The story that broke earlier in the week about an Uber executive threatening to investigate critical journalists’ private lives rumbles on, with the company providing a couple of official responses yesterday.
First, chief executive Travis Kalanick went on a tweetstorm with 13 tweets addressing the issue, although while it concluded with a direct apology to Sarah Lacy, the journalist targeted in the original comments, as Valleywag points out, there were several questions he didn’t answer.
As time has gone by, journalists have been focusing on another aspect of the original BuzzFeed report that kicked off this debate – the claim that an Uber exec had “accessed the profile of a BuzzFeed News reporter, Johana Bhuiyan, to make points in the course of a discussion of Uber policies” without their permission.
Uber has now published a blog post which it says aims to “make very clear our policy on data privacy, which is fundamental to our commitment to both riders and drivers”. It refers to a “strict policy prohibiting all employees at every level from accessing a rider or driver’s data” except for “legitimate business purposes”.
Technology journalists are, unsurprisingly, questioning whether Uber’s radar for what constitutes “legitimate business” has been malfunctioning for some time. But how are you feeling about Uber and other companies of its type, in regards to privacy?
Do you worry about the way your data fits into the “sharing economy”, or do the benefits of services like Uber and Airbnb trump any concerns that your records will be used against you in the future? Is this a specific issue between journalists and Uber, or is this controversy going to put non-hacks off using the company too?
The comments section is open for your thoughts.
What else is worth discussing in tech today? Some links:
Apple launched its SDK for developers wanting to make apps for its first smartwatch, and The Verge has been filleting its documentation to learn more about the Apple Watch. For example, it’ll be closely tied to the iPhone; there’ll be two resolutions for the devices; seemingly no support for video; and a brand new font called San Francisco.
The Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd frontman had a severe free-to-play habit. “I wasted – you’re the first to know this – 10,000 fucking pounds in the last two years on apps on my iPad,” he told the Telegraph. “I got into Game of Thrones, Game of War, Real Racing, and I just wanted to up the ante. And like an idiot I didn’t check myself...”
Twitter announced that it has now indexed every public tweet since 2006, using a search service that “efficiently indexes roughly half a trillion documents and serves queries with an average latency of under 100ms”. The blog post goes into lots of engineering detail, but it’ll be interesting to see what people do with the archive now.
Hardcore gamers and free-to-play games are often pitched in opposition to one another, yet one of the most hardcore genres – multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games like League of Legends and Dota 2 – are freemium. Now developer Super Evil Megacorp is trying to make the genre work on iOS with its Vainglory game: shown off at Apple’s last iPhone launch, and now available.
I’ve been finding out that teaching another human being – my seven year-old son – to tie shoelaces is a harder task than I thought. Maybe by the time he’s an adult, shoelaces will tie themselves though. Witness this Kickstarter campaign that’s trying to raise $650k for “the very first auto-lacing shoe technology”. Do they do children’s sizes?
One of the most interesting companies around at the moment is littleBits, with its electronics kits. The latest is the Smart Home Kit, which costs $249 and promises to “turn any household object into an internet-connected device: instead of buying a bajillion different smart products, you can reinvent the things you already have.”
What else? The comments section is open for your own links, thoughts on the stories above, and (especially) for your advice on tempting surly seven year-olds away from velcro.
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