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Uber Must Submit CEO Emails
Rambo Tribble writes: Uber has lost its bid in U.S. federal court to avoid disclosing emails from Chief Executive Travis Kalanick in a California lawsuit accusing the popular ride-booking service of deceiving customers about how it shares tips with drivers. U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, in reference to U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu's ruling that the plaintiff in the lawsuit can receive emails from Kalanick and global operations chief Ryan Graves, wrote, "That Judge Ryu's order may require defendant to review approximately 21,000 documents does not represent an improper burden given the potential role of defendant's CEO and vice president of operations in defendant's challenged conduct." This comes amid mounting legal problems for Uber, including South Korea indicting Kalanick on charges he violated local licensing laws and numerous cities around the globe banning the service.
This is not an "editorial" on Uber as a service compared to traditional cab services, but rather an observation that growing government regulation (banning) of Uber (and similar services) and the liability of an almost certain stream of lawsuits will simply negate any way for services like Uber to continue.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"hard drive crashed and our backup mostly failed. sorry. here's what we could salvage. it's all we have.....honest!"
--Travis Kalanick, while typing one handed for some undisclosed reason.
Everyone I know uses Uber, at least once a quarter. It only takes 5 minutes for an Uber to arrive and typically it only costs $5 to get a ride back to your car, or $20 to get a ride back home. When calling a taxi, you may or may not have someone arrive within an hour, especially during peak hours. What's the point? If it takes an hour for a Taxi to arrive and you're going less than 4 miles, it's faster to just walk.
Taxi companies want the Uber business, of course they do. But Uber customers hate taxis. They're dirty, filthy, never arrive on time and dealing with change/tips is a real hassle. Especially if it's late and you've been out with friends all night. If Uber disappeared from my city I'd just stop using similar services. Uber makes it just this side of bearable. Taxis are a fucking disaster and unless I'm headed home from the airport in a foreign city, I doubt you'll ever see me in one. If Uber disappears, so does my desire to use "taxi" services.
moox. for a new generation.
Especially not true in many countries where Uber was banned or is in the process of scrutinity. I have never had any dirty in Seoul, or in germany where I live, or in england (as a matter of disclosure I had a few dirty taxi in NY, true, but the vast majority of taxi I took in Dallas or other metropole in teh US were squicky clean). I had a few dirty taxi in Paris, but that was so long ago, and the few taxi I took in the last decade in france were clean too.
Anyway at least for germany I support the regulation and uber being forced to obey it. After all we do not have a medaillon system like in the US, everybody with the proper training driver licence, and the proper governemental check of their money counter, as well as the proper insurance (commercial passenger transport insurance) can become a taxi. In my city we have a lot of different taxi companies, some being simply a single person having repainted their own car (and having the proper papers). Nothing outrageous really, in fact those regulations make a lot of sense.
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Hopefully they used Snapchat to exchange photos of them fucking over customers.
Just kidding, hah. All in all, I think Uber is the greatest gift to us customers in the history of taxis. I've had enough of taxi drivers lying, cheating, and just plain driving badly. Regulators might do well to acknowledge that Uber provides more accountability of drivers and power to the customer than any taxi regualtion has yet.
one day the emails disspear for no reason at all and can't be recovered.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Government, even at it's maximum performance level of Full Glacier Speed, is not naturally adaptable to the rapid advancement of possibilities in a connected culture of free adults.
Why a government needs to interfere with one adult sharing a car ride with another adult, who freely exchange an agreed-upon amount of cash, is the real question that is finally becoming more widely considered (now that it affects your grandma who likes Uber)
Not this this has any bearing on The Fine Article, where it looks like an adult or group of adults may have defrauded other adults through deception.
Theoretically, the ancient legal problem of enforcing contracts should be something governments are super-efficient at by now.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Its isn't even remotely news.
If you're the Head Mother Fucker In Charge, and you're company is involved in a major lawsuit, you better believe your god damn emails are going to get subpoenaed.
And then after those emails are read , the opposition's lawyers are going to subpoena the emails of anyone they find relevant.
I'm glad Uber is getting reined in. There were predictions here on /. or another site where quite a few people think Uber and others won't survive the audits and coming regulations. I'm one hoping for that very outcome. I don't care if taxis cost more or are slower.
I dislike upstarts.as a traditionalist.
Have a read.
It wasn't finding out specifically that personal policies don't cover the behaviours of Uber drivers - that one's obvious. It was that:
i) Uber drivers appear to have been hiding their change in behaviour from insurers, thinking that they could get away with it, such that insurers have had to introduce procedures specifically to weed out those customers who have chosen to engage in fraud. This is something that a traditional taxi driver could never get away with. This is the same problem we had before taxi regulation: it would attract unethical people as drivers.
ii) Uber is deliberately providing inadequate insurance. The behaviour of an Uber driver and requirements of the car used are going to be different from a driver who does not engage in selling taxi services - indeed, half the work is in being around the right place at the right time. Yet Uber's insurance specifically does not cover people before they've accepted a customer.
Government, even at it's maximum performance level of Full Glacier Speed, is not naturally adaptable to the rapid advancement of possibilities in a connected culture of free adults.
Why a government needs to interfere with one adult sharing a car ride with another adult, who freely exchange an agreed-upon amount of cash, is the real question that is finally becoming more widely considered (now that it affects your grandma who likes Uber)
Not this this has any bearing on The Fine Article, where it looks like an adult or group of adults may have defrauded other adults through deception.
Theoretically, the ancient legal problem of enforcing contracts should be something governments are super-efficient at by now.
[cleaning up all the spacing embedded in the quote]
If 2 people in the US wish to enter into a private agreement to share a ride and share the costs, that is all fine and good with the government. If a dispute arises between private parties in such a case, I suspect there are some basic tenets of US contract law that might apply, but if nothing is "in writing" then such a case could be pretty weak. When such arrangements become more formalized and look like a business, then a government will care about many things, including all aspects of the contracts.
Uber is a business, right? Uber has solicited funding from the VC ("venture capital" not "Viet Cong", but I see how one can sometimes confuse the two) community, right? Uber takes a share of the revenue from every ride booked through the Uber service, right? Potential users of the service must agree to the price before the service is provided, right? Uber has a "surge pricing" concept for "peak travel times" when Uber's system is heavily used, right? All of that is public knowledge. Therefore, Uber acts like a business and that is what earns it scrutiny by governments.
Governments have developed laws pertaining to contracts, and some types of contracts are outright illegal. For example, the typical US citizen cannot legally enter into a private agreement with a paid killer to have someone killed, right? Governments "take a very dim view" of commercial situations where a buyer is "gouged" by a seller; various states have "anti- price gouging" statutes that apply during times of "natural events" like the aftermath of hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes, and all of that runs counter to Uber's "surge pricing due to high demand" model.
Last time I checked, taxi services did not have "peak time pricing" or "higher rates due to high demand on the system pricing", but taxis are more diificult to find due to higher demand in times of peak usage, and "no surge pricing" is one benefit of the regulaions imposed on existing taxi services. I don't know if Uber does anything to increase the number of available drivers during "peak times", or worse, discourage active drivers from "peak times". Heck, sometimes "peak times for Uber" occur when nobody wants to drive in any case; holidays for one. So I could see how a government might get interested in Uber's "surge pricing" concept.
The extreme tipping in the U.S. didn't make sense to me either until I looked at it from the sense of a battle against the taxman. The taxman clued in and now tipping in the U.S. is just the twisted leftovers of a rotted collaborative tax-avoidance scheme.
Are you an uber exec?
Ride share?
Weasel loophole words. A taxi is a taxi.
A ride share is some place you where going any way.
Uber has long passed that.
Adults who enter into an agreement with an Uber car for an unspecified price are very unhappy when that price unexpectedly turns out to be $100 or $150 for a ride that is 10 times the regulated price.
They also want to pick up a cab at an airport at 2am without paying $100 or $150. I've never come home to JFK or Laguardia without a line of regulated taxis waiting for me. And if I really want to ride share, I can find somebody to share a cab.
There is a niche market of people who can pay $100 or $150 for a limo, but they're not enough to sustain a mass market.
It turns out that people don't follow Uber's free-market theories. Make a note about that in the margin of your economics book.
Would encryption have made a difference in such a situation?
They could have cheerfully submitted the emails, but the key, unfortunately, has been changed just last week and no, no backups of the old one, your Honor.
Then don't use Uber. It's optional. If Uber violates its price contract, then Uber will answer in litigation and loss of customers.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Don't use Uber if you don't want to. It's optional. I wish I was an Uber exec, the pay looks terrific. Maybe you're a cabbie. /. And in 2015 no less. Are you accessing it on a BBS? Are you even supporting your local BBS?
The taxi system is an ancient implementation that can't keep up with the modern world. The world moves on. Hell, this is
And why aren't you researching this argument in a paper version of World Book Encyclopedia at the school library?
If I want to pay someone for a ride in their vehicle, that's our right. You don't like it, so delete the Uber app and leave the rest of us alone.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
[Please add some spacing and -- editing -- since a lot of web traffic is on small mobile screens.]
.
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It looks like you're point eventually arises as, "Uber gouges its customers".
If you don't like Uber or Lyft or any free-adult private-car driving-for-money price arrangements then don't be a customer.
Problem solved.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Then don't use Uber. It's optional.
If Uber violates its price contract, then Uber will answer in litigation and loss of customers.
As I understand it, on New Year's Eve, Uber announced that surge pricing was in effect. People called an Uber cab, and the driver or the app told them that they would have to pay according to a certain formula (but not what the final price would be). They agreed, but they didn't realize that by the end of the ride it would cost $100 or more for a trip that would cost $10 or $20 for a yellow cab. Economists say that this is a market failure because they don't have enough information to make an informed buying decision. If Uber told them at the beginning that it would cost $100, most of them would have turned it down.
If Uber succeeds in driving the yellow cabs out of business, along with Lyft and any other competitors, then a ride with Uber won't be optional. Uber will be the only provider. If you want to get home from a bar at 1am on New Year's Eve, or if you want to get home from the airport at 2am, you'll have a "choice" between Uber's surge pricing or nothing. In theory, competitors could move into the market, but it's hard (maybe impossible) to compete with a business that has $50 billion in capital.
This happened regularly in the 19th century. Several businesses would compete in the steel or the railroad industry, and finally one would dominate the industry and eliminate competitors by competitive pricing or mergers. Then, the dominant player could raise prices without fear of competition. That's what Uber would do if it could.
This happened regularly in the 19th century. Several businesses would compete in the steel or the railroad industry, and finally one would dominate the industry and eliminate competitors by competitive pricing or mergers. Then, the dominant player could raise prices without fear of competition. That's what Uber would do if it could.
It's called laissez faire capitalism, and it's what results when you believe that absolutely unrestricted markets are "free".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it