It's been a few days, so what fresh trouble has Uber got into now? Lawsuit magnet Uber today settled one case in Washington – while a much larger potential issue has arisen in Philadelphia. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has reportedly expanded its probe into Uber's "Greyball" technology to cover the dial-a-ride app's shenanigans in the city of Philadelphia along with the previously …
How are Uber gonna contact people to see if they wish to receive texts, any texts, the first text even.
Obviously they shouldn't but will they not text to say "Do you wish to receive this text".
Presumably, though it doesn't say, the agreement should include immediate criminal charges for any subsequent spammy texts. I'm not holding my breath.
Uber's use of the tool to evade police detection should be considered a criminal act
why is there even a doubt about this ? Identifying legal prosecutors and then feeding them false information to evade inspection cannot be seen as anything else than illegal in any jurisdiction. Except Luxembourg, may-be.
I'm not defending Uber, but I'm not sure this would be illegal in most countries. It is unlikely to be illegal in the UK.
Now, IANAL, but as far as I there is no law (as in criminal) against putting our false data on your own app to anyone, other than potential for civil cases, for instance under consumer contracts or possibly mis-advertising, and nearly all UK law needs to have a law against doing 'something' for it to be illegal. If the police or other law enforcement had not gone to court to seek an order stopping Uber from providing false information (which they couldn't if they didn't know they were doing it) or informed Uber of an official investigation and sought a court order placing restrictions on what they could and couldn't do then there is unlikely to be a crime committed (in the UK).
Perverting the course of justice charge would require that it can be proved that Uber were breaking the law and that they were then trying to cover up their actual breaking of the law. Now this may seem exactly what they were trying to do, but it wouldn't be easy to prove that in the courts as can be seen by the case brought against Rebekah Brooks (who, for clarification, was found not guilty).
Sadly, it seems a rogue engineer exceeded his authority by coding and releasing Greyball, entirely without the knowledge or consent of the executive board. He has since been fired. Uber will be entering into a settlement without any admission of liability, thus avoiding any criminal prosecution, and drawing a line under this painful moment for the company.
"I'm sure Volkswagen can supply enough to cover Uber's needs. It might even help VW's bottom line."
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Treat the company like any other one.
The next scams....??? will be accident liability. When Uber is finally declared to be an employer they'll no doubt try to get out of accident claims by saying that the driver 'according to their routing'(cough-cough) should not have been on that road at that time and deny any liability leaving the poor driver without insurance.
More lawyers are gonna get rich on the back of this.
Yep, a 4-letter word all right.
"It is alleged that phones identified on "Greyball" were flagged to drivers as breaking Uber's terms of service and the users were assigned fake drivers when they requested a ride with the Uber app. (The drivers, of course, never showed up.)"
Surely even in the USofContracts, agreeing a contract between parties places some obligations on the supplier to inform the customer if the "goods" are not going to be delivered? At the point where the "taxi" is booked, a contract is entered into and no matter the T&Cs, Uber are under an obligation to meet that contract or inform the other party that the contract is now void based on the Ts&Cs without informing the other party.
I'd be inclined to charge Uber with knowing and wilful fraud since they deliberately and specifically targeted these groups of people and took their bookings with no intention to fulfil the contract or warn the customer that they were banned from the service.
I imagine that Uber actively detecting the enforcement authorities in places it wasn't allowed to operate, then feeding them a fake app to conceal the illegal operation, constitutes obstruction of justice. That seems quite apparent, though applying logic to the operations of law is always fraught with the most extreme hazard.
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