Uber Asked Too Much of Technology and Not Enough of Themselves.

I wrote this for the OneQuestion conference last month. I'd written a book called Ubernomics, which was based upon 1,000 hours of interviews, which for various reasons, has not been published. during those interviews, when I heard the term "morally deep and ethically grey", I had a feeling things would not end well. Travis is one of the smartest people I've EVER come across, but without changing his leadership style, him being forced to resign from the company was inevitable.

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When we ask ourselves the question “Can we really trust technology?”, what we are really asking ourselves is, “Who is it that we need to trust in order to make this technology a part of our lives?”.

It is for this very reason that I don’t trust Uber. 

I have spent the last few years writing a book about Uber and have conducted thousands of hours of research and interviews with employees and executives. My initial attraction to the Uber was simple. It was the fastest growing technology company in the world approaching a valuation of almost $70Bn in its’ short lifetime. It was a company that had no marketing budget for years because it received so much new business by word of mouth. It was a company built upon algorithms which could learn how a city moved and how the people within it behaved so accurately, that it knew to within fifteen minutes which areas of the city would have the most demand for its’. And it was a company run, not by marketers and startup sales people, but by rocket scientists and a few neuroscientists. The man in charge of operations was Obama’s Chief of Staff, a strategist who would give Frank Underwood a run for his money. And right at the top of the tree was Travis Kalanick, it’s maverick co-founder. Uber is not your average company.

On the surface, Uber is driven by an attractive mission, “Affordable transportation, as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone”. It is a mission that Kalanick suggests will improve peoples’, because he suggests that if 70% of the cars in large cities were Uber drivers, they could manage the flow of the traffic and “give” people up to an hour each day, from time save by being stuck in traffic. That’s a great vision. 

Beneath the surface though, things are not quite as altruistic. 

I once heard an interview with Kalanick where he suggested that Uber was not being run like a democracy. It did not operate like a political party where you might 51-49. No, in order for Uber to “win” they had to win 98-2 and “destroy the competition”. Aggressive words from a bullish startup entrepreneur you might think? Easy to admire a leader like that who spoils for a fight, builds litigation into his business model and actively looks to dominate every industry that he enters, right?

Yes.

But what about the lengths he is willing to go to in order to win?

In the early days of Uber they installed tracking code on your phone when you downloaded their app. Nothing unusual there, since their service relies upon understanding where you are. But what if I told you that if you un-installed the app, the code remained on your phone, continuing to feed your GPS and behavior back to Uber. From that data, they could understand your interests, lifestyle and accurately predict your salary and potential value to them. An invasion of privacy? Possibly. A violation of Apples’ terms of service? Certainly. So what did they do to maintain this cloak of secrecy and deception? One example was ‘GEO fencing’ Apple’s HQ in California and feeding ‘fake code’ to engineers and compliance offers within Apple, fooling officials and avoiding any allegations of foul play. I have several other examples but you get my point. 

For technology to be trusted, especially where our data is concerned, we must understand three things:

1. What data do they have?
2. What are they doing with it?
3. Where (exactly) is that data being stored?

This is why I don’t trust Uber. I admire Uber and I am captivated whenever Kalanick speaks. But in much in the same way that I am fascinated by Bond villains and Donald Trump. I don’t deny that it Uber an outstanding service which successfully sends me a nice car whenever I need one, but in order for me to trust Uber, I must trust the leaders behind it. They must have my interests at heart and be transparent about what they are doing with my data. They must create more value for me than they are willing to capture of themselves because without a solid and transparent value exchange, I will never trust them. And neither will anyone else.