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Uber Sued Over Driver Data Breach, Adding To Legal Woes
wabrandsma writes with news about the latest trouble facing Uber. "Uber Technologies Inc has been hit with a proposed class action lawsuit over a recently disclosed data breach involving the personal information of about 50,000 drivers, the latest in a series of legal woes to hit the Internet car service. The suit, filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco by Sasha Antman, an Uber driver in Portland, Oregon, says the company did not do enough to prevent the 2014 breach and waited too long — about five months — to disclose it. Antman says Uber violated a California law requiring companies to safeguard employee's personal information."
Uber, are the company that implements a god view mode to track you using the phone app.
http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2014/11/uber-god-mode-spy-on-you
"It was revealed that Uber employees at the corporate level—not Uber drivers—can track anyone anywhere at anytime using something called 'god view', which doesn't sound terrifying at all. ....A Buzzfeed news reporter, Johana Bhuiyan, claims that she was illegally tracked after she traveled to a meeting with the General Manager of Uber New York, Josh Mohrer. Mohrer was allegedly waiting for Bhuyain at the company's Long Island City headquarters where he told the reporter, "I was tracking you" and pointed to his phone."
Note that the app can track you when its not running, and when you're not using the service. It continues to record and transmit your location data and ids. It's worth noting that Google does the exact same thing, as do many of these apps, and Android does not let you withhold the location data from an app when you choose. Turning off the GPS does not fix it, they triangulate by radio tower and Wifi when GPS is off.
You don't implement a God View unless you think your God, and you don't record all this data unless you intend to use it.
That uber was cutting corners for the sake of profit.. Oh right, everyone!
With kinds of information (e.g. hookups) Uber collects, data breach is very serious.
Often, the first company to bring a product or service to market with a disruptive technology fails. But inevitably there is another company that comes behind them and learns from the mistakes that were made. Uber will eventually go public, the stock will go up and then crash, and the company will shut its doors or be bought dirt cheap by someone else. Another company will follow that will be the messiah of dot com transportation and will take the world by storm. That's the company you want to invest in.
Drivers are not employed by Uber, rather they are employed by the person whom they are giving a lift to. Uber is simply the intermediate of which the two connect to one another - much like a telephone company. On that basis alone this case will flop as Uber does not owe drivers the same duty of care that an employer would owe an employee.
Typical nuisance suit. It amounts to the plaintiff's attorneys calling the Uber legal department and requesting (extorting?) a few millions. Of course the exchange drags out over a couple of years justifying the expense on both sides. Private personal data in the modern world is almost non existent. Get used to it.
So laws protecting "employees" will not stand in court because Uber has no employees other than the top C?O team.
I am also amused by so many people with employer-provided health insurance dissing obamacare. In the last generation so many of the companies offered pensions and generous health insurance. Just in 10 years all the employees had been corralled into HMOs and the pension plans have disappeared. Just look at the speed at which HMOs were shoved down your throat. All it takes would be a couple of big employers opting out of providing health care, all other companies would follow suit. Remember how fast they competed with one another to out source IT jobs!. It will happen that fast.
It is time for people who work for a salary to re examine their long standing assumptions about their relationship with their employers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Will there be no end to the protectionists' backlash?
Requiem for the American Dream