The Occasional Blargh

“Uber’s Data Privacy Policy” [emphasis mine]

We wanted to take a moment to make very clear our policy on data privacy, which is fundamental to our commitment to both riders and drivers. Uber has a strict policy prohibiting all employees at every level from accessing a rider or driver’s data. The only exception to this policy is for a limited set of legitimate business purposes. Our policy has been communicated to all employees and contractors.

It’s generally not a good idea in trying to clean up a public relations disaster to continue to make obvious misstatements of fact. The very second sentence is a lie. Not just simply because we know of prior instances of people accessing and disseminating rider and driver information for entertainment, but because it would be impossible for Uber to operate if “all employees at every level” were prohibited from accessing the data. How would Uber know what to charge riders, what to pay drivers, how to dispatch drivers, and so on? Making such an overstatement again does nothing but leads folks to think Uber takes the public for fools.

This leads the release to devolve into a list of non-exhaustive examples of business reasons why it’s more likely than not that the majority of people working at Uber would have access to some piece of driver or passenger data. “The only exception to this policy is pretty much to do anything to run the business.”

Of course, the problem was not that Uber has access to people’s use of the service, but that people with that access are not trustworthy. That is the question that remains unanswered by the blog post.

Juxtaposition

I’m going to steal a bit from Raging Thunderbolt’s probably abandoned blog (Ed.: You’re one to talk. Before today, your last post was from over a year ago.) where she or he places two statements together to contrast each other. And I’ll steal a topic which was done on the website last year. Unlike her or him, I will probably F it up. Both statements appeared on Daring Fireball (the longtime obsession of these pages).

Marco Arment [on the release of various Microsoft apps for free on mobile devices]:

It seems that Microsoft is finally accepting the reality of Office’s market position on smartphones and tablets. To some degree, Office needs to compete with the free Google Docs and iWork, but for many customers, it’s also competing with the idea of simply not using office apps (or using them far less often).

John Gruber [on reaction to a developer’s release of an expansion pack for $2]:

Two fucking dollars. I’m going to the App Store to leave a 5-star review; such a beautiful and original work of art, and the App Store rating is being trashed by cheapskate morons.

The thing here is it hasn’t been a new complaint that the Apple App Store has not really fostered a healthy marketplace where developers can make the money needed to invest in applications more substantial that social media front-ends or simple fad-games. There’s folks who feel this has managed to stunt the iPad’s ascent as the PC replacement it was so destined to be. So, doesn’t it seem weird to celebrate as the natural order of things for one company to be pulled toward free by consumers, while lambasting consumers for pulling another app for free?

Uber Shrugged

This is not what leadership at normal companies do.

A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.

The executive, Emil Michael, made the comments in a conversation he later said he believed was off the record. In a statement through Uber Monday evening, he said he regretted them and that they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.

Go read the whole thing at Buzzfeed. It’s hard to pull out choice quotes from the story, but paragraphs eight and nine are particularly damning a it describes the plan:

Over dinner [at Manhattan's Waverly Inn, attended by such big-wigs as Arianna Huffington], he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.

Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.”…

At the dinner, Michael expressed outrage at Lacy’s column…

He returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.…

So, of course, right after the story hit the Internet, Michael apologized and went on to say that those comments “do not reflect [his] actual views and have no relations to [Uber’s] views or approach.” Which makes sense because who among us haven’t created such elaborate retaliatory plans right there on the spot. Play-acting a Bond villain is a fun way to liven up any dinner party.  Afterwards, I bet they did “Songs in the Style Of…” which is another fun improv game.

Even as absurdly unbelievable as that bit of damage control was, the previous actions of Uber should make you believe it even less. In the very same Buzzfeed article, during Uber’s attempt to show how they can be trusted, they broke their own policies. They demonstrated how no one is allowed to view customer data except for business purposes by accessing the data of Buzzfeed reporter and Uber customer Johana Bhuyian. And I will prove to you this is not a bomb by detonating it.

This, however, is not a one-off problem with Uber. This is a company that lives up to its name by believing it is better than you, or your petty concerns about fairness or safety or privacy. Straight from the beginning, when it was fighting taxicab regulations, through to paying drivers poverty wages while telling the press otherwise, to its infamous innovation of legalized price gouging (thus why it needed to fight those regulations) and sabotaging its competitors, to its indifference to the safety of their customers or financial well-being of its drivers, Uber only cares about its bottom line. Oh, and its reputation. It will go to any self-defeating length to protect its reputation. No surprise when you have a company that is founded by someone whose life's philosophy comes from Atlas Shrugged.