Uber used covert 'undercover agents', says court letter
Uber set up a covert unit tasked
with stealing competitors' secrets and engaging in undercover
surveillance, a letter published by a US court on Friday has alleged.
It
is critical evidence in Uber's legal battle with Waymo, the
self-driving car company that accuses the ride-sharing firm of stealing
its technology.
The letter, sent by lawyers representing a former
Uber employee, sparked an internal investigation when it was sent to
Uber in May, but has not been made public until now.
In a
statement, Uber said: "While we haven’t substantiated all the claims in
this letter - and, importantly, any related to Waymo - our new
leadership has made clear that going forward we will compete honestly
and fairly, on the strength of our ideas and technology."
The
allegations in the letter were made by Richard Jacobs, who worked at
Uber until February this year. He left after an incident in which he
felt he was unfairly demoted. Shortly afterwards, he sent the letter
alleging the misconduct.
"These tactics were employed
clandestinely through a distributed architecture of anonymous servers,
telecommunications architecture, and non-attributable hardware and
software," the letter read.
Snooping
Mr Jacobs settled with Uber for
$4.5m (£3.4m), and he has since said some of what he wrote was in fact
not true, specifically the remarks about Waymo's trade secrets.
However,
several other details in the letter have already been confirmed,
including an incident in which Uber accessed the medical records of a
woman who accused an Uber driver of rape.
Other allegations include Uber employees posing as protestors in order to gain access to private online chat groups.
In
one particularly bizarre example, Mr Jacobs alleged that an Uber
"surveillance team" was deployed to a hotel in order to record and
observe conversations between executives at a rival company - the name
of which has been redacted from the version of the letter made public.
Specifically,
those agents wanted to monitor the competitors' reaction to the news
that Uber had secured a large amount of funding from a Saudi investor.
Angry judge
The
emergence of the "Jacobs letter" has been a dramatic turn of events in
the Uber v Waymo trial, which had been due to start earlier this month
but has now been delayed until February.
Presiding Judge William
Alsup was made aware of the letter's existence by the US Attorney’s
Office for the Northern District of California, which is currently
investigating Uber on a range of other matters.
In court last month, Judge Alsup chastised Uber's legal team, accusing them of withholding evidence.
"I can no longer trust the words of the lawyers for Uber in this case," he said.
"We’re
going to have to put the trial off because if even half of what’s in
that letter is true it would be a huge injustice to force Waymo to go to
trial."
Internally, Uber is going to great lengths to reassure
employees that the old ways of working, under ousted chief executive
Travis Kalanick, no longer exist at the firm.
"There is no place
for such practices or that kind of behaviour at Uber," wrote Tony West,
Uber's general counsel, in a note to employees.
"We don’t need to
be following folks around in order to gain some competitive advantage.
We’re better than that. We will compete and we will win because our
technology is better, our ideas are better, and our people are better.
Period."
BBC
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