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Uber Gets Sued Over Alleged 'Hell' Program To Track Lyft Drivers (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Uber has another lawsuit on its hands. This time, it's about Uber's alleged use of a program called "Hell." The plaintiff, Michael Gonzales, drove for Lyft during the time Uber allegedly used the software. He's seeking $5 million in a class action lawsuit. As the story goes, Uber allegedly tracked Lyft drivers using a secret software program internally referred to as "Hell." It allegedly let Uber see how many Lyft drivers were available to give rides, and what their prices were. Hell could allegedly also determine if people were driving for both Uber and Lyft. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges Uber broadly invaded the privacy of the Lyft drivers, specifically violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act and Federal Wiretap Act and engaged in unfair competition. Uber has not confirmed nor outright denied the claims.
While older economic branches usually have found a modus to do without this (as it ultimately harms everybody), these "young savages" do not know what it means to be civilized and will apparently do anything for a short-term gain.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hell, no
As much as I hate to defend Uber for absolutely anything, how's this different from a supermarket sending someone to walk through a competitor's store to see what their prices are? They posed as normal customers, collected publicly available data, and used it to improve their own business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
"Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party causing economic harm"
So few comments here compared to any story about Uber breaking up a taxi monopoly etc.
And yes, that was sarcasm. But the REAL scary part is all those suckers who have Uber on their phones requesting rides not really realizing how much Uber knows about their CUSTOMERS. And in this case it should be Customers, not Product, since the Customer actually pays them for the service. But I guess there are more idiots in the world who don't think about that than there are people who give a damn.
Yeah, I'll take that old and rusted Cab that I call via telephone. They only get to have me for the one trip, not a lifetime of data acquisition.
If they did this in the UK, their argument that drivers were contractors and not employees of Uber may be in doubt - as they were being "monitored" outside the agreed time (i.e. when not working/being paid by Uber) and Uber were discouraging them from taking alternative work.
Plastics are largely hydrocarbon molecules. The degradation process is thus likely to release lots of carbon molecules, probably much as methane and carbon dioxide. Although this effort may well solve the problem of solid plastic litter in the environment if totally successful, it could still be an environmental catastrophe by releasing far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than might otherwise be the case, if plastics were buried and permitted to only degrade slowly.