For years, Uber's been using a proprietary technology around the world to “identify and circumvent” law enforcement officials who were tracking the ride-hail giant, according to a New York Times story published Friday. When asked for comment on the technology, dubbed “Greyball,” Uber said, “This program denies ride requests to users who are violating our terms of service — whether that’s people aiming to physically harm drivers, competitors looking to disrupt our operations, or opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers.”

If Uber&039;s research indicated an app user was a city official, the Times reports, the backend of the app would tag that user “greyball.” Greyballed users would see a fake version of the app with animated cars that did not correspond to the real locations of drivers, and rides requested by those users were usually cancelled. The company&039;s legal team approved the program as part of its terms of service, according to the Times.

This may or may not mire the company in legal trouble, the Times reports. Greyball could be a violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or intentional obstruction of justice, depending on how the program interacted with local law enforcement.

According to the Times, Uber deployed Greyball in Boston, Paris, and Las Vegas, among other cities, and across Australia, China, Italy, and South Korea, most often when it first introduced its service to cities. Often when Uber first came to new markets, there were little or no regulations for the ride-hail service. The company does not require drivers to be commercially licensed. So as local officials tried to gather details on Uber or collude with taxi drivers on stings, the company would greyball them, the Times reports.

The company said it rarely used Greyball to evade law enforcement. The technology&039;s primary use, according to a spokesperson, was to circumvent competitors and to keep Uber drivers safe in places where they had faced intimidation and physical violence.

On the same day as the Times story broke, Uber&039;s vice president of product and growth Ed Baker resigned, telling employees he wanted to focus on the public sector. According to Recode, his departure may have ties to a complaint that Baker had a sexual relationship with another Uber employee. He&039;s the second senior executive to leave the company in a week after CEO Travis Kalanick asked Amit Singhal, vice president of engineering, to resign after it came to light that he had been investigated for sexual harassment at his previous employer, Google, according to Recode.

Times published yet another story on Friday detailing more internal Uber drama: The company is considering revamping its stock options program after complaints by employees. Uber is a privately held company that partially compensates employees via stock that they can purchase at discounted rates; however, it only allows 30 days for employees who quit to buy said stock before they forfeit the right. Many other tech companies give months or even years, according to the Times. By contrast, Uber employees who have bought the private stock have been saddled with high fees as the company&039;s valuation has risen to $70 billion, forcing them to choose between staying at the company to preserve those options or leave and abandon a potential windfall.

Uber has had a rough time the past few weeks:

In response to a blog post on February 19 by former Uber employee Susan Fowler that detailed blistering accusations of sexism at the company, women working at Uber met with Travis Kalanick and told him that the problem was company-wide. Following the revelations of sexism came an embarrassing video, published Tuesday by Bloomberg, of CEO Travis Kalanick arguing with a driver over pay. Kalanick said he&039;d seek “leadership help.“

In addition to the internal shuffle, Alphabet&039;s self-driving car company Waymo filed suit against Uber last week, alleging that Uber&039;s Anthony Lewandoski, an engineer who once worked at Google, stole Waymo&039;s technology and shared it with Uber.

In January, #DeleteUber began trending in response to the perception that the company was strikebreaking in New York City, leading roughly 200,000 people to erase the app from their phones. The campaign preceded and seemed to play a role in Kalanick quitting his much-contested spot on President Trump&039;s advisory council.

In response to a request for comment, Uber said it used Greyball in places where its service was not explicitly banned and it believed it had a right to operate.

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Quelle: <a href="Uber&039;s &039;Greyball&039; Technology Helped It Sidestep Law Enforcement Around The World“>BuzzFeed

1. März 20171. März 2017

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Video Shows Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Arguing With Driver Over Fares

Shu Zhang / Reuters

Uber’s public relations crisis continues apace with no apparent end in sight.

On Tuesday afternoon, Bloomberg published a video in which CEO Travis Kalanick aggressively argues with an Uber driver who claimed he is earning less money after Uber cut fares. “Some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit,” Kalanick exclaims, after his driver says he lost $97,000 because of Uber. “They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!”

youtube.com

The publication of the dash-cam shot video is the latest in a parade of PR disasters for Uber. In January, Kalanick’s decision to sit on President Trump’s economic advisory group inspired a viral #DeleteUber campaign in which the company saw about 200,000 users delete their accounts, according to the New York Times. Kalanick subsequently resigned from the council.

Then, in early February, a former Uber engineer penned a viral account of her experience at the company with detailed allegations of systemic sexism. In response, Uber launched an internal investigation into the accusations, led by former attorney general Eric Holder and Arianna Huffington, who sits on Uber’s board. A visibly emotional Kalanick apologized to his staff at an all-hands meeting and promised to “do better.”

Two days later, during a meeting with more than 100 women engineers, Kalanick was grilled about issues of sexism at Uber, according to an audio recording obtained by BuzzFeed News. “I want to root out the injustice,” he told those in attendance. “I want to get at the people who are making this place a bad place. And you have my commitment.”

Uber’s tensions with its drivers are well-documented. The company continues to grapple with lawsuits over the classification of drivers as independent contractors. Just last month, Uber paid the Federal Trade Commission $20 million to settle allegations that it advertised inflated estimates of how much its drivers earn on its website and in Craigslist job postings.

Kalanick’s video interaction with his Uber driver is in many ways a snapshot of those tensions — and one that Uber clearly did not expect to become public. Uber declined to comment on the video.

Uber says on its website that drivers are permitted by the company to record riders “for purposes of safety,” but notes that “local regulations may require individuals using recording equipment in vehicles to fully disclose to riders that they are being recorded in or around a vehicle and obtain consent.”

In California, a state with a two-party consent rule for recording confidential conversations, could the driver be in legal trouble?

“It was a risky move to publicize this video,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s unclear if the conversation between the Uber driver and the CEO would qualify as a confidential communication.”

Goldman said whether the conversation would qualify as confidential would depend on several factors, such as whether the dashcam was prominently visible, and whether for-hire vehicles could count as public spaces. Regardless of those questions, he said, lawsuits of this variety are uncommon and the optics around Uber suing one of its own drivers lower the odds of a lawsuit.

Said Goldman, “Uber’s CEO has much bigger problems in his life right now.”

Quelle: <a href="Video Shows Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Arguing With Driver Over Fares“>BuzzFeed

20. Februar 201720. Februar 2017

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Uber CEO Opens "Urgent Investigation" Into Workplace Sexism Described By Former Employee

Eric Risberg / AP

On her first day at Uber after training, site reliability engineer Susan Fowler Rigetti said her new manager told her about his open marriage and tried to get her to have sex with him.

It was the first instance of what she described as “one very, very strange year at Uber” in a blog post on Sunday. Now an engineer with payment startup Stripe, Fowler reflected on what she described as a pattern of sexism as well as organizational chaos that prompted her and other women to leave.

“On my last day at Uber, I calculated the percentage of women who were still in the org,” she wrote. “Out of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3% were women.” She said when she joined this Uber team the number had been over 25%.

As the blog post prompted some people on Twitter to revive #deleteuber, CEO Travis Kalanick said in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News that he had not known about the incidents that Fowler described — although Fowler says she spoke to upper management about it. He also said he had called for an urgent investigation.

“What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in. It's the first time this has come to my attention so I have instructed Liane Hornsey our new Chief Human Resources Officer to conduct an urgent investigation into these allegations. We seek to make Uber a just workplace FOR EVERYONE and there can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber — and anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired.”

Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, a member of Uber&039;s board, tweeted on Sunday that she would be working with the HR team on the investigation. Kalanick said she had his “full support.”

Initially, Fowler wrote that she believed obviously inappropriate behavior would be handled by HR if she reported it. Instead, she said she was told her manager was a “high performer” with no previous infractions; she said she was told to move to another team or face a poor performance review.

“Over the next few months, I began to meet more women engineers in the company. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company.”

She also wrote about a culture of management chaos, where managers fought with peers and undermined their supervisors. When she sought a transfer, she was told she had “performance problems” — which had never been documented in her reviews until a score was quietly changed after the fact.

As women around her left the company, Fowler said she kept reporting sexism, documented with emails, to HR. Her manager then told her she could lose her job if she kept making reports to HR, she said — something that is illegal under employment law. She left the company shortly after.

“When I look back at the time I spent at Uber, I&039;m overcome with thankfulness that I had the opportunity to work with some of the best engineers around. I&039;m proud of the work I did, I&039;m proud of the impact that I was able to make on the entire organization, and I&039;m proud that the work I did and wrote a book about has been adopted by other tech companies all over the world. And when I think about the things I&039;ve recounted in the paragraphs above, I feel a lot of sadness, but I can&039;t help but laugh at how ridiculous everything was.”

Quelle: <a href="Uber CEO Opens "Urgent Investigation" Into Workplace Sexism Described By Former Employee“>BuzzFeed

15. Februar 201715. Februar 2017

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Read The IBM CEO’s Letter On Why She Won’t Stop Advising Trump

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

The head of IBM, who also advises the president on business matters, sent a company wide memo Thursday defending her collaboration with the Trump Administration, as tech executives from Travis Kalanick to Elon Musk face intensifying pressure to challenge the White House on immigration and other issues.

“Some have suggested that we should not engage with the U.S. administration. I disagree,” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty told employees last week, in a letter obtained by BuzzFeed News. “Our experience has taught us that engagement – reaching out, listening and having authentic dialogue – is the best path to good outcomes.”

IBM declined to comment but did confirm the authenticity of the memo.

Rometty, like SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk, serves as a business advisor to the president on his Strategic and Policy Forum. The group first met with Trump earlier this month, when they discussed jobs, cybersecurity, and the president's recent immigration order that barred refugees and people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.

At the White House meeting, Rometty said in the letter that she discussed “ways that advanced technology could address national security imperatives while also permitting lawful immigration and travel.” She added: “I explained that this is not an either/or choice. Our points were heard, and we will continue to engage to find solutions that align with our values.”

Rometty described her meeting with the president as part of a long history of non-partisan, public engagement at the company. “IBM leaders have been engaging directly with every U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson, and this was my ninth such meeting since becoming CEO,” she said.

Her stance contrasts with that of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who was slated to attend that White House meeting but backed out just a day before after mounting criticism and a viral #DeleteUber campaign. In a letter to his employees, Kalanick announced that he would no longer be a part of the economic council. “Joining the group was not meant to be an endorsement of the President or his agenda but unfortunately it has been misinterpreted to be exactly that,” he said. Musk, on the other hand, said he would stay on as an advisor to the president for “the greater good.”

And while Uber, SpaceX, and Tesla were among the more than 130 tech companies that joined a friend-of-the-court brief opposing Trump&039;s immigration order, IBM was not a signatory.

In December a spokesperson for the company told BuzzFeed News that IBM would no help build or provide data for a Muslim registry, an idea Trump proposed during the presidential campaign. “No, IBM would not work on this hypothetical project. Our company has long-standing values and a strong track record of opposing discrimination against anyone on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. That perspective has not changed, and never will.”

Quelle: <a href="Read The IBM CEO’s Letter On Why She Won’t Stop Advising Trump“>BuzzFeed

10. Februar 201710. Februar 2017

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The Viral Anti-Trump Movement Is Here — And It's A Huge Target

In the 20 days since the inauguration, public acts of opposition to the Trump administration and its supporters have started to go viral. An online consumer movement — DeleteUber — spread so wildly that it may have played a role in Uber’s decision to drop out of the President’s business advisory council. A video of a masked man punching white separatist leader Richard Spencer was transmogrified into thousands of memes. And most significantly, a series of protests, some violent, have been broadcast via smartphone to the social feeds of a rapt nation.

Together, these acts have been taken by media across the political spectrum as the first stirrings of a new kind of mass resistance that leverages the scale and speed of the social internet. Writing in the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo made the case that these events constitute unignorable counterprogramming to a President who has an estranged relationship with the truth:

“…there are crowds on every screen and every feed. The people aren’t saying nice things about [Trump]. And there’s something worse than that, too: They’ve stolen the limelight for themselves.”

It’s a powerful vision: Dissenting citizens empowered by the internet, forcing the nation’s attention on themselves, demanding to be heard. But while moments like these might hearten the opposition to Donald Trump in the short term, they also provide an enormous and permanent target for an equally sophisticated internet movement that supports the American president and is well equipped to use the viral tools of the opposition against individuals.

“One of the great strengths of social networks like Twitter is that they allow communities to be visible that have been invisible,” said Aimée Morrison, a professor of New Media studies at the University of Waterloo. “There’s a winning and losing that comes from greater visibility. There is political power… As a group that’s great, but individual people can become very vulnerable.”

In 2017, the limelight is a strange and lingering thing. Almost as soon as they happen, viral political moments pass through the prisms of unprecedentedly partisan filter bubbles, into the obsessive digital netherworlds of internet investigation and conspiratorial media, where they're used and re-used in contexts often dramatically different from the ones from which they came. And, crucially, they leave residue — images, words, video — along the way. The video of, for example, Spencer&039;s assault, now exists in numerous forms and lives in thousands or tens of thousands of different places online. Like any meme, it is everywhere. And now, the anti-anti-Trump internet is rabidly searching for the identity of the masked man who punched Spencer, the subject of a $5000 “bounty” on the right-wing crowd-sourced investigations site WeSearchr.

Last week, another right-wing news site, GotNews, obtained and published the names, ages and hometowns of 231 people arrested during Inauguration Day protests in Washington, DC. Other fringe right-wing news sites followed. And almost immediately, a network of Twitter accounts and white nationalist forums began poring over the information and linking the names to social media accounts, and in some cases outing the arrestees.

A Virginia man who was arrested at the inauguration and who asked not to be identified told BuzzFeed News that his name and information were posted to Twitter by the white nationalist writer Andrew Joyce. Though Joyce’s account was suspended, the man said someone posted a screenshot of the Tweet to Facebook page of a business he runs out of his home, along with a warning not to patronize it.

“I was afraid to go outside that night,” he said. “I went to smoke a cigarette and I thought, what if someone comes and shoots me?” The man said he has since taken down the Facebook page.

“I was afraid to go outside that night. I went to smoke a cigarette and I thought, what if someone comes and shoots me?”

Charles Johnson, the owner of GotNews and founder of WeSearchr, told BuzzFeed News that the public had a right to know the names of the protestors.

“It&039;s journalism bro,” he wrote in an email. “These are criminals and the public deserves to know who they are. In my opinion it&039;s racist that the mug shots aren&039;t being released. We always get the mug shots of black criminals. Why not hipster rioters from Brooklyn? We have several cash bounties against the antifa and are actively working with federal and local law enforcement to see them brought to justice. It won&039;t be long now.”

The anti-anti-Trump internet hardly limits its efforts to black bloc anti-fascists and overzealous protesters. Last month, immigration activists warned that trolls were monitoring and promoting the popular #undocumentedandunafraid Twitter hashtag in an effort to catalogue and report undocumented workers.

Acts of political resistance spread on social media, followed by personal retribution: This is a familiar pattern. In 2011, journalists, politicians, and technologists hailed the role that social networks played in toppling a succession of dictators in the Middle East. In the years that followed, the same people watched in despair as revanchist authoritarians scoured the very same social networks to target the activists and organizers who had used them, they thought, to gain their political freedom. The great technological lesson of the Arab Spring was that social platforms are not inherently democratic; rather, they can just as easily oppress people as express their will.

To be sure, the next anti-administration activist the pro-Trump, alt-right internet manages to get thrown in jail will be the first. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the anti-anti-Trump internet as simply conspiracy mongers or attention-seeking opportunists. While the alt-right may not be able to turn out in great numbers to a street protest, they’ve shown themselves since the nascent days of Gamergate to be remarkably adept at fomenting information campaigns against individual and corporate targets, from Brianna Wu and Intel to Comet Ping Pong and John Podesta. (Earlier this week. the alt-right came up with its own answer to #DeleteUber: #NoNetflix, a response to the site releasing a television expansion of the 2014 campus satire Dear White People, which the Twitter user @BakedAlaska, a hero of the pro-Trump internet said “promotes white genocide.”) Meanwhile, the sheer number of new, Trump-loyal outlets trading in conspiracy and confirmation bias suggests that any and all information surfaced by the same churning engine that produced #Pizzagate will be spread further and faster than ever.

And maybe higher. Charles Johnson worked for Steve Bannon, the president’s powerful chief strategist, at Breitbart, and was reported by Forbes to be advising the Trump transition team. While there is no evidence to suggest that the Trump administration is actively monitoring social media campaigns in order to target private individuals, federal law enforcement has used social media as a tool to impose the President’s since-stayed executive order on immigration. Last week, BBC reporter Ali Hamedani announced that a customs agent seized his phone and read his tweets during his detention at Chicago’s O’Hare airport:

It’s a reminder that, for all the excitement that viral Trump resistance has produced on the left, every unit of that virality — whether it’s a face on a Periscope stream, a tweet, or a Facebook group — is a piece of information that can be seized, decontextualized, and ultimately used against the opposition. And that when it comes to social media’s ability to effect change, proximity to power and access to force matter just as much — if not more — than a majority.

Quelle: <a href="The Viral Anti-Trump Movement Is Here — And It&039;s A Huge Target“>BuzzFeed

3. Februar 20173. Februar 2017

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Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Is Leaving Trump's Advisory Council

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick

Money Sharma / AFP / Getty Images

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has dropped out of President Trump’s economic advisory council after backlash from customers that spurred a viral #DeleteUber social media revolt and internal dissent. Uber confirmed to BuzzFeed News that Kalanick has left the group.

News of Kalanick's decision was first reported by The New York Times.

Kalanick&039;s decision to resign from the advisory group before its first meeting this Friday comes after a protest outside the company&039;s San Francisco headquarters the day of Trump&039;s inauguration, and after Uber was forced to automate its account-deletion process following a viral DeleteUber campaign. At an all-hands meeting with employees on Tuesday in San Francisco, Kalanick said sitting on the council would offer a better chance for Uber to affect change, sources present at the meeting told BuzzFeed News.

The DeleteUber social media revolt began Saturday night, about a day after Trump&039;s controversial executive order restricting immigration – hours after Uber had already announced it would pay drivers affected the order for three months if they could not work. Since then, many thousands of customers have deleted their accounts. Kalanick, who previously had not spoken to Trump, told employees in a memo that “Earlier today I spoke briefly with the President about the immigration executive order and its issues for our community.” Kalanick had previously described his choice to attend the first meeting of the White House advisory group as a means to express dissent against measures like the immigration ban as a voice on the inside.

Protests were scheduled to take place at Uber offices throughout the country — including San Francisco, New York and New Orleans — on Thursday; organizers in Palo Alto said those demonstrations will continue, despite Kalanick’s decision to step down as an advisor to Trump.

Here&039;s the full email Kalanick sent employees announcing his departure from the advisory group:

Dear Team,

Earlier today I spoke briefly with the President about the immigration executive order and its issues for our community. I also let him know that I would not be able to participate on his economic council. Joining the group was not meant to be an endorsement of the President or his agenda but unfortunately it has been misinterpreted to be exactly that.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this and mapping it to our values. There are a couple that are particularly relevant:

Inside Out – The implicit assumption that Uber (or I) was somehow endorsing the Administration’s agenda has created a perception-reality gap between who people think we are, and who we actually are.

Just Change – We must believe that the actions we take ultimately move the ball forward. There are many ways we will continue to advocate for just change on immigration but staying on the council was going to get in the way of that. The executive order is hurting many people in communities all across America. Families are being separated, people are stranded overseas and there’s a growing fear the U.S. is no longer a place that welcomes immigrants.

Immigration and openness to refugees is an important part of our country’s success and quite honestly to Uber’s. I am incredibly proud to work directly with people like Thuan and Emil, both of whom were refugees who came here to build a better life for themselves. I know it has been a tough week for many of you and your families, as well as many thousands of drivers whose stories are heartfelt and heart-wrenching.

Please know, your questions and stories on Tuesday, along with what I heard from drivers, have kept me resilient and reminded me of one of our most essential cultural values, Be Yourself. We will fight for the rights of immigrants in our communities so that each of us can be who we are with optimism and hope for the future.

Travis

This story is developing. Check back for updates.

Quelle: <a href="Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Is Leaving Trump&039;s Advisory Council“>BuzzFeed

30. Januar 201730. Januar 2017

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The Battle Between Uber And Lyft Has Become Political

Getty

In the 36 hours between President Trump’s signing of an executive order restricting immigration and the same rule’s effects being halted by a federal judge in New York, the rivalry between Uber and Lyft abruptly became political. Largely as a result of its CEO’s decision to serve as a Trump advisor, Uber is facing a hashtag-driven social media revolt – even though it appears to be doing more to support drivers affected by the new immigration ban than Lyft.

In Trump’s politicized America, brands are caught up in a rapidly evolving political crisis, and are being forced to take sides. Trump’s executive order suspended the intake of all refugees for 120 days and Syrian refugees indefinitely. It also blocked people from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen from entering the US for 90 days. In the hours following the order, as the scope of the order became clear, pressure mounted on tech companies – who employ many immigrants on H1B visas – to publicly respond. For Uber and Lyft, who already compete for users with nearly identical services in a number of deeply anti-Trump cities, the ramifications of their political statements were immediately evident. By Saturday evening #DeleteUber was trending on Twitter. Meanwhile, Lyft was being touted as an easy Uber alternative and lauded for its denunciation of Trump and $1 million donation to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Shortly after noon on Saturday — less than 10 hours after Trump signed the executive order — Uber told BuzzFeed it had reached out to about a dozen employees who may be affected with offers of support, including legal help. Travis Kalanick, the ride-hail giant’s chief executive, who has agreed to sit on Trump’s economic advisory group, prompting protests outside Uber’s San Francisco headquarters, emailed staff at 1:20PM.

If any Uber driver was outside the country and could not reenter as a result of the executive order, Uber would compensate that driver pro bono “to help mitigate some of the financial stress and complications with supporting their families and putting food on the table.”

Uber has disagreed with governments across the world before, Kalanick said, adding that it has effected change by fighting in some cases, and in others, “from within through persuasion and argument.” He promised that the executive order, shortened as #MuslimBan on social media, was “an issue that I will raise this coming Friday when I go to Washington for President Trump’s first business advisory group meeting.”

Five hours later, Lyft’s cofounders emailed their staff, too.

What people saw when they compared the statements: Uber is willing to work with Trump. Lyft is “firmly against” Trump’s actions.

Uber had responded faster to Trump's executive order, focusing on how it could help its employees. Lyft responded later – without some of the promises Uber made – but its broad denunciation of Trump’s refugee ban drew praise. Lyft’s leaders directly condemned Trump’s executive order as “antithetical to both Lyft’s and our nation’s core values” (It’s worth noting that tech billionaire and Trump advisor Peter Thiel is a Lyft investor who has publicly criticized Uber for being “ethically challenged.”) While Kalanick’s statement was one of the stronger ones to be issued by a tech CEO, it didn’t directly reject Trump. Instead, Kalanick said, “whatever your view please know that I’ve always believed in principled confrontation and just change; and have never shied away (maybe to my detriment) from fighting for what’s right.”

Kalanick also posted his note to staff, with the subject line “Standing up for what’s right,” on Facebook.

Making the optics even worse for Uber, the company had suspended surge pricing near New York’s JFK Airport after taxi drivers stopped working to join anti-Trump protests there. To some, the move appeared to undercut the protesting taxi drivers – many of whom are Muslim and immigrants – by keeping prices stable to entice riders. DeleteUber began trending on Twitter.

Within a few hours, Uber apologized.

“We’re sorry for any confusion about our earlier tweet — it was not meant to break up any strike,” Uber told BuzzFeed News in a statement. “We wanted people to know they could use Uber to get to and from JFK at normal prices, especially tonight.”

On Sunday morning, Lyft sent users an email reiterating its position and noting it would donate $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union “to defend our constitution.”

The email helped Lyft further capitalize on the political tension that riled its – and Uber’s – user base and spurred the DeleteUber to trend on Twitter the prior night.

Meanwhile, Uber crafted a conciliatory response to riders who noted the company’s willingness to collaborate with Trump as their reason for deleting the app. “We share your concern that this ban will impact many thousands of innocent people,” it read, with a link to Kalanick’s full statement.

Uber did not immediately reply to a request for comment as to whether it was sending this response to every individual who cited the company’s relationship with Trump as a reason for deleting the app. But it appears others received a similar response as well.

Kalanick’s position as Trump advisor is causing internal tensions at Uber as well. On Saturday, after Kalanick’s email to staff, a software developer said he should resign from Trump’s advisory group and explicitly denounce the president.

Last week, Business Insider published portions of an internal email in which Uber’s chief technology officer called Trump a “deplorable person.”

Read how other tech companies reacted to Trump’s executive order here.

Quelle: <a href="The Battle Between Uber And Lyft Has Become Political“>BuzzFeed