Uber used undercover agents, court letter says | Hacker News Reader

Uber used undercover agents, court letter says

bbc.com

142 pointscinbun845 comments

It's like Uber is run by the mob. At what point will the feds step in?

They are already investigating which is why much of the document is still redacted.

I 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.

I 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?

Those 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.

Facebook’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.

Mistaking investor happiness for a moral compass, what could possibly go wrong

Indeed, 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.

Uber 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".

In 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.

Not 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.

No, 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.

The 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).

I 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.

Well, not all the rules; so far as I'm aware nobody has got killed.

Does make me wonder how far people are going to take "disruption". Could a company decide to make their self-driving cars more successful by hacking their competitors to cause accidents? What about hacking your competitors' factory SCADA systems? Possibly with the help of a foreign intelligence agency?

After all, this is the cyberpunk future we were promised.

Haha fine, no murder conviction yet

You could say that incidents like this leave them indirectly responsible for rapes and murders though: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/28/lawsuit-claims-uber-ignore...

> After all, their whole "disruption" is "how about we just ignore all the taxi legislation"

The laws I'm familiar with for taxis specifically apply to a vehicle that you hail (wave down) from the street. If you call a car service and arrange someone to pick you up, the rules are entirely different than taxis. Uber found a way to make it really easy to arrange for someone to pick you up which is what allowed them to use drivers who only met the car service requirements. In general, their innovation was to reduce the inconvenience of arranging a ride with a car service and make it even more convenient than dealing with a taxi.

(I'm not saying they haven't ever done anything that ignored legislation, but it is a stretch to say that their primary innovation was to ignore taxi laws.)

Next 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.

There 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.

Sort of sounds like the Shadowrun universe, honestly.

Black Mirror already did it, with a bonus extortion angle. It was called "Shut Up And Dance".

One 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.

This 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?

Ayn Rand ideology in its purest form.

Actually 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.

I'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!

I 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.

I question the sanity of anyone working at uber who isn't at least making preparations to abandon ship at this point.

I 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.

Even 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.

I know someone who worked with Travis at a previous company, not Uber, who has been saying for years that he was clearly a sociopath.

All 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.

Why single out Uber, Google, Facebook and others appear to be neck deep in equally if not more shady activity. Infact most of SV is, Palantir come to mind and seem by media reports to be infinitely worse and a lot of this behavior has been normalized so many do not find it particularly objectionable.

The posturing about Uber is valid but the zeal seems a touch misplaced or this board would be full of similar opinions about others.

As an Uber employee, I respectfully disagree. I'd rather work on an improved and changed Uber than work on forcing ads and propaganda down people's throats.

You say that like those are the only options. They may unfortunately be the most common, but outside of the Silicon Valley brogrammer bubble there are companies working on real problems, and not just trying to expand corporate mass surveillance while patting themselves on the back for "changing the world".

If you have any desire to buy a house without a crushing commute in the bay area, FANGs are the only other alternative.

At this point, almost all the enablers of this culture -- up to the CEO -- have been wiped out of the company. Dara has no intentions of continuing any of this. Given this change, would you rather see me work on shoving ads down your throats or work at one of few companies in silicon valley that actually bridges the digital-real life gap and makes an impact enabling better transportation across the globe?

I assume you're forgetting the incident where Uber started following users around even when they weren't on a trip?

Also, take note of the fact that I said "outside of the Silicon Valley bubble". Believe it or not, there are other places on earth with companies that employ tech workers.

"If you have any desire to buy a house without a crushing commute in the bay area, FANGs are the only other alternative."

Meanwhile, ethical people either commute, don't buy house or work elsewhere. You are talking about it as if house in the most expensive city was some kind of entitlement or absolute need that absolves one of any ethical considerations. For that matter, neither does "I want fun work".

Meanwhile, thread about low paid workers being priced out of any living is full of people blaming them for pretty much everything.

I appreciate your sentiment, but many other people are wanting to know why there has not been significant punishment levied for the sins of the past.

If it helps, Uber is under several investigations for the sins of the past. To some extent, users voting with their dollars has also hurt Uber. Which brings to my last point that the most damaging aspect about all of this is that there is no reason for Uber to have acted like this. In the end we have built a service that’s helped countless people and the paranoia that Travis exhibited was completely misguided imo

"...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.

Yet 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....

It'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.

It's entirely unreasonable to pay that much, especially when you haven't validated it yourself.

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