Yesterday, the news reported that there was a massive data breach within Uber. The breach affected more than 57 million Americans. And now, the story is getting worse.
The ridesharing super giant learned of the breach back in 2016. Rather than reporting the findings to the public, Uber paid hackers $100,000 to delete the data. Then, they asked for the hackers’ silence.
In his CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s statement:
While I can’t erase the past, I can commit on behalf of every Uber employee that we will learn from our mistakes. We are changing the way we do business, putting integrity at the core of every decision we make and working hard to earn the trust of our customers.
When Khosrowshahi was first appointed to his position, he said:
Winning gave some excuses for bad behavior. Don’t tell me what happened; just tell me what we’re going to do.
Looks like Dara is following through on his word. Chief security officer Joe Sullivan and one of his deputies were fired over the breach.
In recent years, Uber has been embroiled in controversy. It initially started when sexual harassment allegations surfaced in a former employee’s blog post.
From one excerpt of the blog post, Susan Fowler details the toxic work environment:
In the background, there was a game-of-thrones political war raging within the ranks of upper management in the infrastructure engineering organization. It seemed like every manager was fighting their peers and attempting to undermine their direct supervisor so that they could have their direct supervisor’s job. No attempts were made by these managers to hide what they were doing: they boasted about it in meetings, told their direct reports about it, and the like.
This is just one of several controversies that forced Travis Kalanick to resign. If you’d like the full list, check it out here. Hopefully, the company is able to turn itself around.
On a better note, Uber’s flying car service is slated to start testing in 2020.