uber portland 2014, bloggod prepped the home for 8 months

 In 2014-2015, Uber used the services of David Plouffe,[167]

An Uber executive is said to have advocated hiring investigators to "dig up dirt" on journalists who criticize them.[265] Portland, Oregon's transportation commissioner called Uber management "a bunch of thugs".[266]

Uber developed an internal tool called Greyball which uses data collected from the Uber app and by other means to avoid giving rides to certain individuals. The tool was used starting in 2014. By showing "ghost cars" driven by fake drivers to the targeted individuals in the Uber app, and by giving real drivers a means to cancel rides requested by those individuals, Uber can avoid operations by known law enforcement officers in areas where its service is illegal.

 An investigative report by The New York Times published on March 3, 2017, described Uber's use of Greyball in 2014 to evade city code enforcement officials in Portland, Oregon, Australia, South Korea, and China.

Kalanick received a letter, dated November 19, 2014, from U.S. Senator Al Franken, Chairman of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, over user privacy. In addition to a list of 10 questions, Franken stated that the company had a "troubling disregard for customer privacy" and that he was "especially troubled because there appears to be evidence of practices inconsistent with the policy [Uber spokesperson] Ms. Hourajian articulated" and that "it appears that on prior occasions your company [Uber] has condoned use of customers' data for questionable purposes."

Franken concluded his letter by asking for a response by December 15, 2014


Another data breach was revealed in November 2017. Occurring in 2016, this breach disclosed personal information on about 600,000 drivers (including license information); and names, email addresses, and phone numbers for 57 million customers. Uber paid a $100,000 ransom to the hackers on the promise they would delete the stolen data.
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"This kind of behavior is underhanded and, if deemed illegal, should not go unpunished. Portland's Bureau of Transportation is scouring Uber data to see whether the company has used the software, called Greyball, since 2014. 

That's when Erich England, a city code inspector, unsuccessfully tried to hail an Uber car using Uber's app during the weeks the company was operating without the city's approval.:


Mark Weiner, a former political consultant to both Hales and Saltzman, was a paid lobbyist for Uber and, from the dining room of his Eastmoreland home in 2014, aided in brokering Uber's hurry-up deal with the city. 

That is not to suggest Saltzman would soft-glove any review of potentially unethical or government-thwarting behavior by Uber. But it is to say that any probe of Uber's practices must measure Uber's data collection and use against consumer fraud laws or unlawful interference with Portland's regulatory authority.


City Commissioner Nick Fish, along with Commissioner Amanda Fritz, had voted against allowing Uber to operate in Portland. In an interview last week with The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board, Fish repeatedly used the term "brazen" to characterize Uber's behavior. And he told Njus, following the Times' report: "This is not just bad behavior. This is an attack on our ability as a local community to enforce community standards."

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/03/uber_revelations_demand_a_hard.html