Sarah Jeong

There’s a good reason for the company’s lackluster initial public offering: There is no future for Uber as we know it, and no one knows if the company will ever make the leap to a profitable business model.

That’s a mild concern for investors who are choosing to either bet big or cash out quickly. But the consequences are staggering for its drivers and the public at large. Drivers led a strike against Uber in cities around the world before the IPO, protesting the unfairness of their working conditions as investors prepared to get rich. Both Uber and Lyft (which made its initial public offering in March) are offering bonuses to some of their drivers to buy stock. But the bonuses are small unless you’re one of a dedicated handful who’ve completed thousands or tens of thousands of rides.

The problem for Uber — and everyone else — is that its very business model excludes a future of fair labor practices.

The Uber strikers have legitimate grievances. According to one study conducted in New York City, about half of ride-hailing drivers are supporting families with children — yet their earnings are so meager that 40% of all drivers qualify for Medicaid and another 18% qualify for food stamps.

Underpaying drivers also hasn’t led to profitability for the companies that employ them. Year after year, both Uber and Lyft, Uber’s closest competitor, have lost money. Floated by a raft of venture capital, they have undercut the taxi industry and in some places even public transit.

Now that Uber is public, fares will probably go up, but the pursuit of profits to satisfy stockholders will not create better working conditions.

Uber’s current model isn’t meant to get better, however. It’s meant to be eventually replaced wholesale. Early on, Uber bet big on self-driving-car technology, hoping to replace drivers en masse. Robot cars don’t complain, don’t strike and don’t have families to feed.

But the company’s plans went awry after an expensive and embarrassing intellectual property lawsuit over its self-driving-car tech. Evidence shown at trial suggested that Uber is several years behind the autonomous-vehicle technology of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. A few weeks after Uber settled the lawsuit, an Uber self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona. The company’s experimental cars are back on the streets after a hiatus, but the testing has been significantly downsized.

If Uber cannot make the leap to eliminating its human drivers, it must suck as much value as it can out of its huge store of data — data that ranges from relatively anonymous information about traffic patterns to deeply intimate details like trips to a place of worship, to a gay bar, to an abortion clinic.

Uber’s IPO spells trouble for the company. But in the larger scheme of things, it doesn’t matter much whether Uber’s investors take a hit or make a killing. From the underpaid drivers it hopes to replace to the customers whose data it has hoarded for a decade — it’s everyone else who’s on the hook for the repercussions of both Uber’s success and its failure

Strike all you want Uber won't pay a living wage

Ten years after its founding, the ride-hailing giant Uber is finally a publicly traded company. But on the first day of trading, its stock price took a hit.

Strike all you want. Uber won't pay a living wage

In the midst of all of this, Marcus Hutchins, then a 22-year-old British security researcher, stumbled upon a “kill switch” in the WannaCry code — and slammed the brakes on a global crisis. “The kill switch is why the U.S. hasn’t been touched so far,” one expert told The Times then.

WannaCry is a variant of ransomware, a type of malware that locks down a computer and forcibly encrypts its data until a ransom is paid. The 2017 outbreak highlighted two things: first, the dismal state of computer security in IT systems around the world, and second, the acceleration of cyberwarfare. According to U.S. authorities, North Korea was behind the WannaCry attack; the motive was to throw its enemies’ economies into disarray. Those behind WannaCry itself used an exploit — a weakness in software wielded as a cyberweapon — developed by and stolen from the United States’ National Security Agency by a Russia-linked group called the Shadow Brokers.

It’s against this dizzying backdrop that a young man from rural England halted a worldwide disaster. Although he took great pains to stay anonymous, he did not succeed once the British tabloids took an interest in the person who stopped WannaCry. After his unmasking, Hutchins was hailed as a “hero” and became the toast of the cybersecurity industry. He was on his way back home from Defcon, one of the oldest and biggest hacking conferences in the world, when he was arrested at the Las Vegas airport Aug. 2, 2017.

As it turned out, Hutchins had dabbled in the dark arts as a minor, continuing up until the age of 20, when he reversed course and dedicated himself to legitimate activities, like research. The U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Wisconsin charged him with writing and conspiring to sell malware — specifically, the Kronos banking trojan, known to have attacked banks in France, Britain and India. The case has dragged out for two years, amid complex legal questions that could have been appealed. But Hutchins had no stomach for an interminable fight and pleaded guilty last week to two counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Wiretap Act, each carrying a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment.

The acts that he has pleaded to are ignoble. Kronos did serious damage, and in his plea agreement, Hutchins acknowledges that he was a witting conspirator to sell the malware. Neither does he attempt to raise the defense that his “black hat” past was necessary to become a “white hat” hero, even if that line resonates with the hacker community and popular culture at large. According to his lawyers, he rejects that line of thinking, calling it “a misnomer.”

Hutchins is not likely to receive a heavy sentence, but even a sentence without any prison time will come with consequences. He has been released on bail since 2017, residing in the United States on an expired tourist visa while waiting for his case to be resolved. That in itself will likely make it difficult to return to the United States in the future, and the felony will hamper his movements further.

If he hadn’t risen to global prominence, Hutchins would most likely have never been charged with his crimes. His conviction sends the wrong message about whether or not it pays to mend your ways and, when the moment comes, to do the right thing.

As the world comes to rely on computer systems more and more, cybersecurity is increasingly a matter of life and death. But we only rarely see expertise deployed in an indisputably heroic way, amid rerouted ambulances and disabled hospital telephone lines. WannaCry never struck the same kind of havoc in the United States that it did in Britain, and we have Hutchins to thank for it.

For that reason, the justice system should show him mercy. But for stopping a North Korean cyberattack in its tracks, mercy is not enough — Marcus Hutchins should be pardoned.

This article originally appeared in <a id="df31a607-2b76-4b36-8ad8-45a54527340a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/opinion/marcus-hutchins-wannacry.html">The New York Times</a>.

Marcus Hutchins stopped a global cyberattack, now he deserves a pardon

(Editorial Observer): In May 2017, a cyberattack called WannaCry infected hundreds of thousands of computers across 150 countries. Among the victims: FedEx, French carmaker Renault, the Russian Interior Ministry and Britain’s National Health Service. The effect on the health service was particularly devastating: Ambulances were diverted, patient records were inaccessible, surgical procedures were canceled, telephone calls could not be received.

The article, published in four countries and three languages, was fated to be misunderstood from the start.

His first suggestion was to create an independent body so users could appeal Facebook’s moderation decisions. Over the past few years, Facebook has caught fire from all sides for its content moderation. Some say hate speech should be censored more aggressively. At the same time, the company has been accused of censoring conservative viewpoints. And for years, it has been roundly criticized for its puritanical ban on female nipples.

But if Facebook had its way, the ultimate authority would no longer lie with Facebook — or Twitter or YouTube or other competitors. That job would fall to unspecified “regulators.”

“Regulation could set baselines for what’s prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum,” Zuckerberg wrote. For a company exhausted by a year of scandal, a regulatory scapegoat is just what the doctor ordered. If you don’t like what we do,why don’t you try it for a change?

U.S. legal experts were incredulous. Daphne Keller of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society accused Facebook of proposing an unconstitutional system, knowing it was impossible. In an initial statement, Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union said it was a violation of the First Amendment. The Electronic Frontier Foundation claimed it would violate the freedom of expression guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Facebook’s head of public policy, Kevin Martin, explained that while Zuckerberg’s reference to “regulation” might mean actual government intervention in France, Germany and Ireland, it meant only private sector self-regulation in the United States.

This kind of faux regulation is nothing new. Among the examples cited were FINRA, a nongovernmental financial industry “regulator”; the Motion Picture Association of America, which rates films; and the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which rates video games. (After this clarification, the ACLU’s Wizner agreed that independent bodies like the MPAA are not unconstitutional).

But none of these examples deal with directly regulating speech. Social media content moderation is a different beast entirely. Slapping a label on a video game isn’t the same as banning distribution of the video game.

Facebook avoided bringing up the Hays Code, the closest corollary to what they propose. The MPAA’s rating system is a pale shadow of Hollywood’s old Hays Code, the now-laughable list of rules that for years had on-screen husbands and wives sleeping in separate beds.

The Code was developed voluntarily by the studios in hopes of avoiding government censorship. It zealously policed depictions of romance, crime, law enforcement and the clergy. When the Supreme Court held that motion pictures were protected by the First Amendment in 1952, enforcement of the code diminished.

Facebook’s proposal is a bow to public opinion. In 2018, a coalition of advocacy groups published the Santa Clara Principles — new baseline rules for how content moderation should work. The principles focus most heavily on the right to appeal decisions — particularly in conjunction with “new independent self-regulatory mechanisms” created in collaboration with industry.

All this sounds like what The Verge’s Casey Newton calls “a Facebook Supreme Court. ” It’s almost as if the Santa Clara Principles were developed by a room full of lawyers. Hammer, meet nail.

Due process would be much welcomed in a world where people believe simultaneously that Facebook takes down too little content or too much. But due process is costly, even after removing high-billing lawyers from the equation. Consider that the Supreme Court, with a budget of nearly $90 million, receives 8,000 petitions a year — most of which are rejected. Meanwhile, according to a class-action lawsuit filed by an ex-Facebook moderator, “moderators are asked to review more than 10 million potentially rule-breaking posts per week.”

No wonder content moderation on the big platforms doesn’t so much resemble an unpleasant visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles as it does a re-enactment of the horror film “The Purge.” Due process is a luxury good.

We’re not likely to see a Facebook Supreme Court — not an American one, in any event. The Hays Code died after the First Amendment was extended to movies; a Hays Code for the internet will probably be dead on arrival.

In a confused, fractured world, Facebook would be glad to stick to a single global standard. This is perhaps why Zuckerberg offers full-throated praise of the European Union’s privacy standard, the General Data Protection Regulation, in his op-ed. The fracture of the internet into different spheres of influence would be bad for his business, and to that end, the company would much rather impose European sensibilities on the U.S. internet than deal with multiple standards.

So, while the U.S. government has its hands tied behind its back by the Constitution, the French, the Germans and the Irish will set their own bar for online speech. In the future, U.S. speech — at least online — may be governed by Europe.

This article originally appeared in <a id="b152b2c6-07be-4439-8467-75e62cd4804b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/opinion/facebook-content-moderation.html">The New York Times</a>.

Facebook wants a faux regulator for internet speech, it won't happen

(Editorial Observer): In an opinion article published last weekend, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he agreed with the growing consensus that Facebook — and other social media companies — should be subject to more regulation.

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Sarah Jeong

Articles written by the author

Strike all you want. Uber won't pay a living wage

Marcus Hutchins stopped a global cyberattack, now he deserves a pardon

Facebook wants a faux regulator for internet speech, it won't happen