Privacy? What privacy? Corporations pose at least as much threat to civil liberties as any government.
Uber executive stirs up privacy controversy
An Uber executive’s suggestion that the company should
investigate the private lives of journalists has sparked a backlash
against the popular car service, offering a potent reminder that tech
companies are amassing detailed — and potentially embarrassing — records
of users’ communications, Internet traffic and even physical movements.
The
controversy stemmed from 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.”
This week’s incident was the latest reminder about the
potential for abuse as intimate information accumulates on the servers
of tech companies that have widely varying approaches to user privacy
and face few legal barriers in how they use personal data.
“We
have never in history been at a point where we were more extortable,”
said Chris Hoofnagle, a law professor at the University of California at
Berkeley who specializes in online privacy. “We have to think about how
the service provider itself can be a threat.”
Uber
officials have sought to distance themselves from Michael’s comments.
Chief executive Travis Kalanick tweeted that they were “terrible,” and
Michael issued an apologetic statement calling the remarks “wrong” and
expressing regret.
On Tuesday, the company said in a
blog post: “Uber has a strict policy prohibiting all employees at every
level from accessing a rider or driver’s data. The only exception to
this policy is for a limited set of legitimate business purposes.”
The
controversy appeared to have wide resonance, especially among women,
some of whom already had expressed uneasiness about Uber and its drivers
knowing where customers live, work and socialize. Many critics noted
that the remarks by Michael focused on the work of a female journalist,
Sarah Lacy, editor of Silicon Valley-based PandoDaily, who had
repeatedly reported on what she called evidence of sexism by Uber.
“I know many women who erased Uber [apps] from their phones last night. . . . They really stepped over a line,” said Katherine Losse, a former Facebook employee who wrote about that company’s early days in the 2012 book “The Boy Kings.”
Yet
Losse and others said privacy issues go far beyond Uber. Days after
being hired as Facebook’s 51st employee in 2005, she was given a master
password that she said allowed her to see any information users typed
into their Facebook pages. (Facebook has instituted more rigorous
privacy controls since, it has said.)
Such incidents occasionally have burst into public view, and
they are not limited to tech companies. Google in 2010 fired an
engineer after he reportedly spied on several teens using company
services. Walgreens has been battling a $1.4 million fine for a
violation federal privacy laws after a pharmacist in Indianapolis showed
private prescription records to her husband, who once had dated the
patient, according to news reports.
In
the public sphere, several State Department employees inappropriately
viewed Barack Obama’s passport records in 2008 when he was running for
president.
“In a time when our data ends up
in databases, people can use it for their own prurient interests,” said
Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil
Liberties Union. “Time and time again, people do it.”
Soghoian
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.”
Federal
law provides little protection should a company decide to deploy users’
information against them. Though the Federal Trade Commission has
cracked down on companies that violate their own representations about
how they handle data, they have wide latitude so long as they comply
with the privacy policies written by company lawyers.
In March, for example, Microsoft revealed that it had searched a user’s Hotmail e-mail account
to find an alleged leaker of its corporate secrets. Microsoft initially
said that its policies allowed it to “protect our customers and the
security and integrity of our products,” but later, amid criticism, it
said it would in future cases refer allegations to authorities instead
of conducting its own searches of user accounts.
Uber,
which connects riders with available drivers through smartphone apps,
has quickly grown from a start-up to a company worth $18 billion and
operating in 46 countries. Yet the company, like many in the tech
industry, has struggled with privacy issues.
Entrepreneur
and writer Peter Sims reported in a September blog post that the
company displayed his location in an Uber vehicle to the crowd at a 2011
launch party for the service in Chicago. He learned of this after
receiving a text from an attendee detailing his exact location.
In
Uber’s “Rides of Glory” blog post from 2012, the company published maps
highlighting the neighborhoods where residents most often participated
in “brief overnight weekend stays.” And while the identities of
individual users were “blind” — meaning not personally identifiable —
the Uber official studied the gender breakdown to conclude that when a
higher ratio of men use the car service, there are more such brief
visits in a neighborhood.
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/business/technology/uber-executive-stirs-up-privacy-controversy/2014/11/18/d0607836-6f61-11e4-ad12-3734c461eab6_story.html
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
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