Uber Sued In California For Fraud, Negligence Following New Delhi Rape

(AsiaTimes.ga) Nearly two months ago, a young woman was allegedly raped by her Uber driver in New Delhi, India. The incident led to the banning of the service in India and a full-scale investigation there, but the victim has brought her case over to the U.S. now filing a complaint with the Northern District Court of California.

The charges raised in the complaint include negligence and fraud, and the victim (who is going by Jane Doe to protect her identity) says that it’s Uber’s hollow marketing tactics and disregard for customer safety that led to the events that unfolded on that December 5 night.

One of the focal points of the complaint is Uber’s background check policies with regards to its riders.

Had Uber not sacrificed customer safety for the sake of profit and expansion, and actually cared about who it was employing to drives its cars rather than being preoccupied with claiming its share of the India taxi market, Plaintiff Doe would not have been viciously raped. In fact, a basic background check would have revealed that Yadav had a known propensity for violent and deviant conduct, including numerous arrests for rape and assault, which should have disqualified him from working as an Uber driver.

Uber structures its business in a way that doesn’t shoulder much responsibility for the behavior of its contracted drivers. Uber promises background checks on hired drivers, but it’s up to the user to choose the safest and best driver on the app (even though it automatically matches you and fines you for canceling). What goes on between the time that the driver picks up the passenger and drops them off is the responsibility of the driver alone.

For this reason, similar cases in the past haven’t made much of a dent in Uber’s legal armor.

Following this particular New Delhi case, Uber’s service was banned in the city. India represents one of Uber’s largest markets outside of the United States.
However, one week ago the service returned to the city under new legal restrictions, working on a no-profit model pending radio taxi license approval.

The company, embattled from the start, has grown from fledging startup to one of the most successful companies of the last decade. Uber is valued north of $40 billion and operates all over the world.

Update: An Uber spokesperson got back to TechCrunch with the following statement:

Our deepest sympathies remain with the victim of this horrific crime. We are cooperating fully with the authorities to ensure the perpetrator is brought to justice.

If you want to look at the full details of the complaint, we’ve embedded them below.

Jane Doe vs. Uber Technologies

[via Re/Code] Featured Image: Visual Idiot/Shutterstock

A Tarnished Uber Tries To Woo The Press

(ATimes) Tonight we might get a glimpse of the kinder, gentler Uber, but we won’t be able to talk about it. The startup has endured months of disastrous press coverage, including Uber exec Emil Michael saying the company should smear journalists that criticize it.
Now the company has emailed reporters saying “The Uber Communications Team invites you to join us for drinks” at a San Francisco bar tonight.

The invite explicitly notes “The Event Is Off-The-Record” meaning journalists won’t be able to publish what’s said there. “Off-The-Record” is the same policy that was supposed to be in effect at the dinner where Michael made his catastrophic remarks, though the BuzzFeed editor who broke the story said he never agreed to that stipulation.

Press mixers aren’t uncommon in Silicon Valley, but we believe this is Uber’s first event of this nature that’s expressly for journalists and its PR team. The company has historically kept press at arm’s length, typically communicating over the phone rather than in person or through events, though it did hold this meeting between NY press and Uber execs.

It could feel that human faces will improve communication. The company claims “Our team has grown a lot.  It’s just a casual opportunity to get together in person with the local reporters we work with every day.”

Last year at TechCrunch Disrupt, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick discussed how Uber has to play nicer now that it’s so powerful. He admitted that “You have to find different ways of doing things, different ways of communicating, and just understanding that people look at you as the big guy now, not the scrappy guy, and it requires a different way of running your business”.

For much of its life, Uber has been a relative darling in the press, which has covered its every expansion and weird promotional stunt.  But last year’s run of issues — including several rape cases involving Uber users, surge pricing complaints and the aforementioned incident where exec Emil Michael said at dinner for Uber VIPs that he wanted to dig up dirt on journalists that criticize his company — may have forced an immovable wedge between Uber and press.

The perception of journalists is especially important for Uber. The company’s aggressively pragmatic strategy has helped it raise $3.3 billion in funding, but often puts it at odds with taxi drivers, city governments, and even its users. Reporters with a bone to pick can find plenty of cabbies put out of work, laws broken, and customers burned by surge pricing.

Uber would like to get those stories to flip to its narrative. Unaccountable and inconvenient cabs being disrupted; outdated and monopolistic laws circumvented for the good of the public; the laws of supply and demand employed to ensure a reliable service.

I’ll be there tonight assessing what Uber’s after, even if I can’t write about it.

Be Smarter Than That, Uber Users

Uber surprised a 26-year-old Baltimore woman with a spooky Halloween bill that hit $326 on a routine ride, resulting in her inability to pay her rent and general Internet outrage.

Gabrielle Wathen posted to the site GoFund.me, saying that she went out for her 26th birthday on the night of Halloween and, after taking an Uber an approximately 22-minute ride home around 3am, was charged $326. This means she can’t pay her $450 rent, and so she hit the crowd-funding site to ask for help. She raised upwards of $500 by using Instagram to build up awareness, which led to the story getting picked up by the media. (We saw it first on Business Insider.)

To be clear, I’m unimpressed by this Gabrielle Wathen in every way except that she managed to pull off what is clearly a con catalyzed by irresponsibility.

Since 2012, Uber has made its surge pricing unmistakably clear within the app. In fact, you have to key in the exact amount by which your fare will be multiplied in order to even request an Uber during a surge pricing time.

Sure, it might be surgier than you expect. 2.5x looks like a pretty small number, but it takes your $20 charge to $50. So on holidays, when the multiplier is around 7x or 8x in most cities, a 20-minute ride could easily jump to a $300 fare.

I’m not necessarily defending Uber altogether. Though the company’s dynamic pricing has been explained to exhaustion through simple supply-and-demand charts and promises that most of Uber’s cut goes toward maintaining the service, there is some question over whether or not those huge spikes (especially when it isn’t so tasteful) are truly where they should be to make sure the company can fulfill requests.

Still, this particular case seems more like an irresponsible girl, who was supposedly tricked by Uber, then turning around and using a sharing economy herself to fix her mistake.

 Here’s what she had to say on the crowd funding website:

Last night was Halloween. Great time. Today is my 26th birthday. Not so great time. I live in Baltimore and went out with my friends to celebrate my birthday at midnight. When 3 AM rolled around, I suggested we take an Uber home to avoid drunk driving (#responsibility/#MADD). I live 22 minutes , tops, from the party I was leaving.

When I awoke this morning, I heard a friend talking about how outrageous Uber rates were the night before (9x original rate). I checked my bank account when, unbeknowst to me, I see a charge for $362. Not only is it my 26th birthday, it is rent day. My rent is $450 and I can no longer pay it today due to this completely outrageous charge.

I have had little to no luck in disputing this transaction.

I waitress at two restaurants and freelance for a City Paper. I worked incredibly hard this week to be able to enjoy my birthday this weekend. This misunderstanding has cost me 80% of the funds I have to my name (embarrassingly so) and I spent a good two hours of my birthday crying over it.
I feel taken advantage of and cheated by the Uber name. $367 for a 20 minute ride should never be justified, even on Halloween. Please donate even just $1 if you think this is utter and complete bullshit and also hilarious and very, very depressing at the same time.

Thanks for the ride, Muhammed.

Although it’s hard to defend a company that gouges you on holidays, I think Gabrielle is the one who took us for a ride.

#UberPool Lets You Split #Uber Fares With Other Passengers Along The Same Route

#GNN - In the ongoing war between Uber, Lyft, and all of the other me-too ride-sharing services, competitors are looking for any way they can better utilize their supply of drivers and reduce costs for their riders.

Today, Uber is announcing UberPool, a new feature that will let you pick up other riders on the way to your destination and split the bill.

While the feature should do a lot to cut costs for passengers, not everyone will want to ride with a stranger in addition to the driver picking them up; Uber notes that the new feature also serves as a kind of “social experiment.”

Since there’s not much data about how people will react to the new service, Uber isn’t going to release UberPool across every market it serves. The company has begun rolling out a private beta, and starting August 15 a public beta will launch in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Uber also notes that the company’s “friends at Google” will be joining the beta as early adopters, as they “share [Uber's] vision of a more energy-efficient world with less traffic congestion and pollution in our cities and are excited to be early adopters of UberPool.” This signals continued cooperation between the companies following Google integrating Uber into Google Maps for iOS and Android.

Getting more riders into a single car to make rides cheaper isn’t exactly a novel idea. In June we covered Hitch, a ride-sharing service whose biggest differentiator from Uber and Lyft was the fact that it tries to use software to maximize the number of passengers in a single car to increase driver utilization and reduce prices for riders.