Uber

Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and operates in approximately 70 countries and 15,000 cities worldwide. It is the largest ridesharing company worldwide with over 202 million monthly active users and 10 million active drivers and couriers. It coordinates an average of 42 million trips and delivery orders per day, and has coordinated 72 billion trips and delivery orders since its inception in 2010. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the company had a take rate (revenue as a percentage of gross bookings) of 29.9% for mobility services and 19.2% for food delivery. The company has launched or is in the process of launching robotaxi services in several cities worldwide in partnership with operators, software designers, and car manufacturers including Lucid Motors, Nuro, Baidu, Pony.ai, Avride, Nissan, Rivian, Zoox, Stellantis, Wayve, and Nvidia (to use the Nvidia Drive software).

Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and operates in approximately 70 countries and 15,000 cities worldwide. It is the largest ridesharing company worldwide with over 202 million monthly active users and 10 million active drivers and couriers. It coordinates an average of 42 million trips and delivery orders per day, and has coordinated 72 billion trips and delivery orders since its inception in 2010. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the company had a take rate (revenue as a percentage of gross bookings) of 29.9% for mobility services and 19.2% for food delivery. The company has launched or is in the process of launching robotaxi services in several cities worldwide in partnership with operators, software designers, and car manufacturers including Lucid Motors, Nuro, Baidu, Pony.ai, Avride, Nissan, Rivian, Zoox, Stellantis, Wayve, and Nvidia (to use the Nvidia Drive software). ==Legal and regulatory issues== ===Operating without permission=== While it was expanding, Uber was accused of commencing operations in a city based on a loose interpretation of local regulations or by ignoring them completely and then using lobbying to change regulations. In 2016, Uber was fined $11.4 million for operating in Pennsylvania without permission. ===Legal cases by taxi companies and taxi drivers=== Taxi companies sued Uber in Boston, alleging that Uber acted unlawfully in the years prior to ride-sharing regulations being implemented in the city; courts ruled in favor of Uber. In the U.S., although some courts did find that Uber intentionally violated taxi rules, Uber prevailed in every case, including the only case to proceed to trial. Anoush Cab, Inc. v. Uber Technologies, Inc., No. 19-2001 (1st Cir. 2021) alleged that Uber caused asset devaluation by competing unfairly; the trial resulted in a full verdict for Uber. Flywheel, the largest operator of taxis in San Francisco, sued Uber in 2016, alleging antitrust violations and predatory pricing. In 2021, a federal judge threw out the bulk of the case and Uber settled the remainder of the case by integrating Flywheel taxis into its mobile app. In 2019, 8,000 taxi drivers, represented by law firm Maurice Blackburn, filed a class action lawsuit against Uber in Australia alleging illegal taxi operations, loss of income and loss of value of taxi and/or hire car licenses. Uber agreed to settle the case by paying AU$271.8 million. ===Classification of drivers as gig workers=== ===Accusations of misleading drivers=== Uber has paid to settle accusations of having misled drivers about potential earnings and shortchanging drivers. ===Driver control over fares=== In the United States, drivers do not have any control over the fares they charge. A lawsuit filed in California, Gill et al. v. Uber Technologies, Inc. et al., alleged that this is a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The lawsuit was denied class action status; a judge forced each plaintiff to go to arbitration individually. The case was dropped in March 2024. ===Greyball=== In March 2017, an investigation by The New York Times revealed that Uber developed a software tool called "Greyball" to avoid giving rides to known law enforcement officers in areas where its service was illegal such as in Portland, Oregon, Australia, South Korea, and China, leading to government inquiries. The tool identified government officials using geofencing, mining credit card databases, identifying devices, and searches of social media. While at first, Uber stated that it only used the tool to identify riders that violated its terms of service, after investigations by Portland, Oregon, and the United States Department of Justice, Uber admitted to using the tool to skirt local regulations and promised not to use the tool for that purpose. The use of Greyball in London was cited by Transport for London as one of the reasons for its decision not to renew Uber's private hire operator licence in September 2017. ===Ripley - kill switch=== A January 2018 report by Bloomberg News stated that Uber routinely used a "panic button" system, codenamed "Ripley", that locked, powered off and changed passwords on staff computers when those offices were subjected to government raids. Uber allegedly used this button at least 24 times, from spring 2015 until late 2016. The company claimed the kill switches were not intended to obstruct justice, but rather to protect intellectual property, customer privacy, and due process and that no data was permanently deleted, and was available for authorities to obtain later. ===Counter-intelligence research on class action plaintiffs=== In 2016, Uber hired Ergo, a global security consulting firm, to secretly investigate plaintiffs involved in a class action lawsuit. Ergo operatives posed as acquaintances of the plaintiff's counsel and tried to contact their associates to obtain information. As a result, the judge threw out evidence that was obtained in a fraudulent manner. ===Insufficient accessibility=== According to a lawsuit filed in 2018, not enough Uber drivers own a wheelchair accessible vans (WAV), in violation of accessibility laws. ===Refusal to transport service animal for a blind customer=== In April 2021, an arbitrator ruled against Uber in a case involving Lisa Irving, a blind American customer with a guide dog who was denied rides on 14 separate occasions. Uber was ordered to pay $1.1 million, including $324,000 in damages and more than $800,000 in attorney fees and court costs. While drivers are required to transport service animals, drivers have been criticized for refusal to transport service animals, which, in the United States, is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. ===Illegal concealment of data breaches=== In 2020, the US Department of Justice announced criminal charges against former Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan for obstruction of justice. The criminal complaint said Joe Sullivan arranged with Travis Kalanick's knowledge, to pay a ransom for the 2016 data breach as a "bug bounty" to conceal its true nature, and for the hackers to falsify non-disclosure agreements to say they had not obtained any data. ===Deceptive billing practices=== In April 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Uber, alleging that it enrolled some of its customers in the $9.99 monthly Uber One service without their consent, and used unlawful tactics to make cancellation difficult for consumers. In December 2025, 21 US states and Washington, D.C. joined the FTC in filing an amended complaint seeking civil penalties against Uber for allegedly violating both state laws and the federal Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act. ===Data breaches and related fines=== On February 27, 2015, Uber admitted that it had suffered a data breach more than nine months prior. Names and license plate information from approximately 50,000 drivers were inadvertently disclosed. Uber discovered this leak in September 2014, but waited more than five months to notify the affected individuals. An announcement in November 2017 revealed that in 2016, a separate data breach had disclosed the personal information of 600,000 drivers and 57 million customers. This data included names, email addresses, phone numbers, and drivers' license information. Hackers used employees' usernames and passwords that had been compromised in previous breaches (a "credential stuffing" method) to gain access to a private GitHub repository used by Uber's developers. The hackers located credentials for the company's Amazon Web Services datastore in the repository files, and were able to obtain access to the account records of users and drivers, as well as other data contained in over 100 Amazon S3 buckets. Uber paid a $100,000 ransom to the hackers on the promise they would delete the stolen data. Uber was subsequently criticized for concealing this data breach. Dara Khosrowshahi publicly apologized. In September 2018, in the largest multi-state settlement of a data breach, Uber paid $148 million to the Federal Trade Commission, and admitted that internal access to consumers' personal information was closely monitored on an ongoing basis was false, and stated that it had failed to live up to its promise to provide reasonable security for consumer data. In November 2018, Uber's British divisions were fined £385,000 (reduced to £308,000) by the Information Commissioner's Office. On September 15, 2022, Uber discovered a security breach of its internal network by a hacker that utilized social engineering to obtain an employee's credentials and gain access to the company's VPN and intranet. The company said that no sensitive data had been compromised. ===Deactivation of driver accounts through automated systems=== In August 2026, Uber was fined €825 million by the Dutch Data Protection Authority for deactivating driver accounts through automated systems, while also not informing the users adequately of the deactivation. European Union law forbid companies from making decisions through the sole use of automated systems if they have a big impact on the person's life, requiring human review and the ability to appeal. ===Lobbying=== In 2022, more than 124,000 internal documents covering the five-year period from 2012 to 2017 when Uber was run by Travis Kalanick were leaked by Mark MacGann, a lobbyist who "led Uber's efforts to win over governments across Europe, the Middle East and Africa". The documents were leaked to The Guardian and first printed on 10 July 2022 by its Sunday sister The Observer. The documents revealed attempts to lobby Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz and George Osborne; how Emmanuel Macron secretly aided Uber lobbying in France, and use of a kill switch during police raids to conceal data.

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1378212950 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.