What are the Uber files? A guide to cab-hailing firm’s ruthless expansion tactics

theguardian.com:

The Uber files is a global investigation into a trove of 124,000 confidential documents from the tech company that were leaked to the Guardian. The data reveals how Uber flouted the law, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world.

The leak consists of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant’s most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.

The files cover 40 countries and span from 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber went from a plucky startup to a global behemoth, brute-forcing its way into cities around the world with little regard for taxi regulations.

To facilitate a global investigation, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists at more than 40 media organisations via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

The cache of more than 124,000 internal Uber files lays bare the ethically questionable practices through which the company barged its way into new markets, often where existing laws or regulations made its operations illegal, before lobbying aggressively for those same laws or regulations to be altered to accommodate it.

As economy minister, Emmanuel Macron went to extraordinary lengths to support Uber and its campaign to disrupt France’s closed-shop taxi industry, even telling the company he had brokered a “deal” with its opponents in the French cabinet.

Senior executives at Uber ordered the use of a “kill switch” to prevent police and regulators from accessing sensitive data during raids on its offices in at least six countries.

Two of Barack Obama’s most senior presidential campaign advisers, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, discussed helping