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Uber and Lyft Spend $8.2 Million To Lose Fingerprint Election, Vow To Leave Austin (examiner.com)
On Saturday voters in Austin, Texas refused to repeal a new regulation that requires fingerprinting drivers for ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft. In Austin's most expensive election ever, the ride-sharing services spent over $8.2 million pushing Proposition 1, apparently outspending their opponents by a 80:1 ratio. But on election day, the proposal to repeal ultimately received just 39,083 votes -- 44% of the total cast -- meaning the lobbyists spent $209 for each vote received. Both services have said they will cease operations in Austin rather than perform the fingerprint-based criminal background checks.
My friends who have used Uber said that they were getting like 3-4 mail advertisements a week about this, plus emails, texts, etc. Some who otherwise wouldn't care voted against it because they were so annoyed at the spam.
Austin still has a driver service besides taxis. Get Me operates here and complies with the background checks.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Austin defeated an ordinance that was forced onto the ballot by Uber and Lyft, who said "Pass our ordinance or we'll pick up our toys and go home."
This was never really about Austin. It was about teaching a lesson to other cities who might follow Austin's lead.
Uber and Lyft have backed themselves into a corner. If they leave, they'll leave an opening for other companies to come in and grow (GetMe is already here and probably salivating at the prospect); if they don't leave, they'll show other cities they can be cowed after all. So expect them to leave long enough to show other cities they mean business, but then come back with deep discounts and free rides to kill off any homegrown competition.
FWIW, it's not just about fingerprints. For example, currently, Uber and Lyft are theoretically prohibited from stopping in traffic lanes (because people die when they do that), but the proposed ordinance was going to change that because they can make more money if they inconvenience everybody else.
But to the extent it was about vetting drivers, don't for a minute think that Uber and Lyft are planning on cheerfully taking responsibility for the actions of their drivers anyway.
Entitled? How about let the consumer decide.
The consumers did decide, it went to a vote and Uber lost.
There is absolutely no reason the government should require collecting and using fingerprints, especially just to run background checks. Using fingerprints and allowing the government (or any other party) to have access to that data is unacceptable. Not only because the government should have no need to track what people are doing but because the gov should not have fingerprint registration data- which will be horribly abused. To me this is just SHOCKING.
Stand up for your rights, people... (and the rights of your children, too). Once you give this data to the government (or big business), it will NEVER be erased or restricted, regardless of claims or laws- it will go into huge databases and shared between all agencies and used however they want for as long as they want. Even worse, with every crime investigation, you will be searched without probable cause.
Again, there is ZERO reason for fingerprints just to do a background check of *LICENSED DRIVERS*, but if one MUST use biometrics, there is only one safer and practical biometric I know of- that is deep vein palm scan. That registration data cannot be readily abused. It can't be latently collected like DNA, fingerprints, and face recognition can. You have to know you are registering/enrolling when it happens. You don't leave evidence of it all over the place. When you go to use it, you know you are using it every time. And on top of all that, it is accurate, fast, reliable, unchanging, live-sensing, and cheap. If you must participate in a biometric, this is the one you should insist on using.
They already do perform background checks.
Make no mistake, this had nothing to do with "safety" on the party of the City Council. This was about control, political connections, and Austin getting a taste of Uber and Lyfts cash. It's a classic shake down. Several City Council members have close ties to the local Taxi companies, who were getting their clocks cleaned.
Taxi Cabs have enjoyed a public monopoly and regulated shortages for decades, The barrier to entry is very high in the Taxi market. The city made lots of money from taxes and fees and regulated what taxis went when and where. Along come Uber and Lyft. they don't play Austin's game.
Before Uber and Lyft, it was very difficult to find a cab at 2AM downtown. There weren't enough for all the partiers. With Uber and Lyft in the market, drunk driving incidents have gone down and people were very satisfied with Uber and Lyft's service. So what happens when a business is making money and has happy customers? Yep, the politicians step in to fuck it up. Austin wants to control prices, wants fees, and wants to limit the number of drivers.
So now Uber and Lyft leave and more people will stumble to their cars at 2am and drive drunk, More people will drive their own vehicles downtown, taking up parking and clogging up traffic. The cost of getting a ride will go up and service will decline.
It's the Detroit model where special interests win out over common sense.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
First, how does requiring fingerprint-based background checks put money in the City's pocket?
The last time I had a fingerprinting done in Texas for a background check, I had to go to the local police department and pay them cash (only cash, and no change given) for a police officer to print me. They had to stamp it to verify that the prints were from the person on the ID, so you can't print yourself and "borrow" someone else's fingers. The fee wasn't huge, but it was a fee paid to the local city. There was a separate fee to the state for the actual background check.
Do you know what the process is for fingerprint background checks, or were you just assuming it wasn't a revenue source?
Couldn't Uber and Lyft simply require prospective drivers to foot the cost for their own fingerprinting?
That's the standard practice, but is illegal. Requiring an employee to pay to work was outlawed in the 1800s, as part of Reconstruction. The laws have since been loosened, bot early post-slavery practices included "hiring" a person at $1 to work a field, and charging him a $2 fee to work the field. Then, once in debt, require he work off the debt. It resulted in permenant indentures servitude, which is more commonly called slavery. So outlawing slavery didn't work, and laws were put in place, especially in the south (and some federal laws) that ban an employer from requiring costs to work. They are not commonly applied, but for someone like Uber, I'm sure the crowd here would have no qualms equating Uber to slavery, and holding Uber to laws that are never used these days.
Learn to love Alaska
rank utter ignorance.
research some actual corporate malfeasance.
the tobacco industry is a GREAT example.
or early food processors.
or DuPont's legacy involving C8, using in making Teflon, a chemical now so prevalent that there is no place on earth NOT contaminated by it.
or lead, something most of the rest of world had reduced usage of by the 1920s, but the US went along putting in everything, everywhere, for another 60 years, blatantly ignoring, at the behest of the companies dependent on it, all the science pointing to its ill effects.
the fact is that damages to the business have never scared companies from poisoning customers, destroying the environment, or any other possible harms. they are amoral institutions that know exactly what the value of a human life is to their bottom line. and the math frequently comes out to "we can afford to harm X number of people before profits suffer", and then they operate as such.
self-regulation is a fairy tale told by the ignorant.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.