44 Facts About Uber

Uber Technologies, Inc is an American mobility as a service provider, allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi.

Uber has posted hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in losses each year since 2014 except for 2018, when it exited from the markets in Russia, China, and Southeast Asia in exchange for stakes in rival businesses.

Uber has been criticized for various unethical practices—many revealed by a massive document leak in July 2022—and for ignoring local regulations.

Uber is regulated in many jurisdictions and the company has been banned in several countries.

Uber realized that sharing the cost with people could make it affordable, and his idea morphed into Uber.

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In February 2010, Ryan Graves became the first Uber employee, receiving the job by responding to a post on Twitter.

Uber had started operations in China in 2014, under the name ??.

In December 2016, Uber acquired the AI research startup Geometric Intelligence for an undisclosed amount.

In July 2017, Uber received a five-star privacy rating from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but was harshly criticised by the group in September 2017 for a controversial policy of tracking customers' locations even after a ride ended, forcing the company to reverse its policy.

In February 2018, Uber combined its operations in Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan with those of Yandex.

In March 2018, Uber merged its services in Southeast Asia with those of Grab in exchange for a 27.

On May 10, 2019, Uber became a public company via an initial public offering.

In early September 2019, Uber laid off an additional 435 employees with 265 coming from the engineering team and another 170 from the product team.

In 2020, Uber announced plans to become an emission free platform.

Uber introduced Uber Green, promoting users to choose electric and hybrid vehicles.

In June 2020, Uber announced that it would manage the on-demand high-occupancy vehicle fleet for Marin Transit, a public bus agency in Marin County, California.

On January 20, 2022, Uber acquired Australian car-sharing company Car Next Door.

In May 2022, Uber formed a partnership with IT Taxi, Italy's largest taxi dispatcher.

On September 19th, 2022, Uber announced that its fleet of vehicles in developed countries and regions such as Europe, Japan, South Korea, United States, Canada, etc.

On September 15, 2022, Uber discovered a security breach of its internal network.

Additionally, Uber uses services of HackerOne, a Californian bug bounty platform that employs ethical hackers to help identify bugs and protect the systems of many big companies.

Uber restarted testing in December 2018 after receiving local approval in Pittsburgh and Toronto.

In 2016, Uber acquired Ottomotto, a self-driving truck company, for $625 million.

In February 2018, to settle a lawsuit regarding the stolen trade secrets, Uber gave Waymo $244 million in stock and agreed not to infringe on Waymo's intellectual property.

In June 2022, Uber struck a deal with Waymo to use the latter's technology for autonomous trucks in Uber's Freight service.

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In October 2019, in partnership with HeliFlight, Uber offered 8-minute helicopter flights between Manhattan and John F Kennedy International Airport for $200-$225 per passenger.

In December 2020, Uber sold its Elevate division, which was developing short flights using VTOL aircraft, to Joby Aviation.

Uber Rent, powered by Getaround, was a peer-to-peer carsharing service available to some users in San Francisco between May 2018 and November 2018.

In October 2019, Uber launched Uber Works to connect workers who wanted temporary jobs with businesses.

In December 2016, Uber launched Uber AI, a division for researching AI technologies and machine learning.

Uber AI created multiple open source projects, such as Pyro, Ludwig, and Plato.

Uber AI developed new AI techniques and algorithms, such as the POET algorithm and their sequence of papers on neuroevolution.

Uber AI was shut down in May 2020 in order to refocus on Uber's core operations in an effort to recover financial losses dealt by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Uber has been criticized for its strategy of generally commencing operations in a city without regard for local regulations.

Uber argued that it is "a technology company" and not a taxi company, and therefore it was not subject to regulations affecting taxi companies.

Uber's strategy was generally to "seek forgiveness rather than permission".

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.

Uber allegedly used this button at least 24 times, from spring 2015 until late 2016.

In 2016 Uber hired the global security consulting firm Ergo to secretly investigate plaintiffs involved in a class action lawsuit.

On February 27, 2015, Uber admitted that it had suffered a data breach more than nine months prior.

Uber discovered this leak in September 2014, but waited more than five months to notify the affected individuals.

Uber paid a $100, 000 ransom to the hackers on the promise they would delete the stolen data.

In September 2018, in the largest multi-state settlement of a data breach, Uber paid $148 million to the Federal Trade Commission, admitted that its claim 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.

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.