by the mob. At what point will the feds step in?
- lozenge 9y agoThey are already investigating which is why much of the document is still redacted.
- alphonsegaston 9y agoI think it’s more accurate to say that the valley has done an incredible job of dressing up the tactics of organized crime under some weird, half-intelligible fetishism of “disruption.” Most of the things Uber and their ilk do are indistinguishable from mob tactics, they just have better PR.
- WisNorCan 9y agoI agree that some of the things Uber gets blamed for are commonplace and Uber is just being held to a different standard. But, it is also true that Uber pushed a lot further into the dark side than other companies. For example, do Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook set up surveillance of hotel and conference rooms of executives from other companies?
- Spooky23 9y agoThose companies have competive intelligence, but they aren’t run like a college fraternity on probation, so I doubt you’ll find those kind of abuses.
- alphonsegaston 9y agoFacebook’s business model is essentially surveillance. Same with Google, who was also involved with illegal, wide-scale wage fixing. Amazon is notorious for labor abuses, and Microsoft’s history on all these fronts is storied. And they all court and pay off politicians to avoid repercussions. The mob of old could only dream of having this kind of reach. Uber is not really a different standard. They’re more like an upstart gangster faction whose lack of discretion is calling attention to the baseline amorality and criminal intentions that lurk beyond the (quite thin) veil of techno-utopianism. The big guys lean on this ideology to get away with what they’re doing and thus don’t like Uber undermining it with their flagrant criminality.
- usrusr 9y agoMistaking investor happiness for a moral compass, what could possibly go wrong
- jgalt212 9y agoIndeed, given all the press I have read about them (I don't have any insider knowledge), it does seem that Uber has much more in common with a criminal enterprise than a legitimate business.
- nikanj 9y agoUber has (somewhat correctly) predicted that the feds are so slow and the penalties so small, running things like the mob will pay off. After all, their whole "disruption" is "how about we just ignore all the taxi legislation". See also, AirBnB with "how about we just ignore all the hotel legislation".
- pjmlp 9y agoIn some European countries, AirBnB no longer has a free reign as people are now required to pay taxes for renting rooms, not doing so is considered tax evasion.
- nolemurs 9y agoNot paying taxes on AirBnB income is also considered tax evasion in the US. I doubt there's any meaningful enforcement, but it's no more legal in the US than in Europe.
- TomMarius 9y agoNo, paying taxes on income is something different. You of course have to pay taxes for your whole income; new taxes that include requirements for explicit registration and so on have been introduced.
- djsumdog 9y agoThe state of Washington in the US has a one time fee of a couple of thousand dollars if you want to use a property as an AirBNB. It's per-property and goes to the property (so if you sell it, the new owner gets that grant as well).
- mrgordon 9y agoI don't think its a great comparison. Uber has repeatedly broken the law including stealing trade secrets, spying on competitors, and sabotaging them. They aren't toeing the law to figure out what regulations make sense for ridesharing. They are flagrantly breaking every rule so they win.
- chippy 9y agoNext SV pitch: "it's like Uber for organised crime". semi-seriously though - I can imagine in a work of science fiction a "sharing economy" of people willing to trade time for work doing criminal activities evolves. There must have been such a novel written already. Thinking a bit more morally, how about an "Uber for police" where citizens can be contracted at short notice to trade time for work against criminals.
- bertil 9y agoThere is a lot of joke on how Cryptocurrency was for that (drugs & guns being the butt of the joke). It seems the current uptick is more related to getting money out of controlled change system (China and Zimbabwe). I can see how the ethics of accessing saving instruments or storing capital in a non-collapsing currency is different than organised crime but it is still technically illegal.
- dev_sebbot 9y agoSort of sounds like the Shadowrun universe, honestly.
- facetube 9y agoBlack Mirror already did it, with a bonus extortion angle. It was called "Shut Up And Dance".
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoOne generation of bureaucrats after the business relationship ceases to be profitable. Look at what happened to Whitey. There was no serious progress going after him until after all the people who stood to lose anything from it retired away with their pensions. Regardless of their pros/cons as an instrument of financial security tying future financial security so directly to time spent serving the status quo puts a obstacle in the way of any sort of high speed change to how things are done.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- briandear 9y ago"...he has since said some of what he wrote was in fact not true, specifically the remarks about Waymo's trade secrets." So certainly, if some of these things are true, that's bad, however why is this letter even relevant if the person who wrote it has admitted that it was a lie? Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
- paul7986 9y agoYet they paid 7 million dollars for his silence? Then Uber should just close shop because they are willing to pay every accuser. Who is not going to believe the accusers over Uber....
- misun78 9y agoIt's not unreasonable for companies to avoid litigation by settling. Given that the timeframe of this coincides with Uber's darkest periods, it may have been operating out of a position of weakness.
- s73ver_ 9y agoIt's entirely unreasonable to pay that much, especially when you haven't validated it yourself.
- 659087 9y agoI question the sanity of anyone working at uber who isn't at least making preparations to abandon ship at this point.
- Asparagirl 9y agoI question the ethics of anyone choosing to work at Uber, period. It’s been blatantly obvious for at least two to three years that they are corrupt, not just “disruptive”. And that’s just based on the news we get in public; there were probably internal signs long earlier. I speak as someone who once worked at a corrupt and unethical company (in Hollywood) and who got TF out of there within months, as soon as it became obvious internally.
- cbHXBY1D 9y agoEven five years ago, it was common knwoledge in the SF startup scene that Uber was run like a frat house. We used to laugh and hear about the Travis gang doing cocaine on his desk after work.
- Asparagirl 9y agoI know someone who worked with Travis at a previous company, not Uber, who has been saying for years that he was clearly a sociopath.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ben_jones 9y agoAll it takes for a 22 year old to work for an unethical company, writing Linkedin style spamware, Facebook style ad tracking, etc., is around 120k combined compensation.
- chronic193 9y agoCan confirm. Tons of my friends from MIT and Stanford go to Facebook targeting or Google Maps tracking for $150K. That's more than many HN readers make. So it's natural these HN readers are jealous: making $150K with a bachelor's and spying on people with hot, bleeding-edge technologies? Damn. It just doesn't fit with their understanding of how the world works.
- MichaelGG 9y agoThis is not that special nor should it be unexpected. Uber's real problem here is that they were so careless about their operations. Like the rape victim health records incident. They sent their own VP over to go get these records? They should be using deniable intermediaries. I feel it is rather naive to think that large companies don't have intelligence agents or other such things. The amounts it costs to spy and subvert people is just too small. The KGB was able to flip FBI and other agents for very small sums of money. So how much easier must it be for, say, Oracle, to flip a Google engineer? Or to simply support someone's career and get one of their people hired on an into relevant projects? Some large companies certainly have Internal Affairs orgs that can go undercover to find out corruption in their org. (I've seen this happen in the case of overseas subsidiaries fudging numbers to steal from corp.) It's bizarre to think they wouldn't spend a small amount of money to obtain info worth thousands of times more. I mean how much would you really bet that Oracle or Microsoft have never, ever, engaged in anything undercover?
- sethbannon 9y agoAyn Rand ideology in its purest form.
- mantas 9y agoActually that's what the bad guys in Atlas Shrugged did. Use every possible, no matter how illegal, way to go ahead and extort value from the system for your solo benefit. Meanwhile good guys played by the rules and tried to stick to high moral standards.
- marenkay 9y agoI'm going to write an an called "mober", and it will be the most disruptive thing in the world of crime. By applying Uber's tested and tried methods, "mober" will take over the criminal world. No more consequences for legal offences, yay!
- eadmund 9y agoI wonder if the same people who got upset at Uber detecting and avoiding state inspectors who pretend to be customers are also upset about Uber agents … pretending to be customers.