Posted November 18, 2014 9:31 PM ET; Last updated November 19, 2014 4:29 PM ET
[From article]
remarks by Uber Senior Vice President Emil Michael on Friday night as he spoke of his desire to spend $1 million to dig up information on “your personal lives, your families,” referring to journalists who write critically about the company, according to a report published Monday night by Buzzfeed. The same story said a different Uber executive once had examined the private travel records of a Buzzfeed reporter during an e-mail exchange about an article without seeking permission to access the data.
That combination of vindictiveness and willingness to tap into user information provoked outrage Tuesday on social-media sites, spawning the hashtag “#ubergate” on Twitter. Critics recounted a series of Uber privacy missteps, including a 2012 blog post in which a company official analyzed anonymous ridership data in Washington and several other cities in an attempt to determine the frequency of overnight sexual liaisons by customers — which Uber dubbed “Rides of Glory.”
[. . .]
Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union said that while he was a graduate student — and before he worked for the ACLU — an official with a major technology company once threatened him while he was working to publicize a privacy problem with its service, which collected extensive personal information on users. “If you keep doing this stuff,” the official said, according to Soghoian, “they will dig up stuff on you and try to destroy you.”
[. . .]
Ron Linton, chairman of the D.C. Taxicab Commission, which has battled with Uber over a range of issues, says the company uses data to gain a competitive advantage over traditional cab drivers. “The greater part of their business plan is that they’re going to amass the greatest database of consumer habits that the world has ever seen,” he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Uber executive stirs up privacy controversy
By Craig Timberg, Nancy Scola and Andrea Peterson
November 18, 2014 at 9:20 PM
* * *
[From article]
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.
[. . .]
Over dinner, 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.
[. . .]
Then 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.
Michael at no point suggested that Uber has actually hired opposition researchers, or that it plans to. He cast it as something that would make sense, that the company would be justified in doing.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/
Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists
Senior vice president Emil Michael floated making critics’ personal lives fair game. Michael apologized Monday for the remarks.
posted on Nov. 17, 2014, at 8:57 p.m.
Ben Smith
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