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

At the shop

[Hognoxious]

Shopkeeper: what can I get you?

Me: I'd like a dozen softwares and three hardwares, please.

Re:Virtual pleading the 5th

[dreamchaser]

Methods to evade laws have nothing to do with the 5th Amendment. One can argue for or against the areas that ban Uber and their laws, but your analogy is flawed. This software is more like a real criminal using methods to avoid undercover police.

Uber should be shut down

[WCMI92]

They've already commited enough shenanigans to warrant the corporate death penalty.

Re:Uber should be shut down

[TWX]

They are not publicly traded but they still have a business license that was granted to them. Time to revoke it and force asset liquidation. If anything it's better that they're not publicly traded, the people most hurt by the behavior are those who invested in the criminal enterprise, losing their venture capital dollars may convince them to avoid these kinds of business practices in the future.

Poor old Travis

[Viol8]

I wonder if this particular specimen of arrogant entitled Tech Bro will finally realise its better to work with regulators around the world than to try and bully your way onto the scene and hope you built up enough critical mass to bulldoze your way through all those tedious regulations and laws that other companies have to comply with.

The idea behind Uber is a good one, but I hope the company itself goes out of business. Its business and HR practices stink and we don't need a company like that running transportation services (not that they'd stop there tbh).

Re:Poor old Travis

[dbIII]

He hasn't just been bullying, he's been sweetening people in power up as well.
It's an odd kind of feeling seeing these guys come in and treat places in the west as if it's a banana republic with easily bought officials - not just insulting but depressing when it works.

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.

Re:Poor old Travis

[Nidi62]

I wonder if this particular specimen of arrogant entitled Tech Bro will finally realise its better to work with regulators around the world than to try and bully your way onto the scene and hope you built up enough critical mass to bulldoze your way through all those tedious regulations and laws that other companies have to comply with.

Kalanick and Elizabeth Holmes should get together. They would be the power couple of fraudulent...I mean disruptive...tech startups. They could start a new company called Uberos to disrupt the corrupt lab-testing industry by creating an app that allows people who have bought their own equipment for personal testing to test samples for other people too!