Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals:In internal emails, staff referred to Uber's "other than legal status", or other forms of active non-compliance with regulations, in countries including Turkey, South Africa, Spain, the Czech Republic, Sweden, France, Germany, and Russia.
One senior executive wrote in an email: "We are not legal in many countries, we should avoid making antagonistic statements." Commenting on the tactics the company was prepared to deploy to "avoid enforcement", another executive wrote: "We have officially become pirates."
Nairi Hourdajian, Uber's head of global communications, put it even more bluntly in a message to a colleague in 2014, amid efforts to shut the company down in Thailand and India: "Sometimes we have problems because, well, we're just fucking illegal." Contacted by the Guardian, Hourdajian declined to comment.
"Please hit the kill switch ASAP," Kalanick had emailed:
In the period covered in the documents, Uber was embarking on an aggressive expansion in countries which outlawed paid transport in private personal vehicles. [...]
The kill switch helped thwart authorities by locking devices out of Uber's internal systems. Although it was used internationally, the kill switch was controlled centrally by Uber's San Francisco IT department and through another location in Denmark to protect local employees who might otherwise be accused of obstruction or forced to override it, two former employees said. According to the documents, Uber used it to cut access to devices that could have been seized in raids, sometimes while authorities searched for evidence within Uber's offices.
Uber officials eventually began hitting the kill switch as soon as they considered a raid imminent, the documents show. The action blocked the laptops from accessing information held on remote servers, former employees said, making the devices unable to retrieve even email.
Some employees engaged in stall tactics so the kill switch could be activated before police got their hands on their devices [...] "The procedure was, if you have law enforcement, you try to buy time by greeting them, and call San Francisco," said one of Uber's former lawyers in Europe. "Even if it was 2 a.m. in San Francisco, there were people who were supposed to react."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
When I first hear about this yesterday, my knee-jerk thought was, "Oh look: yet another one of Trump's associates caught being shady as fuck. What a surprise!"
Then I read the part where he said Uber drivers should be attacked by riders and others promoting unions because "Violence guarantees success" and I suddenly had a vision of him being chased, Christine-style, by his own self-driving cars (shown below on its side):
And that does not surprise me at all. Macron can count on the last remaining non-racist voters that are just glad they can summon a cheap (well, it was in 2014) taxi with their phone, and cannot see any issue beyond that. People outside large French cities won't ever see a Uber anytime soon and so don't have to care at all.
My former colleagues had this game where the first to get an Uber Eats order delivered by someone with a non-foreign-sounding name (i.e. Arab or African) would win. They were ordering several times a week for two or three years. I only remember someone winning twice.
I gotta try that the next time I murder someone. "Well, I don't want to get dragged into all that history, the important part is to judge me on how I am now, and you can take my word for it that I am not currently actively murdering anyone".
Odd that it will probably work for them, but not for me.
C.