Uber sends private investigator to question former employee suspected of leaking ‘rape’ searches.

The extraordinarily broad reach of Uber across the world and their questionable process for screening and hiring drivers has a lot of people worried about what the next negative PR bomb will be. 

Back in March, we heard allegations of a high number of reports of rape and sexual assault in Uber’s customer service database, with the company quickly rebutted the numbers and attempted to explain why screenshots of searches appeared to show numbers that were not grounded in real complaint cases. 

Uber said the word "Rape" had been the product of misspelling the word "Rate", although they gave no alternative misspelling from the words "Sexual Assault".

The story now takes on an added level of weirdness as reports that one former customer service employee based in Portland received an at-home visit from an “investigator from California” working on behalf of Uber, who allegedly came to her apartment to question and intimidate her and (the woman claims) entered her apartment illegally, even though she told him he was not welcome. 

Morgan Richardson, who used to work for Uber in Portland, says she had already been contacted by Uber’s legal security and law enforcement director just before the original article appeared, on March 4. 

He questioned her about leaking screenshots of rape and sexual assault searches in the company’s Zendesk customer support software, and proceeded to contact her again after the article published on March 6. 

She was informed of the leaked screenshots, from March 3, with Uber demanding she hand over any information she had and disclose to whom she had given it. 

Uber is taking the stance that Richardson, or possibly another employee or employees, were leaking private information about customers (even though the screenshots had all names redacted), saying they are “unsurprisingly concerned that sensitive, personal and confidential data has been shared with people outside Uber.” 

The official Uber statement adds, “We believe that any company in a similar situation would do exactly the same.” 

But would any company really send private investigators around to knock on former employees’ doors at 7:30 a. m. and say things like, “Do I scare you?” and “This is not going to go away you know”?

 

That’s what Richardson is alleging, via an attorney, in a cease and desist letter dated March 29. 

Further, she says, the visit from the strange man on March 25 included him knocking on her door loudly for five minutes, pressing his ear to her door, and looking inside her mailbox before she ultimately opened the door. 

Also she claims the man illegally trespassed in her apartment after she’d already refused to let him in. She says he stepped into her apartment while she was going to look for a pen. A local San Francisco news outlet asked Uber about how many current or former employees they might be similarly investigating, but Uber would not answer that on the record. 

All that the company would say is that the investigator who visited Ms. Richardson is “a seasoned, older gentleman in his 70's and at no time did he enter her home, attempt to intimidate her or even notice a mailbox.” They also say, “The investigator knocked once and the conversation lasted two minutes.” 

So let's just take stock for a moment. An aged security employee in his 70's allegedly travels/drives from California to Portland, Oregon, to have a two minute conversation with a former Uber employee!!! 

This of course is his version of the story versus hers. Uber say the investigation is ongoing, and clarify that Ms. Richardson was only a contract employee. 

“We strongly believe that we have an obligation to look into situations like this, where sensitive information is shared and we always do. Any customer service contractor who shared this type of information publicly violated multiple policies both with Uber and the third party employing them.” the company says. 

Original screenshots show 5,827 support results showing the keyword “rape” between December 2012 and August 2015.” 

Also, there appeared to be 6,160 results for “sexual assault” and 382 results for “sexually assaulted".

This of course follows on from 2014 reports of Uber exec Emil Michael claiming to have spent $1 million on “opposition researchers” to dig up dirt on and discredit a journalist who was similarly making claims regarding sexual assault risks and Uber drivers. 

Th Uber Executive bragged about an idea to spend $1 Million, to investigate certain journalists’ private lives.

Source : SFist

from Taxi Leaks http://ift.tt/1SxXR6s
via IFTTT