Posted by Hongkun Ma.
On Nov. 22nd, the ride-hailing app company Uber Technologies Inc. paid hackers $100,000 to conceal an incident that Uber revealed 57 million users’ personal information like names, phone numbers and addresses around the world. 600,000 Uber drivers’ license numbers also were released.
Whether the incident violated state law is being investigated by five state attorneys general: New York, Washington, Missouri, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Forty-eight states have laws that customers have right to know a company’s data breach and will impose fines if company violates them. For Uber, the incident has been so complicated, which lost the trust of millions of customers.
The incident reflected how a data breach can trigger responses from mass of regulators and enforcement agencies, and how a private company can have flexibility to deal with this kind of things. International regulators investigated the incident right away and data protection officers from throughout the European Union announced a task-force to look into the incident. Experts indicated that Uber had more flexibility in the way it report the incident, which can be reported as a security incident, because Uber is a private company. Uber is facing crisis of confidence and it’s difficult to win back the trust of their huge numbers of customers.
Finally, I would like to give some of my opinions. Uber is a private company, which is a third party between customers and taxi drivers. In China, Uber Company is almost monopoly. When it came into China market at the very beginning, most customers were attracted by its low price, which sometimes were even free to take a taxi. Uber gained a huge customer base from the beginning. Later, customers found Uber was not as cheap as before. It became more and more expensive, sometimes was more expensive than regular taxi. The strategy actually made the company lose some of their customers, but most customers stayed. And many customers found that Uber keeps ride details in their system for so long. Some of customers received messages that contained their personal information like history location, ride history or even private residences. From my perspective, it is possible that Uber sold customers’ personal information to third-party companies which would look for visits to key locations, such as particular market, meet-up events, café and so on.
The incident of Uber Company that they concealed the cybersecurity problem really violated law from state level, and not federal. For Uber, the challenge quickly became more complicated and needed to be handled.A company’s reputation can be easily built up and destroyed. And how to win back the trust of customers is becoming a really hard task for Uber Company.
Hongkun is an accounting major at the Stillman School of Business, Seton Hall University, Class of 2019.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-likely-to-face-a-barrage-of-state-legal-action-after-breach-1512131094
Posted by Mohammed Almanqari.
Uber Company is always thought of being sued now and then for one or two issues. Apparently, the company has sued an advertising company called Fetch Media. Uber has taken to court Fetch Media accusing it of click fraud. The company had improperly billed Uber for online advertisements, which were not genuine. Fetch Media took advantage of the same and benefited from application downloads that did not belong to it. Fetch Media is owned by Dentsu, one of the largest advertising company in Japan. The case was filed by Uber on 19th September 2017 in the US District Court in San Francisco.
After placing the charges, Uber said that it expected not less than forty million dollars as compensation for the damages caused by Fetch Media. However Uber is not fond of taking to court most of the issues it faces; in fact, according to report prepared by Bloomberg, Uber has been a plaintiff twice but has been accused in more than 250 cases. Ever since the internet became a money-making platform, fraud related to online advertising has been on the rise. “One of the biggest challenges we face as digital marketers is to reduce mobile ad fraud.” This was according to the chief executive of Fetch Media, James Connelly. According to the head of media at Fetch Company, Steve Hobbs, a big percentage of downloads from Fetch`s system are noted as invalid or not genuine.
Uber became aware of this fraud during a period when it was putting efforts to shut down and avoid a scandal that was different. Uber Company then requested Fetch Media not to post any advertisements on a certain website called Breitbart news which was being run by the former chief strategist of President Donald Trump. However, ads stills appeared on that site. Fetch canceled the running of ads from any network that was related to Breitbart but this did not reduce the number of application downloads. There is a specific fee paid to Fetch by Uber when a customer downloads the company`s application. From the years 2015 to 2017, Uber had paid close to $8.4m for ads regulated by Fetch Company.
Mohammed is a graduate student at the Feliciano School of Business, Montclair State University.
Reference:
http://www.fin24.com/Tech/Companies/uber-goes-on-rare-legal-offensive-suing-ad-agency-for-fraud-20170919