Trove of documents leaked to the Guardian cast light on firm’s operations at height of its global rise
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 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 Uber get to access leaders, officials and diplomats.
The former vice-president of the European Commission Neelie Kroes secretly helped Uber to lobby a string of top Dutch politicians, including the country’s prime minister. Her relationship with the company was so sensitive that its top European lobbyist warned it was “highly confidential and should not be discussed outside this group”.