So the big Uber story this week isn't really about surge pricing for once, which is honestly a nice change of pace, except what it's actually about is worse.
BuzzFeed's Ben Smith published a piece last night about a dinner he had with Uber SVP Emil Michael at the Waverly Inn, where Michael reportedly floated the idea of spending a million dollars to hire opposition researchers to dig up dirt on journalists who write critically about the company, specifically naming Sarah Lacy over at PandoDaily, who's been on Uber about its handling of sexual assault reports and general bro-culture nonsense for a while now. Michael apparently wanted to go after Lacy's personal life. Smith says none of this was agreed to be off the record, so he ran it.
And then, almost on top of that story, BuzzFeed ran a second piece saying one of their own reporters, Johana Bhuiyan, had her Uber trip pulled up and watched in real time by a company executive using something called "God View" — the internal tool that lets Uber staff see live locations of riders and drivers on a map. No warrant, no request, nobody asked her permission. She just got tracked because she was a journalist covering the company and somebody in the office thought that was fine.
I don't think I'm being dramatic when I say this is the kind of thing that should actually change how people think about handing a private company their location data every time they want a ride home. We've all sort of shrugged our way into this. You open the app, you watch the little car icon crawl toward you on the map, you don't think about who else can see that car crawling toward you and why. Turns out the answer is: whoever's logged into the dashboard that day, for basically any reason they feel like.
I like Uber as a product, for what it's worth. I've used it probably forty or fifty times this year, mostly late at night after the trains stop running reliably out where I live, and it's been fine, mostly cheaper than a cab, definitely faster to summon. Two weeks ago I got charged $34 for a ride from the airport that should've been more like twenty, and I was annoyed about that in a completely different way than I'm annoyed today, which tells you something about the gap between "this app overcharged me" and "an executive at this company thought it was reasonable dinner conversation to talk about digging through a critic's personal life." Those are not the same category of bad.
What gets me is the casualness of it. Nobody snuck into a server room at 3am for this. It was dinner. Wine, probably. Somebody just said the quiet part out loud to a room that included a guy whose entire job is writing things down. That's not a hack, that's a culture, and cultures don't show up out of nowhere in one dinner conversation — they've been sitting there the whole time, waiting for a reporter to ask the wrong question at the right table.
I deleted the app off my phone tonight. I don't know if I'll put it back. Lyft's coverage in my area is spottier and their pricing isn't always better, and I recognize that boycotting-with-your-phone is a pretty small gesture that probably means nothing to a company this size. But it's the only lever I've actually got, so I'm pulling it, and I'd rather take a slightly worse cab situation for a while than keep paying a company that apparently keeps a dashboard for watching me move around a city.
Uber put out a statement tonight saying Michael's comments "do not reflect" the company's views and that they're taking the tracking claims seriously. Fine. We'll see. Companies say that kind of thing constantly and then nothing changes until enough people actually stop clicking the button, which, again, is a small lever, but it's mine.
Anyway. If you've got the app and you didn't see either of these stories today, go read the Smith piece first. It's short, and it's the kind of short that sticks with you longer than it has any right to.