Justice Department Opens Criminal Probe Into Uber (washingtonpost.com)

parallel_prankster quotes a report from Washington Post: The Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation into Uber's use of a secret software that was used to evade authorities in places where its ride-sharing service was banned or restricted, according to a person familiar with the government's probe. The investigation is in its early stages, but deepens the crisis for the embattled company and its chief executive and founder Travis Kalanick, who has faced a barrage of negative press this year in the wake of high-profile sexual harassment complaints, a slew of high-level executive departures, and a consequential trade secrets lawsuit from Google's parent company. The federal criminal probe, first reported by Reuters, focuses on software developed by Uber called "Greyball." The program helped the company evade officials in cities where Uber was not yet approved. The software identified and blocked rides to transportation regulators who were posing as Uber customers to prove that the company was operating illegally.

Comments

Re:Poor old Travis

[TWX]

Some of Ubers ideas are good, but most of the good ones could have been evaluated by regulatory bodies and then applied to existing passenger livery regulations. It's not unreasonable to have a better booking system for rides. It's not unreasonable to use mapping software to determine the approximate cost of a fare. It may possibly even be reasonable to allow the use of private vehicles for passenger livery part-time, which means that part-time drivers would have to buy-in to whatever dispatch service they wish to work for. It even may be reasonable to allow customers to rate drivers and drivers to rate customers to essentially determine risk/worth/surcharge.

Thing is, at the end it still is necessary for the drivers to make sustainable wages. It's necessary to protect passengers with proper insurance. It's necessary to ensure that drivers are properly vetted. Bad things have happened over the years, many taxi and sedan regulations are reactions to those bad things, and while it's always a good idea to re-evaluate rules to see if they're still necessary, I expect that since the act of moving a fare from one place to another really hasn't changed all that much, most of those regulations still need to be in-effect.