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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.
With kinds of information (e.g. hookups) Uber collects, data breach is very serious.
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.
You may be able to outsource the work; but, the responsibility is still yours. Hopefully the courts will see through this shell game fiction.
This "shell game" fiction happens to be the truth of the matter and historically has always been held up by the courts. At no point are the drivers in the employment (directly or otherwise) of Uber. Uber's business is to provide an application platform that connects drivers with passengers. Both of those parties voluntarily use the service that Uber provides in accordance with its Terms of Service. Drivers are no more an employee of Uber than the passengers themselves, ergo, they're not.
To say otherwise is the height of intellectual dishonesty.
fedex try to make there drivers independent contractions and lost in the courts.
"This "shell game" fiction happens to be the truth of the matter and historically has always been held up by the courts."
Wrong, and the state of California has quite often said "Uh, no, you've improperly classified your employees as independent contractors" using a set of criteria, all of which not necessarily needs to be met, for the standard of 'employee' versus 'contractor' to be determined.
Papa John's tried your same logic - that their customer hired the driver to deliver the pizza, not the employee (hence delivery charges.)
That failed miserably.
I guess you fail to understand that, and thus your intelliectual dishonesty shows.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The fact that in specific cases firms which have claimed to hire contractors have lost in court and had the contractors re-designated as employees does not logically imply that uber drivers are employees. As others have noted, there are specific criteria against which courts determine if a person designated as a contractor is, in fact an employee. IANAL so I won't speculate as to the outcome other than saying it is hardly a forgone conclusion that Uber drivers are actually employees as a matter of law. The real tricky part for Uber will be, assuming they retain contractor designation for now, then, going forward, the more they try to improve the service by dictating things on the driver end (cleanliness, etc.) the more likely they are to be re-defined as employees.
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
you do realize that laws regarding safety of private information apply to anyone who stores them right? it has nothing to do whether the drivers are "employees" or "users" or "clients" or whatever you choose to call them...
Will there be no end to the protectionists' backlash?
Requiem for the American Dream