What were the consequences when Uber management was caught behaving badly in the past?
In November 2014, Uber’s senior vice president Emil Michael suggested Uber hire a team of opposition researchers—equipped with a million-dollar budget—to dig into the personal lives of journalists who reported negatively about the company in order to dox, target and harass them and their families. One of his main targets was Pando founder and editor-in-chief Sarah Lacey, who had reported on the company’s sexist and misogynistic ways. Further proving her point, Mr. Michael said he thought Ms. Lacy should be held “personally responsible” if passengers who head Ms. Lacey’s advice and stop using Uber are sexually assaults by taxi drivers. Mr. Kalanick apologized on behalf of the company, but Mr. Michael didn’t lose his position.
Well, there's your answer.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicole-campbell/what-was-said-...
Since when is discussing a philosophical hypothetical "behaving badly"?
And again, the actual hypothetical is worth answering. Suppose Emil did, in fact, drop $1M on hiring journalists to do journalism to other journalists. Why is it "behaving badly" if Uber does journalism, but not if Techcrunch or Gawker does?
There is no journalism in Silicon Valley. Everything is PR. As Doerr said "No conflict, no interest."
How is that somehow worse than Gawker hiring people to do that to Uber?
If you think that maliciously doxing people is perfectly fine as long as the dox are true facts, then you are a being a troll. If I have misunderstood your point, then I apologise and would appreciate clarification.
Specifically, the idea was to write articles like these, but with Sarah Lacy (founder of Pando) as the subject:
https://pando.com/2014/02/27/we-call-that-boob-er-the-four-m...
https://pando.com/2014/10/06/venture-capital-and-the-great-b...
So yes, my concrete question is why it's wrong to write the 4 most awful true things about Sarah Lacy, but it's perfectly fine to write the 4 most awful true facts about Travis Kalanick?
The first article there is taking a public PR interview that someone chose to give and copy pasting it. He should be thanking Pando for it, they are simply repeating quotes he intentionally gave to the public with a little bit of editorializing.
The second one is downright nasty I agree, except for the entire section on Uber which is totally fine. Just quotes that Kalanick gave to the news media and the public willingly speaking as CEO of his company (NOT dredged out of his personal life) and 'information' about their business practices and NOT about the personal, private life of anyone. It also outlines illegal business practices, a culture of disregard for customer safety, disrespect for drivers, etc. Something Uber customers (and shareholders) have a right to know about but that Uber certainly won't tell them.
Quoting leaked personal emails is nasty. There's a line between private and public and exposing someone's private life because you don't like what they're doing in their public life is what's so disgusting and beyond the pale. Pando certainly does exactly that (they did it to Evan Spiegel in the article you linked), you could even say their entire business model is based on being scummy but that doesn't mean it's alright for Uber to. In fact it's much worse for Uber to. I don't trust Pando with personal information about my comings and goings (or trust them at all, with anything) or let them install an app on my phone with permissions. Pando doesn't forcibly alter the laws in every governmental jurisdiction it touches to favor their business. It's a huge difference of scale.
I don't understand - you wrote the word "no" in front a sentence in complete agreement with me.
If I understand your argument, it's wrong for Uber to investigate and report true facts because you give them personal information (which presumably would not be used in this reporting) and because Uber speaks to the public and lobbies the government for redress of grievances? Could you explain why these activities somehow make investigating and reporting true facts somehow wrong?
(Your use of the term "forcibly alter" is, I assume, hyperbole. As far as I'm aware Uber has never used force against anyone, although it is often the victim of others who use force.)
What other activities causes one to lose one's (moral, if not legal) right to investigate and report true facts? If Sarah Lacy (for example) had an abortion, refused to allow soldiers to quarter in her house or refused to incriminate herself, would she then lose her (moral or ethical) right to investigate and report?
I don't agree with you that "Pando did it" is a good excuse for someone else to do it too.
I do think that Uber is trying to position itself as a respectable company (they are asking people to trust them quite a bit, getting into their cars, giving them their data), not a hive of scum and villainy like Pando is, and they don't deserve to be considered a respectable company if they engage in the same despicable behavior Pando does.
You lose the moral high ground when you do disgusting things to other people. It doesn't matter if they do it too. You keep saying "reporting true facts" but this is not what's immoral, of course. It's immoral to make someone's private life public in retaliation for their public activity (I claim, and I think you'd agree or at least concede the point for the sake of this argument).
Forcibly alter was part hyperbole but also part not. Dumping huge amounts of lobbying money into small governments in order to change the laws to suit your business is political/economic force. Violence is not the only kind of 'forcing' that can be done. Hostile takeovers are not violent, but they are certainly forcible.
The article highlighted four direct quotes from Kalanick's interview with GQ magazine, not "the 4 most awful true facts about Travis Kalanick."
Do you understand the difference between digging up and exposing embarrassing personal details about a person and his or her family, and quoting what a person said in a magazine interview?
These are things that notable journalistic establishments do on a regular basis. I'm asking the same question that Emil Michael asked: why is it wrong to do the same thing to journalists?
But if that's his mindset, "Other people have done bad things, so why shouldn't I?", that's not great. That leads to a culture of decaying ethics, lowest-common-denominator behavioral norms, backstabbing and retribution, etc. And the stories we've heard about life at Uber become much more plausible.
But I don't think that Ben Smith (editor at Gawker, and the person Emil Michael was arguing with) could make the same objection without being a transparent hypocrite.
Someone here once asked me how I differentiated between a corporation run by people and a corporation structured as an institution. In the latter there are processes put in place that bind the people in the corporation to specific rules and constraints, and the consequences of not following the rules is well defined and not up to interpretation.
An example of that would be a sexual harassment protocol that would be activated by making a claim to the protocol director. That position would typically report to the general counsel or the CEO. That director would have 30 days from the time of the report to capture statements from all of the named parties, copies of all company email from all named parties, and any chat session transcripts. The protocol director would then have another 30 days to seek out any corroborating information from people likely to be affected and then would provide the CEO (or General Counsel) with a report on whether or not harassment was deemed to occur. If it had, they would be required to remove from management responsibility the perpetrator on a first offense, and to separate from the company on a second offense. There would be no consideration for their "performance" against their goals.
Its all very mechanical, there isn't a lot of leeway for misinterpretation and the punishment is fixed without recourse. Of course there are similar punishments doled out to protocol enforcers should they attempt to mitigate the protocol.
Institutions are interlocking processes and regulations which insure the proper functioning and survival of the institution in the face of imperfect people being in charge of executing the institution's mission.
Corporations of people run on loyalty, friendship, and leverage. In such a corporation, justice is only found the exercise of friendship or leverage. And greater friendship or greater leverage can steer the result regardless of its merits.