
Uber used undercover agents, court letter says - cinbun8
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42376515
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sschueller
It's like Uber is run by the mob. At what point will the feds step in?

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nikanj
Uber has (somewhat correctly) predicted that the feds are so slow and the
penalties so small, running things like the mob will pay off. After all, their
whole "disruption" is "how about we just ignore all the taxi legislation". See
also, AirBnB with "how about we just ignore all the hotel legislation".

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pjmlp
In some European countries, AirBnB no longer has a free reign as people are
now required to pay taxes for renting rooms, not doing so is considered tax
evasion.

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nolemurs
Not paying taxes on AirBnB income is also considered tax evasion in the US. I
doubt there's any meaningful enforcement, but it's no more legal in the US
than in Europe.

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TomMarius
No, paying taxes on income is something different. You of course have to pay
taxes for your whole income; new taxes that include requirements for explicit
registration and so on have been introduced.

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MichaelGG
This is not that special nor should it be unexpected. Uber's real problem here
is that they were so careless about their operations. Like the rape victim
health records incident. They sent their own VP over to go get these records?
They should be using deniable intermediaries.

I feel it is rather naive to think that large companies don't have
intelligence agents or other such things. The amounts it costs to spy and
subvert people is just too small. The KGB was able to flip FBI and other
agents for very small sums of money. So how much easier must it be for, say,
Oracle, to flip a Google engineer? Or to simply support someone's career and
get one of their people hired on an into relevant projects?

Some large companies certainly have Internal Affairs orgs that can go
undercover to find out corruption in their org. (I've seen this happen in the
case of overseas subsidiaries fudging numbers to steal from corp.) It's
bizarre to think they wouldn't spend a small amount of money to obtain info
worth thousands of times more.

I mean how much would you really bet that Oracle or Microsoft have never,
ever, engaged in anything undercover?

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sethbannon
Ayn Rand ideology in its purest form.

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mantas
Actually that's what the bad guys in Atlas Shrugged did. Use every possible,
no matter how illegal, way to go ahead and extort value from the system for
your solo benefit. Meanwhile good guys played by the rules and tried to stick
to high moral standards.

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marenkay
I'm going to write an an called "mober", and it will be the most disruptive
thing in the world of crime.

By applying Uber's tested and tried methods, "mober" will take over the
criminal world. No more consequences for legal offences, yay!

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eadmund
I wonder if the same people who got upset at Uber detecting and avoiding state
inspectors who pretend to be customers are _also_ upset about Uber agents …
pretending to be customers.

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659087
I question the sanity of anyone working at uber who isn't at least making
preparations to abandon ship at this point.

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Asparagirl
I question the ethics of anyone choosing to work at Uber, period. It’s been
blatantly obvious for at least two to three years that they are corrupt, not
just “disruptive”. And that’s just based on the news we get in public; there
were probably internal signs long earlier.

I speak as someone who once worked at a corrupt and unethical company (in
Hollywood) and who got TF out of there within months, as soon as it became
obvious internally.

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cbHXBY1D
Even five years ago, it was common knwoledge in the SF startup scene that Uber
was run like a frat house. We used to laugh and hear about the Travis gang
doing cocaine on his desk after work.

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Asparagirl
I know someone who worked with Travis at a previous company, not Uber, who has
been saying for years that he was clearly a sociopath.

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bpanon
ok

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briandear
"...he has since said some of what he wrote was in fact not true, specifically
the remarks about Waymo's trade secrets."

So certainly, if some of these things are true, that's bad, however why is
this letter even relevant if the person who wrote it has admitted that it was
a lie? Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

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paul7986
Yet they paid 7 million dollars for his silence?

Then Uber should just close shop because they are willing to pay every
accuser. Who is not going to believe the accusers over Uber....

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misun78
It's not unreasonable for companies to avoid litigation by settling. Given
that the timeframe of this coincides with Uber's darkest periods, it may have
been operating out of a position of weakness.

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s73ver_
It's entirely unreasonable to pay that much, especially when you haven't
validated it yourself.

