Uber employee chiming in - while I entirely sympathize with HN's frustrations around our ethics and can't really justify our actions around this data breach, it is very much worth noting that Lyft would not exist were it not for Uber's extremely aggressive practices. There were/are far too many protectionist policies at play at most locales that -- not out of pure coincidence -- needed a company as aggressive as Uber to pave the path for a better option for both riders and drivers (over existing taxis).
We fought all the battles, took a hit on our reputation and set it up nicely for Lyft who very smartly played along with the nice guy approach to capitalize. Net-net, no Uber would have most likely meant existing taxis everywhere and as most riders/drivers will tell you, there is nothing inherently better about either app, they offer the same, pay the same but vastly differ in perception.
That said, we took our aggressive attitude way too far. In an ideal world, Travis would have evolved or replaced himself a couple of years back once the company essentially reached escape velocity where our consumers themselves became our most fervent supporters. Unfortunately that did not play out and making a near perfect switch like that is probably unlikely.
Given this important context, I hope you will give Uber another chance as in the end, Dara and the employees are genuinely trying to evolve by doing the right things and putting all of this behind us. You can get some sense of this from going to sites like reddit.com/r/uberdrivers (or r/lyft) and seeing the changing perception at least from the driver side of things.
I disagree that Lyft would not exist; Lyft invented the UberX category. Originally Kalanick complained about Lyft's creative interpretation of the law, before succumbing to internal employee pressure to introduce a competitor. Years after its introduction, Kalanick admitted that he didn't believe in UberX until it demonstrated its success.
That said, almost all of the notable legislative and regulatory battles were conducted and won by Uber.
The wrongful actions by companies do get forgiven eventually, as toxic executives leave (as in the case of the CEO, Legal Officer, and now the CSO), but no public is foolish enough to immediately absolve any company of wrongdoing. Uber will have a reputation for sexual harassment long after it meets or exceeds the standards of other large companies.
In fact, there was a company called SideCar[1] who popularized the idea of ridesharing before Uber and Lyft. There was a time, maybe 2013 or 2014 when I exclusively used Sidecar until Uber became more prominent. Uber was only offering their high end cars at that time.
Are you saying the end justify the means? The problem is that over and over and over we see companies breaking the rules, reaping massive rewards as a result of unethical practices, saying "sorry" and then carrying on with no real consequences. It sets a horrible precedent and unless people start being punished instead of rewarded(!!!) for their actions nothing will change.
I drove for Lyft and Uber during that era, and I promise you lyft was doing just as much to fight those protectionist policies, they were doing it with a lighter touch. In many places they were making headway, and then Uber's asshole tactics wound up turning it into a two-steps-back situation (getting ridership access to San Diego Airport e.g.)
It's not like Uber did one bad thing. Uber has been a fountain of terrible things for years and years. You even admit that Uber's market-dominant position has been been achieved through those terrible things. And those are only the terrible things that we've discovered despite Uber's energetic attempts to cover things up. Lord knows what horrors you're still hiding.
Until Uber loses their ill-gotten lead, I won't even consider using them.
I don't buy your view of what transpired. "In an ideal world", "making a near perfect switch like that is probably unlikely", "took a hit on our reputation", etc. None of these truly recognize the actual weight of what Uber has done as an organization.
When I deactivated my account it was a huge pain, I had to reply to 2 emails, and in the end it took 5 days to complete. That alone annoyed me enough to never go back.
Wasn't like that when Uber let my account get hacked and 1k was stolen from me. When that happened I went searching for answers and found UBer blaming it's users for their lack of security. Further I immediately wanted to cancel my account .. chop off it's head/the source but had to wait days for Uber to delete my account.
They are worst then Comcast and sorry need burn through all their VC money til they are ashes! Loathe Uber so much!
IIRC you can't remove all payment methods from the app, so just deleting the app will leave your credit card information in their hands. Also all your previous ride data will still be on their servers. Both of these things could be lost in a data breach, and presumably account deletion deletes this data.
> In the EU, data protection rules mean they must delete all user data on request.
That means every day I'm a new customer and get $20 off my first ride of $22. One day, they'll wise up and stop making such silly deals.
The behavior described here is extremely selfish and amoral. It amounts to gaming the system. Additionally, the cost of exploiting a loophole such as this will be passed on to other customers before the company stops offering a losing deal. Those customers will not be reimbursed when the offer is rescinded.
The antisocial behavior of the company would not excuse the antisocial behavior of a user acting in this way.
I _really_ hope they let braintree handle that and don't touch PANs. If they do store PANs, presumably they'd be audited and hopefully would store them more securely. But hey, I guess you never know and less exposure is always better.
You may or may not want to remove your information, especially if you change phones. Someone getting your phone number could charge rides to your account if you don't unlink your credit card information.
It's also good hygiene to delete accounts. I don't typically do it, but when a company offers an easy delete button, I won't refuse.
Uber is one of the fastest growing companies in the world, and it did an enormous amount of good in challenging laws prohibiting voluntary exchange and in expanding transportation options (which had benefits that included reducing DUI), while making many serious mistakes. I don't think it can be characterized as a "bad place", and I don't think many hiring managers will consider having experience at Uber a black mark. Quite the opposite.
Good, it's important to judge a company of 10k people on one person's story. That's usually a great strategy.
I'm not defending uber, but this kind of attitude is exactly what got Trump elected. You can't generalize and demonize entities based on one person's view.
You might have a point if this was a different company, but look at the context - it's Uber. Probably one of the outright most scummiest companies out there.
You'll find that thinking like that will only lead to misery at worst and hypocrisy at best. For example, if you live in the United States (though this logic applies to any country, really), you'll be interested to know that the US holds the world record for the amount innocent civilians killed [1].
EDIT: I realize I sound far more judge-y than intended in these posts. My overall point is that people should just do whatever makes 'em happy while doing the best you can (w.r.t. everything else). Trying to emphasize the morality in your actions is just wrong, imo.
It’s just not possible to be perfectly consistent in all your actions, we’re all hypocrites somewhere if you consider all down to the root. We probably all hate forced child labor, yet we all own smartphones, all of them most likely built with resources mined by children under grueling conditions. (This text Is typed on one) Still, don’t let that stop from doing the right thing once in a while. If we all did the right thing most of the time, we’d still be hypocrites, but the world would probably be a better place.
A false premise. If that were true, just like you stated, we wouldn't support it. Actions speak louder than words, and all that.
EDIT: I realize I sound far more judge-y than intended in these posts. My overall point is that people should just do whatever makes 'em happy while doing the best you can (w.r.t. everything else). Trying to emphasize the morality in your actions is just wrong, imo.
It’s not a false premise. It’s just not humanly possible to change everything you don’t support. We can’t move all back to self-dug caves and till the land with our bare hands. You need to pick your battles.
It's not about changing things you support, it's just about consistency in your actions.
Taking the child labor thing into account, never being brand new electronics again would pretty much take care of that. One could make an argument that buying used goods is still supporting child labor, but I'd argue it's a sunk cost.
Why choose this example? Child labour is rife in many sectors, particularly textiles.
It's also rampant in electronics recycling[0]. So even if you never buy any new electronics, you're complicit when you dispose of your old electronics.
The point is you shouldn't allow an impossible quest for perfect ideological consistency and moral purity to prevent you from doing good on a imperfect, inconsistent scale.
Consistency is absolutely impossible, as you already alluded to. It’s not a bad move to assess the current position, accept it for what it is, and improve it bit by bit. Pick your battles.
Two wrongs don’t make a right when you try to sum them, I.e. combine them. My point is: don’t compare them at all. Don’t change the subject. Uber is one, other things are another. Being a hypocrite doesn’t make you wrong, it just makes you a hypocrite. Don’t even pull in the other wrong to begin with.
Otherwise, how do you ever justify standing up for anything you believe in? I was born a hypocrite, surely a life of mute acquiescence can’t be my destiny?
My overall point is that people don't actually care. It's just virtue signaling. If people cared they'd have consistency in their actions. For example, you probably are very consistent in the fact that you probably will never cause physical harm to someone.
Consistency isn't impossible at all. People are already very consistent in doing what simply is convenient for them. In the case of Uber vs. Lyft, if you live in an area where they're priced similarly and are of similar service it's easy to switch to one or the other under the guise of trying to do the right thing, or whatever.
Not using Uber hardly requires any effort. What, ten seconds to uninstall an app and install the alternative one?
> My overall point is that people don't actually care. It's just virtue signaling.
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
I care up to certain thresholds. Last year my Uber use was probably 90%, Lyft 10%. Now that's flipped. I only use Uber if I'm outside the US and there's no comparable local alternative.
Uber is demonstrably making less money than it used to because I do this, and Lyft is making more. I'm personally happy with that arrangement, and honestly my feelings here are the only ones that matter. I don't particularly care if you think I'm just "virtue signaling" or if I'm "not doing enough" or whatever.
Hey, just wanted to let you know (not that you care), that you're 100% right. My original post, and subsequent responses were based on a false equivalency.
Dunno what I was thinking, I was totally in the wrong. Apologies if any offense was taken.
> people don't actually care. It's just virtue signaling.
"Virtue signaling" is an annoying, low-effort way of dismissing something. Try harder. You haven't even provided any evidence. Here's an alternative proposal: People like doing things that they believe will make the world a better place, within their money/time/inconvenience budget, in ways that are limited by their attention. They're human - they have limited attention, limited capacity for simultaneously optimizing hundreds of metrics, and many competing demands that they're trying to satisfy, so they're not going to be perfectly consistent.
No, one person uninstalling Uber is not a massive blow against evil. But many people uninstalling it has been enough to send a pretty powerful signal that -- in conjunction with a lot of concurrent social and legal factors -- is causing Uber to do a pretty solid about-face.
(And it's not seconds, because depending on where you are, Uber may have many more drivers than Lyft -- people travel, after all, so even if Lyft is equal in your home market, it's not equal everywhere. You're also losing the prospect of alternating apps when one or the other is in surge pricing. If you're a heavy user of ride-sharing services, uninstalling Uber imposes both a time and monetary cost.)
Kudos to the GP and others for uninstalling Uber. And for every other step they've taken to try to improve the world by their own actions.
Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.
(In his writings, a wise Italian
says that the better is the enemy of good.)
-- Voltaire
Don't let the pursuit of perfection stop you from doing anything that matters.
Though I appreciate your post, it only further emphasizes my original point. You, apparently a professor at CMU, praise folks for merely uninstalling an app. Something you only knew because they bothered to post it on an internet board. This further reinforces that people should post that they're doing such virtuous things to begin with. Why, because they want to increase social standing among people in a given area, that is computer science, to which you already have a high standing in, given that you're a CS professor at CMU.
So yes, it is virtue signalling, pretty much by definition -- "the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue." That being said, I don't think virtue signalling is bad. In fact, it's virtue signalling that has led to the pressure on Uber that brought about this very discussion.
---
As an aside, I didn't realize "virtue signalling" was such a bad word, as well as "hypocrisy." I guess I'll have to stop using those words.
> people don't actually care. It's just virtue signaling.
You're making claims about their underlying motivation, and dismissing their actions as just virtue signaling.
"They're not doing A, they're only doing B"
Showing the presence of B is not sufficient to demonstrate the absence of A.
Second, you haven't actually shown that they're virtue signaling. Note that your definition specifically includes intent: "publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character" -- the OP could be expressing their sentiments publicly in order to induce others to follow suit, for example. The same post admits many possible explanations, and you are in no position to read the mind of the posters in order to divine their intent. You're making assumptions, but you again haven't presented any evidence to suggest that your hypothesis is better than any others.
> You're making claims about their underlying motivation, and dismissing their actions as just virtue signaling.
This is true.
> Showing the presence of B is not sufficient to demonstrate the absence of A.
This is also true.
> Second, you haven't actually shown that they're virtue signaling. Note that your definition specifically includes intent: "publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character" -- the OP could be expressing their sentiments publicly in order to induce others to follow suit, for example. The same post admits many possible explanations, and you are in no position to read the mind of the posters in order to divine their intent. You're making assumptions, but you again haven't presented any evidence to suggest that your hypothesis is better than any others.
Indeed, though, with respect to this there's no evidence --
save the person themselves stating that's what they intended -- that I could present that would be sufficient.
Overall I regret my original post and the ensuing posts, since ironically, my original intent was far less aggressive than is implied by the responses.
The point is that if you know that the US kills civilians yet you stay in the US, giving them money through tax, the majority of which is used to fund the very same military that kills civilians, yet claim to do the right thing, that's hypocritical, no?
In any case, you're right. There is no conflict. Just hypocrisy.
EDIT: I realize I sound far more judge-y than intended in these posts. My overall point is that people should just do whatever makes 'em happy while doing the best you can (w.r.t. everything else). Trying to emphasize the morality in your actions is just wrong, imo.
Why should I tidy my room when we don't have world peace?
It's a ridiculous comparison. Leaving the country is a lot more difficult than changing ride share apps. It's not hypocritical to take the low-hanging ethical fruit, even if you don't do the harder stuff. In any case, living in a country doesn't imply that you support everything its government does. If anything, the ethical course of action is to stay and try to change things.
This number doesn't account for countless millions, if not the majority of Americans who drain more from the government in the form of services, subsidies, and assistance than they pay in taxes (and I'm not suggesting this is necessarily a bad thing).
No no. My point probably just wasn't properly conveyed. In the original post I replied to the person the person encouraged their friends to use Lyft after hearing about the terrible things over at Uber.
Presumably they want friends to switch over as to not support an organization they disagree with, but my point was that doing so is pretty much impossible to begin with. If the goal is to not support organizations that do things you disagree with it's futile.
Therefore, one should just decide arbitrarily. It really doesn't matter.
Taking money away from a bad company helps stop that company from doing bad. Similarly, voting for a politician who will try not to kill civilians helps prevent civilians from being killed. Both of these are correct actions to take. Moving out of the country is comparatively less effective, and continuing to give money to the bad company is not effective at all.
"things are never that simple" says the guy who is implying that you shouldn't think about whether a company is moral/not if you live in a country that does horrible things?
Heh, yeah I'll admit the original post and the subsequent responses were pretty dumb. Can't change the past (no really, I couldn't edit it even if I wanted).
If you're not willing to restructure your entire life to the point of renouncing citizenship of the country you were born into then you shouldn't ever make any choices based on moral principles whatsoever? uh.. what??
I plan to never use Uber again.