Controversies surrounding Uber

[2] In 2014, with regards to airport pickups without a permit in California, drivers were actually told to ignore local regulations and that the company would pay for any citations.

[3] Uber's response to California Assembly Bill 5 (2019), whereby it announced that it would not comply with the law, then engaged lobbyists and mounted an expensive public opinion campaign to overturn it via a ballot, was cited as an example of this policy.

The suit was filed by 8000 taxi drivers who claimed that Uber's entry into the Australian market resulted in major financial losses for them.

[9] In March 2017, an investigation by The New York Times revealed that Uber developed a software tool called "Greyball" to avoid giving rides to known law enforcement officers in areas where its service was illegal such as in Portland, Oregon, Australia, South Korea, and China.

Greyball was deployed in countries including Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Denmark, with the knowledge of senior management such as Kalanick and Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty.

[25] A January 2018 report by Bloomberg News stated that Uber routinely used a kill switch, codenamed "Ripley", that locked, powered off and changed passwords on staff computers when those offices were subjected to government raids.

[29] When Uber offices were raided by police or regulatory agencies, the "kill switch" of which was not used until the very moment, was used to cut access to the data systems.

For example, it was reported that when the French competition regulator, the DGCCRF, raided Uber's offices in Paris, de Kievit asked an engineer in Denmark to "please kill access now".

[30] The company claims the kill switches were not intended to obstruct justice, but rather to protect IP, customer privacy, and due process.

[34][35] In January 2017, Uber agreed to pay $20 million to the Federal Trade Commission to resolve allegations of having misled drivers about potential earnings.

Senator Al Franken, Chairman of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, expressed concerns regarding ride sharing privacy, specifically Uber's "God View", whereby the whereabouts of specific customers, including journalists and politicians, are able to be tracked by Uber insiders.

[73][74] In 2012, an Uber employee tracked the frequency of probable one-night stands[75] in six U.S. cities by day and neighborhood, by correlating late-night and next-day trips.

Hackers used employees' usernames and passwords that had been compromised in previous breaches (a "credential stuffing" method) to gain access to a private GitHub repository used by Uber's developers.

[82][83] In September 2018, in the largest multi-state settlement of a data breach, Uber paid $148 million to the Federal Trade Commission, admitted that its claim that internal access to consumers' personal information was closely monitored on an ongoing basis was false, and stated that it had failed to live up to its promise to provide reasonable security for consumer data.

The criminal complaint said Sullivan arranged, with Kalanick's knowledge, to pay a ransom for the 2016 breach as a "bug bounty" to conceal its true nature, and for the hackers to falsify non-disclosure agreements to say they had not obtained any data.

[91] In April 2021, an arbitrator ruled against Uber in a case involving Lisa Irving, a blind American customer with a guide dog who was denied rides on 14 separate occasions.

[92] In April 2021, the court of Amsterdam ruled that Uber has to reinstate and pay compensation to six drivers that were allegedly automatically terminated solely due to algorithms, which is in violation of Article 22 of GDPR, which relates to automated decisions causing "legal or significant impact".

Driver evaluation relies on Uber's star rating system, which the lawsuit says disproportionately leads to the firing of people who are not white or who speak with accents.

"[94] The lawsuit was dismissed in August 2021 due to lack of evidence to prove that the rating system has a racially disparate impact and that Uber intentionally discriminated against the lead plaintiff.

[100] The Indian Express also found that in most Uber cabs, safety features mandated by the Delhi Government, such as a panic button, were not present or did not work.

According to Bloomberg Law correspondent Chris Marr, the Chilutti ruling places Pennsylvania as having one of the strongest protections against arbitration clauses.

The dissenting judge, Victor P. Stabile, rejected McCaffery's assessment on procedural grounds, writing that the appealed trial court's order to compel arbitration was not the final ruling in the case.