So Uber ToS requires you to accept arbitration, then, when they are found responsible for damages, they still don’t want to pay. Seems pretty shitty for the consumer.
In that case why is there a "settlement agreement" mentioned that has a $10M penalty for disparagement? Not sure what that refers to exactly but how can Uber (try to) dictate terms in the settlement?
It does seem they're trying to get out of it somehow.
Looking at a filing by Uber (https://www.panish.law/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Uber-Techn...), and in particular Exhibit 8, the ADR award is confirmed by a settlement agreement (and if no agreement is come to, then a civil action would confirm the terms of the award).
There was a dispute about whether the amount awarded was confidential or not (Uber contended it was; plaintiff contended it wasn't), but on the face of it, had plaintiff agreed to the confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses, Uber would have paid up.
I suppose it could be argued that Uber were trying to write in clauses they knew plaintiff wouldn't agree to, but it's not obvious to me that a different plaintiff wouldn't have agreed to confidentiality and non-disparagement.
(FWIW, it's not clear to me whether Uber have now in fact paid up; they made a statement to the Guardian that _suggests_ they have, but the fact that they didn't explicitly say so means I wouldn't want to draw that inference)
I mean both are right, they made a bullshit filing about something being confidential, in order to negotiate a confidentiality settlement against it.
It's minor, but they are not accepting the award as-is, they are still trying to negotiating, albeit in a minor way, not by contesting the amount, but a confidentiality clause.
They love to negotiate confidentiality clauses, there's few cases without it, including a case by Mike Rafi's personal injury firm which resulted from an omission by Uber (and later Uber being much more anal about confidentiality). I think it's a strategy to avoid case law catching on.
Moreso it’s them whining about losing when and trying to add a non-disparagement clause at $10m per event to the settlement for even factual information relating to the case.
Uber were the ones who forced arbitration ostensibly because it often lowers their overall legal and damages bills.
Forced arbitration is creating a parallel legal system where certain companies are excluded from the consequences of their own actions. One might even say they’re becoming a protected class even.
I have been on both sides of arbitration, winning and losing. It’s much better. Basically legislation done right (for civil matters).
The only people who really win from traditional legislation are lawyers (and plaintiffs counsel who use the long expensive process to blackmail people - which is 90% of civil cases)
Arbitration can be more efficient, but both parties should have an option to choose it, a direct settlement or public court. The average consumer is denied the choice by using these everyday services that have non-negotiable contracts.
Many places have a ‘small claims court’, which is very similar to arbitration. The issue is that class action lawsuits are very profitable for plaintiff lawyers working on contingency, so those are the cases that get brought.
They are very profitable when they win, what is the win rate of class action cases. Also what is the win rate of chosen class action cases versus all potential class action cases.
The 'tipping point' for class actions is usually the class certification, not a final judgement by the court. Class actions are absurdly expensive for defendants, largely due to the scope of discovery, and they also cause problems for public companies (for reporting and other reasons), so public companies almost always settle them after the class is certified. On the other side, these settlements often don't offer much benefit to the class, because the plaintiff counsel take a massive fee off the top, pay off the lead plaintiff, and don't have much incentive to do anything for the remainder of the class.
Small claims is great in that in most states lawyers generally aren't allowed so right out the gate you remove the wealth asymmetry issue. The downside is the dollar amount is very small. I'd like to see small claims limits expanded tbh.
You seem to be missing that arbitrators have a financial incentive to side with the company, which pays them? Explained in this video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787720
I wonder how often this is the case. The one time I read the fine print when signing up for a service, it said that I had the right to disagree with the choice of arbiter, and get some national organization to pick a different arbiter independently.
I don't know how common this is, but yeah, this is a bare minimum that one should have with arbitration.
But, many of the members of that organization make their money from various forced arbitration deals, so that doesn't necessarily move the needle back towards the consumer.
This isn't specifically business vs consumer. The problem is ruling against the guy who brings you more business isn't good for getting more business. And you have a related problem with big fish vs big fish (for example, arbitration of union contracts) where you have to appease both sides--go something like 50/50 regardless of merits.
Very clear case, arbitration is fine. Fuzzy case, I would much prefer something that doesn't tip the scales in advance.
Note that the same bias problem exists with home inspectors. Realtors won't like inspectors that find things that kill deals. That one can be solved by hiring your own inspector with no input from the realtor.
Of course, if you don't agree with the ToS, Uber is also not forced to transport you. But that's fair enough.
Letting entities that hold the vast majority of the leverage and financial/legal/political power in a contract opt out of the legal system and pick an alternative with a financial incentive to side with them is perhaps "fair" to you, but a lot of people would disagree on the "enough" part.
I always thought arbitration was forcing weaker parties out of the fairer legal system. Now I wonder if that's a planted idea by the legal industry? It made sense to me that arbitration was paid for by the company, and there would be incentives for the judge to side with their long term meal ticket. But perhaps all that is wrong? I really wish you could elaborate on why it is better, I'm very interested in challenging my assumptions here.
Your reasoning makes sense, and I was concerned in a similar way when I filed my arbitration case (for about $8k) against the manufacturer of my leased car. The so called “Lemon law” in California suggests the arbitration as the first step. Surprisingly enough, I won the case, and it only took me about an hour of collecting documents and filling in the forms, and 45 minutes of the phone call.
Even though the car manufacturer does indeed pay for the arbitration, I never felt the arbiter is biased, and the judgement was completely in my favor.
Companies like arbitration because unlike in a civil lawsuit, the plaintiff cannot compel discovery. Paying for an arbitrator is cheaper than going through discovery, especially if the discovery unearths facts materially damaging to the business.
This is simply untrue, and honestly anyone who thinks our legal system does not provide justice needs to go travel the world to see how it really works for 80% of the global population.
All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, you can start with arbitration but if you believe on good merits you have a case and fail arbitration you should have the right to your day in court.
Throwing out our whole legal system because sometimes the lawyers make the most money is reductionist at best.
I believe what he's referring to is the cost of the legal system. Lawyers cost money, and if the other party has a lot more money, they can play all kinds of tactics to keep the case going (filing pointless motions, drowning your lawyer with huge amounts of documents, etc).
With arbitration, the arbiter can put an end to those shenanigans really quickly, because they're not legally obligated to allow for that kind of crap.
There are ups and downs to both systems. The benefits are there for parties of roughly equal size. The down side is there is no recourse if the arbiter makes a completely unfair judgement (e.g. because he thinks some law should not apply, etc).
All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, you can start with arbitration but if you believe on good merits you have a case and fail arbitration you should have the right to your day in court.
That just makes it the worst of both worlds! The whole point of arbitration is not to have a war of attrition, and to make the process efficient. Your solution doesn't take care of it. If I'm a business getting into a contract with another business, knowing that you can't outspend me in court is important, and lets both of us make a deal. If I know you still want the option to go to court, it's as if arbitration wasn't on the table.
A better system would be to change the law such that for certain, predefined offenses, you can't waive your right to go through the legal system (e.g. sexual harassment).
And of course, both parties should have say on who the arbiter is.
Finally, you are talking to someone who's had experience with arbitration. You might want to tone things down in your rhetoric if you don't have your own experience to bring to the table. Things might sound fine in theory, but can be really, really bad in practice. As an example, on How I Built This, whenever he's interviewing a founder that went to court to enforce a patent they owned, he asks if it was worth it. The answer almost always is "It was a bad idea and we shouldn't have filed a case." This is coming from those who won in court.
This is simply untrue, and honestly anyone who thinks our legal system does not provide justice needs to go travel the world to see how it really works for 80% of the global population.
That's weird. Two things can be true at once: arbitrary is better than the American legal system, and the American legal system is better than what 80% of the global population live under.
All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, [...]
It is! You explicitly have to opt in, that's why Uber needs have it in their ToS that you accept. They can't just force it on you, when you have no contractual relationship with them.
Prove it. Where are the transcripts of all arbitration proceedings so we can see that arbitration is fair?
See, that's why court proceedings are public, so that the public can verify that courts are fair. It's also why judges are appointed by democratically elected politicians. Who appointed your arbitrator?
And of course the court system is bad and unfair in a bunch of ways. But it's starting from a much better place than secret, forced arbitration.
Worth noting that this is only for the civil responsibility, that is, deciding the award of damages.
The criminal charges, if any, whether to the driver or to Uber management (possibly from the sham structuring of worker categorization and corporate structure in order to reduce tax liabilities while reducing control and thus endangering consumers) are proper in state criminal courts and can never be delegated to private courts.
In general, most issues are being redirected to forced arbitration and not enough people can or effort to sue these companies, so in actual effect, they’re immune one might say.
First to be clear, I am speaking in general terms. I know nothing about this case, I don't want to know anything about this case, but I have just scrolled through people's thoughts on arbitration here and thought I should offer a general alternative perspective. To be clear I'm not interested in blindly defending Uber either. So here goes...
Arbitration clauses will be found pretty much everywhere. They come under the auspice of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) of which the top-three ways are: mediation, arbitration and ombudsmen.
The whole point of ADR is that:
1. there are only so many courts in a given jurisdiction and there are only so many judges in any jurisdiction, and both courts and judges tend to have large backlogs.
2. added to which going to court is expensive and time consuming. And if the other side has deep pockets and you loose, you end up paying the hourly rates of very expensive lawyers in smart shoes that the opposition employed because 600+/hour/person is peanuts to them.
So that's where ADR comes in. Its more informal, its cheaper to do and the costs side if you loose are kept under control.
Because ADR is an informal environment, this can also work in your favour. The timetable and parameters are flexible and the final agreement reached can easily be better than whatever a judge might have handed down after listening to both side's lawyers bicker.
Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given some sort of ADR a go first.
Is it perfect, of course not. But neither are the courts. Your outcome in court is effectively dependent on both side's lawyers and what judge you get, so you having a better outcome in court is not necessarily guaranteed !
We all know the talking points from big corporations about why they force everyone into arbitration out of the goodness of their hearts. We don't need it regurgitated as if it's the truth.
big corporations about why they force everyone into arbitration out of the goodness of their hearts. We don't need it regurgitated as if it's the truth.
Its not a regurgitation. Its the facts.
It applies to small businesses too.
A mom and pop shop will (or should !) also have ADR clauses in its contracts.
And the court will certainly take a very dim view if you try to sue a mom and pop shop without having tried ADR.
Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given some sort of ADR a go first.
But Uber's terms explicitly force consumers to waive their right to go to court if they want to access Uber's service.
Arbitration is fine. There's no reason people shouldn't be allowed to freely engage the services of an arbitrator.
What people take issue with is forced arbitration. The problem isn't really about the arbitration at all, the problem is the part where you lose access to the courts. That should not be allowed.
Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given ADR a go first.
“Nothing is stopping you” - most TOSes mandate arbitration, and unless you have something particularly egregious and a sympathetic judge the first thing on the docket is going to be a Motion to Dismiss.
And agreed. For better or worse. My minor stepdaughter was involved in a car accident. No liability was found, and the other party tried to sue her in Small Claims court which, in my state, you can’t sue a minor in (as no attorneys are permitted, so you’d have a minor representing themselves). The judge noted this, and told the other party “if you want to sue you will need to sue her parents or guardians”… and then tried to push us into binding arbitration anyway.
Which of course got my insurance company upset and involving attorneys on procedural/constitutional law, about challenging the judges authority to push us into that given there was no jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place so there was none to enforce us into arbitration (which in itself was an entirely separate farce, including where the “neutral” arbitrator berated me and said “I don’t understand why, as a person, if you know your insurance is going to be the one paying, you don’t just agree to give them all they’re asking for.”).
Louis Rossman does not take sponsorships, and turns off ads for his videos as much as YouTube allows. His videos are for his opinions, not making money.
Mr Rossman will literally tell you to use an ad-blocker to watch his videos and refuses to take sponsorships, actively does not want money from making YouTube videos and just wants to get the word out. I'd agree with you if it was literally any other creator.
Two things can be true at once, especially when talking about people’s behaviour. I don’t know this guy from atom, but if he’s a YouTuber then my instinct is to not trust him.
No, you would say it needs to be reformed and funded, we have an extremely legalistic society that allows endless delaying and does not fund its core services very well.
Food for thought (not specifically relevant to this case): I wonder how much would go away if the US had universal healthcare, or to put it another way, how much of its legal system is spent figuring out who pays for medical treatment
What's the line? If 2 brothers sign a contract, can't they decide their father will be the judge if disputes arise?
If there's a sports match, shouldn't the sports arbiter be able to decide whether some team scored a goal or not?
These are all valid civil contracts. It only affects the civil claims, never criminal, and the venue for disputing the arbitration clause (if you believe arbitration wasn't legal to begin with) are the public courts anyways, who will delegate or not to the private court.
Almost all countries recognize it and it has a quite defensible theory.
i think the keyword is "forced". there's very little now that the consumer can do because it seems everything requires arbitration now and people still have to operate in society.
I agree that word is putting some work, and calling it forced is already partisan.
To the extent that you believe it is forced, you can dispute it on a public court, and if you can prove you were forced, you wouldn't be subject to arbitration.
Arbitration in private courts only exists if both parties agree prior to agreeing to the contract to that clause.
If you believe that it's forced because you never read the Terms of Agreement, I feel that's more of a discussion of whether clickwrapped terms are valid or not, it would be a way more radical position to believe that they have absolutely no effect. And if they do have an effect, agreeing to private arbitration is no different.
I think we need to stop calling one-sided "terms documents" that are entirely written by one party, the party with 100x+ the monetary resources and power of the other party, with no input from that other party and not subject to any negotiation whatsoever, "agreements." They are not what any reasonable person would call an agreement. There is no meeting of the minds, and the terms are entirely controlled by one party.
It sure is contextual. And nobody would disagree with your examples. The difference here seems to be more of a power imbalance than any objection to terms. In particular, terms of service are often very dense documents. Many people are only presented these documents at the moment they sign up for a service. And people are not usually careful in these situations. I bet most of the Uber signups were outside of bars or venues where someone really needed to get home. So there’s some duress there. So it’s probably not that cut and dried. It’s more analogous to presenting a contract to harvest your wheat field the day before a big rain. If you’re the only guy with a combine for miles then that puts you in a position of relative power. And historically the US hasn’t permitted people to exploit their positions to the maximum extent, usually when it would be immoral by the standards of society. I think this exists in a gray area. It’s not that easy.
I think my gripe is less that it exists and more so that it's not a negotiated agreement. I think it should only be allowed if the contract was negotiated between two parties with full authority to offer any terms in the negotiation. If it's a standardized, take it or leave it, contract where one party has no opportunity to offer alternative terms that get proper and full consideration by the other party, it shouldn't be allowed. In most of the examples you give, they are contracts that have been clearly negotiated between parties, not click-wrapped take it or leave it, my way or the highway, terms.
The line that minimum should be against using this as a tool against consumers. To the extent it should exist at all, which is arguable, it must be between parties that are either equal in standing or have genuine commercial disputes between duly organized business entities.
Arbitration isn't the issue. The issue is when one of the parties has vastly more legal resources than the other, and gets to pick the arbiter.
Arbitration is fine for two equal parties when a third party neutral arbiter is chosen. I've been through that kind of arbitration and it was great.
But when the huge company gets to pick the arbiter (or even just threaten the arbiter with taking away all their other cases), that is when you have problems.
I'm not the right person to explain English history, secret courts, and the American revolution. Suffice to say, public courts a vital check on the power of the state by way of the court of public opinion. The real final court of appeal.
All these companies are universally sleazy and refuse to take responsibility, no matter what. It's pretty much par for the course: deny you are responsible, try to control the court case in such a way that you inflict even more suffering on the victims and their families and ultimately, even if you're found to be in the wrong do everything to stall payment until each and every legal avenue to do so is exhausted.
Stone rejected Uber's argument that it is "merely a technology company" connecting riders with drivers, finding that Uber provides transportation services to the public through its app, sets prices and controls key aspects of the rider experience.
The arbitrator also rejected Uber's argument that Proposition 22 -- a California ballot measure approved by voters in 2020 that allows companies to classify app-based drivers as independent contractors instead of employees -- prevented the company from being held liable for Tran's conduct.
The dream of every major tech company, making ridiculous profits while taking zero legal responsibility for what you create...
The bad guy here is the driver. Could Uber have done more? That's what the arbitrators concluded.
But the reality is that this is a victory for the driverless cars (Waymo, Tesla, etc.). If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.
There was no world in which driverless cars weren't the eventual outcome anyway.
And, it's not exactly taking responsibility for the driver. It's taking responsibility for the safety of the passenger using their service. This is a different thing. Driverless cars still can't allow their passengers to get injured and killed which is going to present a lot of technical and social challenges for these companies.
They all thought that playing a word game would get them out of the difficult problems all transportation companies have to solve and be liable for.
There's this prevailing narrative that someday self-driving cars will eliminate all human-controlled driving and that these types of stories are like milestones in the path to that future utopia.
But I don't think that's the case anymore than the narrative that LLMs will eventually displace all software engineers.
The invention of the automobile didn't eliminate all horses, but it certainly replaced the vast majority of horses.
In 7 years we've gone from GPT-2 to Fable and Astra. There seems to be no sign of slowdown, except from the top AI labs who want to slow down out of caution. It would be incredibly surprising to me if in another 7 years, my software engineering skills were still useful. AI capabilities will get to the point where even the best human is adding noise to the system, similar to today's chess engines and calculators.
Self-driving cars will take longer to roll out because they require new hardware and changes to laws, but I don't see how a career such as "truck driver" or "cab driver" exists in 20 years. At most it would be for a few niche uses and tourism novelty (similar to steam locomotives or horse-drawn buggies).
I mostly agree. However, I do actually think that many of the skills you use as a software engineer will still be useful in 7 years. It's just that, as you suggest, no one will let us near any actual code.
It would be incredibly surprising to me if in another 7 years, my software engineering skills were still useful
This profession has always required reskilling/ changing based on new technologies. How many people are still meaningfully employed as pascal programmers?
Almost every career requires staying on top of new developments to remain competitive. Even mechanics must learn about new systems in vehicles to be able to repair them. Not many people are still meaningfully employed as Model T mechanics.
The difference with LLMs is that they are a substitute for more general cognitive skills. Right now they are also a complement (using them increases the productivity of humans writing software), but it's only a matter of time before they improve to the point where they fully substitute. And it seems quite likely that the timeline for that is significantly shorter than my remaining career.
If you are confident that there will be specific tasks that LLMs can't accomplish in 2033, I'm happy to entertain such ideas. But considering the current rate of progress, I can't think of anything like that.
Self-driving cars and trucks will eliminate human-controlled driving in the same way that engines (ICE, electric, steam, whatever) have eliminated human and animal powered transportation.
Yes, there are a few people around who ride horses, have an ox-cart or pedal their own bikes, but in a commercial sense, those are rounding errors.
Compilers have already replaced software engineers producing native code by hand. (Apart from a handful of exceptions.) LLMs will and do have a similar impact one level higher.
I'm really, really happy when I see my less technical friends suddenly vibe-code things they have dreamed up!
I don't know what that means. But presumably you are talking about some difficult technical feat that one can perform with a vehicle?
I'm fairly sure, if it's something mechanical and a human can do it, the computers won't be far behind. But even if not, we can redesign the vehicles to make it easier for a computer, eg we can make all axes or even all wheels independently steerable and control their velocity individually. A human would be overwhelmed with that, they can barely keep hold of a steering wheel, but a computer wouldn't mind too much.
This sounds about right. When Uber's driverless car killed someone they got off pretty easy:
*"In March 2019, Arizona prosecutors ruled that Uber was not criminally responsible for the crash. The back-up driver of the vehicle was charged with negligent homicide, pled guilty to endangerment, and was sentenced to three years' probation." [0]
So.. there's a driver in driverless cars. A fall guy that will take all the blame should the company needs to produce someone to be arrested, but don't otherwise have leverage to earn a decent living
So.. there's a driver in driverless cars. A fall guy that will take all the blame should the company needs to produce someone to be arrested
Are you seriously pretending the driver doesn't have agency here? This accident was easily preventable by the safety driver, which makes the "fall guy" characterization misleading. Sure, maybe there was some risk of complacency, but what's the alternative? Should uber have gone full workplace surveillance and have a camera trained on the safety driver's face, to make sure she was paying attention?
But.. they did have that? What a bizarre argument.
And yes, if you make software that drives the car, release it into public traffic, and then your software runs someone over that would be plainly visible to a reasonable human driver (the misleading dashcam footage you release to make it seem way too dark [to a shitty dashcam sensor] notwithstanding) - you should absolutely bear responsibility! How is that even a question? You did that! Not whoever you put there as a "safety driver". We can adjudicate their responsibility separately, but it's certainly not 100%.
The driverless car which, as well as having an insufficient and negligent safety driver (a regime that the Air Transport and Train industries would be happy to provide the hundred years worth of evidence that allows us to know ahead of time that this is not going to work), also had safety devices disabled.
The point being, you shouldn't be allowed to just hand off liability to someone you know won't handle it. I don't care what you put in any contract, hiring someone should not be a get out of liability free card. You should be on the hook for putting in the effort required to be confident that liability is managed well.
You should in fact not be allowed to do something dangerous, but say you were not liable because the danger was someone else's responsibility. No! The danger was your responsibility, no matter who you hire to manage it!
We can agree that the driver made bad choices but I feel like you are skimming over the 2 women's responsibility in this situation. Intoxicated to the point of vomiting, arguing over the cleaning fee, and wandering away from the car while parked, yes illegally, on the freeway.
Not sure what your experiences have been with drunk people but I can tell you that dealing with 1 drunk person can be hard to control, let alone 2.
I'd be interested to hear where other people draw the line on the driver's culpability. If he left them at a gas station and one of them was still hit and killed by a car would he still be at fault? In my mind Uber/Lyft provide transportation, they aren't babysitters, there has to be a limit to their responsibility. Perhaps the driver was more at fault here but this outcome (how the driver reacted) is not in the slightest bit surprising to me given everything I know about Uber and how it treats drivers and passengers.
If you don’t punish the corporation they won’t ensure they vet their employees and have strict policies and procedures around handling customers.
So in my mind the driver was at fault criminal negligence, but when the driver can be any untrained pleb with a phone, the company assumes the risk and should be held liable.
I’m not at all opposed to Uber getting slapped. I just think that “the driver is the bad guy” is incredibly reductionist and absolves Uber of the responsibility that I think we both agree that hold.
The driver IS the bad guy. Any driver who stops and forces their customers onto a freeway doesn’t know how to drive, let alone shuttle people around for money. They would rather put people at risk than spend an hour cleaning their car. This is practically the definition of criminal negligence.
If you don’t punish the corporation they won’t ensure they vet their employees and have strict policies and procedures around handling customers.
What if that's what you want?
Why should we be pressuring corporate middlemen to be regulators and law enforcement? They're not only bad at it and in no position to do it well, their attempts do more harm than good.
How is a corporation supposed to "vet" drivers? The only plausible tools they have are things like background checks. So now you have someone who is only trying to put food on the table getting excluded from some of the only work it's easy to get quickly because they have an unrelated drug conviction from when they were 19 years old. Meanwhile the same thing happens in the case in question because that driver can pass the background check.
Whereas if you put the liability on the driver, i.e. the person who is actually there and making the decision, then losing their fancy new car and maybe going to jail provides the right incentive to not dump people in a dangerous place, to the person who is actually choosing to do it.
Dropping them off at a gore is basically throwing them in the middle of the highway, many of them don't have easy access to a safe location without crossing the highway.
The court itself said taking the nearby exit would have allowed him to drop them off at a safe location. Yes, they could have injured themselves after that, but it's not the same.
I did read it. In fact, I read a good bit of the PDF, not just the wiki. There are a lot of unanswered questions, and the PDF admits that. No one can seem to agree on exactly what happened or the sequence of events.
What’s not in question is that the two women were extremely intoxicated to the point of vomiting on themselves. The PDF alleges that one of the women shouted that there was an emergency, which is what originally caused the driver to pull over where he did.
It’s still not clear to me how much of this was the driver forcing them out and leaving them, and how much was they got out, refused to pay the cleaning fee, and so he just left them.
We aren’t getting clear views of what happened at all from the two people left alive.
What we can ask, however, is why isn't there a worldwide " I need help" button? Doesn't matter what your problem is, of what variety, you need help. The driver could have rang that, either of the women could have. Instead, one of the three people are dead. Oh well.
I’m not at all trying to downplay Uber’s responsibly here, I also am not pretending the driver is not at fault, however everyone seems to want to put the full/majority of the blame on the driver while reserving a bit for Uber as well. This whole subthread posits that self-driving cars would solve this (I find that laughable).
My point is: where do we draw the line? Intoxicated people are going to act irrationally and at what point does “low paid person who shuttles people from point A to point B” become responsible for the actions of their riders?
It’s still unclear how much of this was “forced out of the car” and “got out to argue and refused to get back in”, the timeline of events is incredibly muddy (as the linked PDF agrees) and having dealt with very intoxicated people I can easily imagine the challenges the driver (who doesn’t appear to speak English well or at all given they needed a translator in the arbitration) faced dealing with 2 drunk and irrational passengers.
Let me be crystal clear, I don’t at all think “oh well, someone died”. But attacking the driver isn’t going to fix the system that caused this.
I don't understand. What would such a button have done?
If somebody needed help, the driver may very well have to decided to stop ASAP, at the same gore point, and the women could have then chosen to immediately get out, and one of them would have gotten killed. Literally nothing would have changed.
Indeed, it sounds like one of the women was shouting there was an emergency, so the driver stopped. That is effectively "I need help". What would your button do any differently?
If you’re a taxi driver you have a duty of care not to dump your passengers on the side of a freeway where pedestrians aren’t allowed. Same with a railroad crossing
And if you stop the car because a passenger was yelling there was an emergency? If your passengers refuse to get back in the car and wander off?
The “facts” of this event are highly contested and not at all clear. I’m not saying what I typed above is what happened, but it’s just as likely as the other scenarios presented. The linked PDF acknowledges this and presents a few of the conflicting statements made by the surviving passenger and the driver.
The problem here is where he stopped. Since when would you consider letting anyone out at a gore point?! General rule is your skill takes someone into hazard, you are expected to get them back out of hazard. In this case, they're drunk--traffic is a hazard. Gore points are not supposed to be occupied at all, let alone let out passengers there.
I question the $20M, but I have no problem at all with finding fault.
The linked PDF says the driver alleges that one of the passengers yelled there was an emergency which is why he pulled over where he did, that “fact” is contested and we will probably never know exactly what happened. But I’m not ready to buy into “driver forced them out at a gore point” given everything I’ve read. I agree that was the final outcome, they were left there, but I can come up with a number of scenarios (some backed by the driver’s testimony) in where the driver isn’t quite the monster some people in this thread want to make them out to be.
I’ve had personal experience dealing with drunk people in my car, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how you would get to this point. And that was with drunk people I knew, and mostly liked, not strangers. Drunk people do not normally act logically, especially if they are to the point of throwing up on themselves due to their level of intoxication.
(in my country, to get a bus driver license, you have to go through training that explain how to act in weird situation, how to identify dangers and which danger to prefer. You have a whole hour about always stopping at a safe place (parking, bus stop, red lignt, stop sign) before getting involved with anything that happen inside)
In the US, in employment, there is no such thing as common sense. People come from diverse backgrounds. When you have a million employees, anything is possible as as an untrained baseline. Everything has to be trained.
You all realize that when AI takes everyone's jobs the only way people will survive is by pledging allegiance to AI companies so they feed and house them right? Its not going to lead to some utopia where people are free to paint and write novels all day. People will basically become slaves to these companies.
I would think twice about pushing for driverless cars and replacing people with agentic workflows.
The bad guy here is the driver. Could Uber have done more?
Isn't their entire business model build around bypassing the regulations build around the taxi industry? Things like training for new drivers and I think they even refused to do mandatory background checks early on.
If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.
When their driverless car ran over a cyclist they pretended it was too dark to see anything, using a video from a cheap camera as "evidence".
Yes the driver made a poor decision in a situation that he was not trained for. However enrolling and onboarding the driver is a part of Uber's process. The situation may have been avoided if Uber had this strict clause in its onboarding manual to never stop the car or drop the passenger at unsafe spot. The driver and rider are bound by the Uber negotiated contract atleast until the end of ride.
On the driverless cars, the chances are that the companies would come up with some innovative legal clause to add to their terms and services to avoid taking any liability from the driverless car's action.
The situation may have been avoided if Uber had this strict clause in its onboarding manual to never stop the car or drop the passenger at unsafe spot.
Its interesting, saying sorry for your mistakes using plain words does not have the same impact as saying it in a convincing manner as if you mean it. Giving them a 10 page long documentation and asking them to just acknowledge it as a part of onboarding process wont do the job. We are talking about human life here and an emphasis on security should be baked into mind by regular training, and it is usually required for such jobs in general.
Being responsible for some one else's safety should have a higher bar than being responsible for your own safety.
I cannot claim to have done the onboarding process myself, tried to look up online and the most I could find is that a good amount of time is spend on doing background checks. I was able to find Uber's employee onboarding information for their corporate employees and it turns out that there is indeed some training required for people who are managing your corporate property. Ironically I do not see any mandatory (ideally paid for) training provided by Uber to drivers when they are handling other human beings (passengers). And to be fair its hard to predict everything, mistakes happen unfortunately, the goal should always be to get to a better state than where we are as of today.
A company is liable for the actions of its workers whether they are W2 employees or 1099 independent contractors. That distinction governs the relationship between the worker and the company, not the company and its customers.
A worker's criminal actions also usually do not entail criminal liability for the company except in very rare situations.
So Uber took this into forced arbitration to avoid the courts and then the arbitration blew up in their face. Sorry, but there’s some strong schadenfreude there.
Arbitration has no particular basis in law so much as agreeing that a third party reaches some conclusion to resolve a civil dispute, though the law may be used to justify the conclusion, the conclusion is binding regardless, so as to make it so there's no appeals, etc., right? So by participating in the arbitration it means there's only the conclusion and no basis to object or appeal, right?
The MP3 lawsuits were filed in the districts in which the defendants resided. Almost all of the 94 districts had MP3 sharing lawsuits.
You are probably thinking of patents. For a long time the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX) was by far the most popular choice for patent lawsuits by far, especially against big tech companies.
Then there was a Supreme Court decision (TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, 581 U.S. 258 (2017)) [1]. It made it so corporations can only be sued for patent infringement in the state where they are incorporated or a district where they have both infringed and have a regular and established place of business.
EDTX is largely a rural district with no really major cities. Most big tech companies have no physical offices there.
Many of those cases moved to the Western District of Texas (WDTX). WDTX includes Austin, and a whole lot of big tech has offices there.
There was one judge in Waco whose court was particularly attractive to patent lawsuits, due to having plaintiff-friendly procedures and a rapid trial schedule. 100% of patent cases filed in Waco went to him. In a few years his court was handling 20% of all patents cases in the entire country.
The Supreme Court and Congress did not like so many patent cases being handled by a single judge, and the WDTX Chief Judge making it so patent cases filed in WDTX are random distributed among its 13 judges.
Cases against big tech companies mostly moved to Delaware (where many big tech companies are incorporated) or Northern California.
EDTX regained the number one spot for patent cases after that, although not from big tech cases. Delaware and Northern California remain the big places for those.
EDTX is #1 because even though it is rural and has almost no big tech presence, it still has major retailers, grocery chains, distribution centers, and communication hubs. For patent suits not against big tech it still works fine.
Also, Heartland did not apply to international defendants. They can still be sued in any district in the US.
The biggest reason EDTX is a popular choice if you can pick it is not plaintiffs do particularly well there. It depends on when you look because it has varied quite a bit, but there are often other districts where plaintiffs win more.
The big reasons are:
• Patent litigation is complex, both for the court and the attorneys. Regardless of which side of the case is on you want a court with experience. If the court is inexperienced the case can drag on which is expensive, burning up lots of billable hours of the expensive patent litigation firm you are using. EDTX has many patent experienced judges, and has developed rules and procedures to move cases along.
• In addition to cases moving along efficiently once they get going, the get going faster in EDTX.
Patent suits are civil cases. They take a back seat to criminal cases. EDTX simply does not have much federal crime (or state crime that ends up in federal district courts).
At no point in time has anyone ever suspected that companies requiring arbitration was in the best interests of the consumer. This is very plainly an attempt to avoid responsibility and consequences. It's a margin-improving policy. The safety of its customers are merely a number on a spreadsheet.
Imagine how this could've gone if Uber had used its tracking and vast knowledge of roadways to know to follow up with riders on a cancelled ride on the highway or even deny drivers the right to cancel the trip on the highway because that is unsafe. Could've prevented all this, have they learned from this case to prevent future incidents?
This is what happens when every single company we have an app for forces us to re-agree to new TOC (most this year, but last year too).
Go check your e-mail - look at all the TOC agreements you had to make recently. How many added a new (or amended an existing) arbitration clause?
Too many. And consumers are stuck either agreeing blindly/under duress, or uninstalling the app? These are apps we use and rely on, and don't have enough competition to refuse.
Lyft and Uber. Name one other competitor in the app space. Without googling it
Rant over (it wasn't even a rant at the beginning but couldn't help myself)
ESH. Everyone sucks here. The person that hit them. The driver that dropped them off. The girls drinking to the point of stupor. Uber for not training drivers enough.
An important detail, according to the driver he didn't force her out. The girl got out after he pulled over to argue about / inspect the vomit and assess the situation.
"Tran argued that he responded reasonably to a perceived sudden emergency caused by the passengers' prior excessive drinking, of which he said he was unaware, & that he could not anticipate that Normandin-Parker would leave his vehicle and wander into traffic."
So Uber ToS requires you to accept arbitration, then, when they are found responsible for damages, they still don’t want to pay. Seems pretty shitty for the consumer.
I don't think there's anything to suggest Uber refused to pay the arbitration award? They just stated that they disagreed with the outcome.
(Which is not to say there's not plenty to dislike about this whole case, including the fact it's forced arbitration...)
In that case why is there a "settlement agreement" mentioned that has a $10M penalty for disparagement? Not sure what that refers to exactly but how can Uber (try to) dictate terms in the settlement?
It does seem they're trying to get out of it somehow.
It sounds like they didn't agree to that but anyone can propose a settlement.
Really? Isn't the arbitration binding and therefore the end of the matter?
Looking at a filing by Uber (https://www.panish.law/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Uber-Techn...), and in particular Exhibit 8, the ADR award is confirmed by a settlement agreement (and if no agreement is come to, then a civil action would confirm the terms of the award).
There was a dispute about whether the amount awarded was confidential or not (Uber contended it was; plaintiff contended it wasn't), but on the face of it, had plaintiff agreed to the confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses, Uber would have paid up.
I suppose it could be argued that Uber were trying to write in clauses they knew plaintiff wouldn't agree to, but it's not obvious to me that a different plaintiff wouldn't have agreed to confidentiality and non-disparagement.
(FWIW, it's not clear to me whether Uber have now in fact paid up; they made a statement to the Guardian that _suggests_ they have, but the fact that they didn't explicitly say so means I wouldn't want to draw that inference)
I mean both are right, they made a bullshit filing about something being confidential, in order to negotiate a confidentiality settlement against it.
It's minor, but they are not accepting the award as-is, they are still trying to negotiating, albeit in a minor way, not by contesting the amount, but a confidentiality clause.
They love to negotiate confidentiality clauses, there's few cases without it, including a case by Mike Rafi's personal injury firm which resulted from an omission by Uber (and later Uber being much more anal about confidentiality). I think it's a strategy to avoid case law catching on.
It's a strategy to prevent other arbitrators from recognizing what a death is worth. Now everybody can google the case and adjust payouts accordingly.
Moreso it’s them whining about losing when and trying to add a non-disparagement clause at $10m per event to the settlement for even factual information relating to the case.
Uber were the ones who forced arbitration ostensibly because it often lowers their overall legal and damages bills.
Forced arbitration is creating a parallel legal system where certain companies are excluded from the consequences of their own actions. One might even say they’re becoming a protected class even.
I have been on both sides of arbitration, winning and losing. It’s much better. Basically legislation done right (for civil matters).
The only people who really win from traditional legislation are lawyers (and plaintiffs counsel who use the long expensive process to blackmail people - which is 90% of civil cases)
Did you mean "litigation" rather than "legislation" ?
I thought legislation made a lot of sense:
If you had better laws, arbitration wouldn't be as necessary.
Arbitration can be more efficient, but both parties should have an option to choose it, a direct settlement or public court. The average consumer is denied the choice by using these everyday services that have non-negotiable contracts.
None of the parties should have option to choose it, it should be within govt. justice system, just have arbitration court
Many places have a ‘small claims court’, which is very similar to arbitration. The issue is that class action lawsuits are very profitable for plaintiff lawyers working on contingency, so those are the cases that get brought.
They are very profitable when they win, what is the win rate of class action cases. Also what is the win rate of chosen class action cases versus all potential class action cases.
Measurement matters here.
The 'tipping point' for class actions is usually the class certification, not a final judgement by the court. Class actions are absurdly expensive for defendants, largely due to the scope of discovery, and they also cause problems for public companies (for reporting and other reasons), so public companies almost always settle them after the class is certified. On the other side, these settlements often don't offer much benefit to the class, because the plaintiff counsel take a massive fee off the top, pay off the lead plaintiff, and don't have much incentive to do anything for the remainder of the class.
Small claims is great in that in most states lawyers generally aren't allowed so right out the gate you remove the wealth asymmetry issue. The downside is the dollar amount is very small. I'd like to see small claims limits expanded tbh.
Adjust them to the past X0 years of inflation from whenever the limits were last set, and peg them to inflation from then out.
You seem to be missing that arbitrators have a financial incentive to side with the company, which pays them? Explained in this video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787720
I wonder how often this is the case. The one time I read the fine print when signing up for a service, it said that I had the right to disagree with the choice of arbiter, and get some national organization to pick a different arbiter independently.
I don't know how common this is, but yeah, this is a bare minimum that one should have with arbitration.
But, many of the members of that organization make their money from various forced arbitration deals, so that doesn't necessarily move the needle back towards the consumer.
This isn't specifically business vs consumer. The problem is ruling against the guy who brings you more business isn't good for getting more business. And you have a related problem with big fish vs big fish (for example, arbitration of union contracts) where you have to appease both sides--go something like 50/50 regardless of merits.
Very clear case, arbitration is fine. Fuzzy case, I would much prefer something that doesn't tip the scales in advance.
Note that the same bias problem exists with home inspectors. Realtors won't like inspectors that find things that kill deals. That one can be solved by hiring your own inspector with no input from the realtor.
Arbitration is fine. Forced arbitration is not.
They can't force arbitration on you.
If eg Uber runs you over or bumps your car, you have no contractual relationship with them, and thus they can't force arbitration on you.
That's why they have to write the arbitrary clause into their ToS that they need you to agree on. No forced arbitration.
Of course, if you don't agree with the ToS, Uber is also not forced to transport you. But that's fair enough.
No, that's not fair enough. It's a very one sided contract where one party has all the power.
IMO, no it is not. It should not be legal to force arbitration via ToS.
Letting entities that hold the vast majority of the leverage and financial/legal/political power in a contract opt out of the legal system and pick an alternative with a financial incentive to side with them is perhaps "fair" to you, but a lot of people would disagree on the "enough" part.
Have you ever ridden an Uber? Then yes, they absolutely can. You agreed to it when you installed the app.
I always thought arbitration was forcing weaker parties out of the fairer legal system. Now I wonder if that's a planted idea by the legal industry? It made sense to me that arbitration was paid for by the company, and there would be incentives for the judge to side with their long term meal ticket. But perhaps all that is wrong? I really wish you could elaborate on why it is better, I'm very interested in challenging my assumptions here.
Arbitration is secret. There's no way to determine if it's fair.
Your reasoning makes sense, and I was concerned in a similar way when I filed my arbitration case (for about $8k) against the manufacturer of my leased car. The so called “Lemon law” in California suggests the arbitration as the first step. Surprisingly enough, I won the case, and it only took me about an hour of collecting documents and filling in the forms, and 45 minutes of the phone call.
Even though the car manufacturer does indeed pay for the arbitration, I never felt the arbiter is biased, and the judgement was completely in my favor.
Doesn't arbitration avoid setting binding precedent? So even if the consumer wins a case, it's still overall better for the company.
Companies like arbitration because unlike in a civil lawsuit, the plaintiff cannot compel discovery. Paying for an arbitrator is cheaper than going through discovery, especially if the discovery unearths facts materially damaging to the business.
This is simply untrue, and honestly anyone who thinks our legal system does not provide justice needs to go travel the world to see how it really works for 80% of the global population.
All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, you can start with arbitration but if you believe on good merits you have a case and fail arbitration you should have the right to your day in court.
Throwing out our whole legal system because sometimes the lawyers make the most money is reductionist at best.
I don't think you really read the comment. They specifically mentioned it for civil matters
That's 75%+ of all legal cases.
I believe what he's referring to is the cost of the legal system. Lawyers cost money, and if the other party has a lot more money, they can play all kinds of tactics to keep the case going (filing pointless motions, drowning your lawyer with huge amounts of documents, etc).
With arbitration, the arbiter can put an end to those shenanigans really quickly, because they're not legally obligated to allow for that kind of crap.
There are ups and downs to both systems. The benefits are there for parties of roughly equal size. The down side is there is no recourse if the arbiter makes a completely unfair judgement (e.g. because he thinks some law should not apply, etc).
That just makes it the worst of both worlds! The whole point of arbitration is not to have a war of attrition, and to make the process efficient. Your solution doesn't take care of it. If I'm a business getting into a contract with another business, knowing that you can't outspend me in court is important, and lets both of us make a deal. If I know you still want the option to go to court, it's as if arbitration wasn't on the table.
A better system would be to change the law such that for certain, predefined offenses, you can't waive your right to go through the legal system (e.g. sexual harassment).
And of course, both parties should have say on who the arbiter is.
Finally, you are talking to someone who's had experience with arbitration. You might want to tone things down in your rhetoric if you don't have your own experience to bring to the table. Things might sound fine in theory, but can be really, really bad in practice. As an example, on How I Built This, whenever he's interviewing a founder that went to court to enforce a patent they owned, he asks if it was worth it. The answer almost always is "It was a bad idea and we shouldn't have filed a case." This is coming from those who won in court.
That's weird. Two things can be true at once: arbitrary is better than the American legal system, and the American legal system is better than what 80% of the global population live under.
It is! You explicitly have to opt in, that's why Uber needs have it in their ToS that you accept. They can't just force it on you, when you have no contractual relationship with them.
"opt in" - as part of a 300 page TOS that you never read, that is modified 4 times annually and you are told to read all 300 pages again.
Prove it. Where are the transcripts of all arbitration proceedings so we can see that arbitration is fair?
See, that's why court proceedings are public, so that the public can verify that courts are fair. It's also why judges are appointed by democratically elected politicians. Who appointed your arbitrator?
And of course the court system is bad and unfair in a bunch of ways. But it's starting from a much better place than secret, forced arbitration.
Worth noting that this is only for the civil responsibility, that is, deciding the award of damages.
The criminal charges, if any, whether to the driver or to Uber management (possibly from the sham structuring of worker categorization and corporate structure in order to reduce tax liabilities while reducing control and thus endangering consumers) are proper in state criminal courts and can never be delegated to private courts.
In this case, that doesn't seem to be what happened? The judge ruled against them.
In general, most issues are being redirected to forced arbitration and not enough people can or effort to sue these companies, so in actual effect, they’re immune one might say.
First to be clear, I am speaking in general terms. I know nothing about this case, I don't want to know anything about this case, but I have just scrolled through people's thoughts on arbitration here and thought I should offer a general alternative perspective. To be clear I'm not interested in blindly defending Uber either. So here goes...
Arbitration clauses will be found pretty much everywhere. They come under the auspice of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) of which the top-three ways are: mediation, arbitration and ombudsmen.
The whole point of ADR is that:
1. there are only so many courts in a given jurisdiction and there are only so many judges in any jurisdiction, and both courts and judges tend to have large backlogs.
2. added to which going to court is expensive and time consuming. And if the other side has deep pockets and you loose, you end up paying the hourly rates of very expensive lawyers in smart shoes that the opposition employed because 600+/hour/person is peanuts to them.
So that's where ADR comes in. Its more informal, its cheaper to do and the costs side if you loose are kept under control.
Because ADR is an informal environment, this can also work in your favour. The timetable and parameters are flexible and the final agreement reached can easily be better than whatever a judge might have handed down after listening to both side's lawyers bicker.
Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given some sort of ADR a go first.
Is it perfect, of course not. But neither are the courts. Your outcome in court is effectively dependent on both side's lawyers and what judge you get, so you having a better outcome in court is not necessarily guaranteed !
We all know the talking points from big corporations about why they force everyone into arbitration out of the goodness of their hearts. We don't need it regurgitated as if it's the truth.
Its not a regurgitation. Its the facts.
It applies to small businesses too.
A mom and pop shop will (or should !) also have ADR clauses in its contracts.
And the court will certainly take a very dim view if you try to sue a mom and pop shop without having tried ADR.
But Uber's terms explicitly force consumers to waive their right to go to court if they want to access Uber's service.
In most jurisdictions there are often laws related to unfair contract terms.
And even if there are no such laws, judges remain free to rule clauses and contracts void.
So you might waive that right in theory. But in practice I doubt you'll find it would hold up in court.
That's not the case in this situation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility_LLC_v._Concepc...
Arbitration is fine. There's no reason people shouldn't be allowed to freely engage the services of an arbitrator.
What people take issue with is forced arbitration. The problem isn't really about the arbitration at all, the problem is the part where you lose access to the courts. That should not be allowed.
“Nothing is stopping you” - most TOSes mandate arbitration, and unless you have something particularly egregious and a sympathetic judge the first thing on the docket is going to be a Motion to Dismiss.
And agreed. For better or worse. My minor stepdaughter was involved in a car accident. No liability was found, and the other party tried to sue her in Small Claims court which, in my state, you can’t sue a minor in (as no attorneys are permitted, so you’d have a minor representing themselves). The judge noted this, and told the other party “if you want to sue you will need to sue her parents or guardians”… and then tried to push us into binding arbitration anyway.
Which of course got my insurance company upset and involving attorneys on procedural/constitutional law, about challenging the judges authority to push us into that given there was no jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place so there was none to enforce us into arbitration (which in itself was an entirely separate farce, including where the “neutral” arbitrator berated me and said “I don’t understand why, as a person, if you know your insurance is going to be the one paying, you don’t just agree to give them all they’re asking for.”).
Video from Louis Rossmann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2B3uBQuGnU
No. Just no. We don't need monetized influencers pontificating and building fandoms on this. That is gross.
Louis founded the Consumer Rights wiki and also wrote the article that's the subject of this NH thread.
Louis Rossman does not take sponsorships, and turns off ads for his videos as much as YouTube allows. His videos are for his opinions, not making money.
Mr Rossman will literally tell you to use an ad-blocker to watch his videos and refuses to take sponsorships, actively does not want money from making YouTube videos and just wants to get the word out. I'd agree with you if it was literally any other creator.
Two things can be true at once, especially when talking about people’s behaviour. I don’t know this guy from atom, but if he’s a YouTuber then my instinct is to not trust him.
Your instinct is, believe it or not, imperfect.
Good outcome, but forced arbitration should still be illegal.
If you have been through both processes, you would more likely say the traditional civil process should be illegal.
No, you would say it needs to be reformed and funded, we have an extremely legalistic society that allows endless delaying and does not fund its core services very well.
Food for thought (not specifically relevant to this case): I wonder how much would go away if the US had universal healthcare, or to put it another way, how much of its legal system is spent figuring out who pays for medical treatment
What's the line? If 2 brothers sign a contract, can't they decide their father will be the judge if disputes arise?
If there's a sports match, shouldn't the sports arbiter be able to decide whether some team scored a goal or not?
These are all valid civil contracts. It only affects the civil claims, never criminal, and the venue for disputing the arbitration clause (if you believe arbitration wasn't legal to begin with) are the public courts anyways, who will delegate or not to the private court.
Almost all countries recognize it and it has a quite defensible theory.
i think the keyword is "forced". there's very little now that the consumer can do because it seems everything requires arbitration now and people still have to operate in society.
I agree that word is putting some work, and calling it forced is already partisan.
To the extent that you believe it is forced, you can dispute it on a public court, and if you can prove you were forced, you wouldn't be subject to arbitration.
Arbitration in private courts only exists if both parties agree prior to agreeing to the contract to that clause.
If you believe that it's forced because you never read the Terms of Agreement, I feel that's more of a discussion of whether clickwrapped terms are valid or not, it would be a way more radical position to believe that they have absolutely no effect. And if they do have an effect, agreeing to private arbitration is no different.
I think we need to stop calling one-sided "terms documents" that are entirely written by one party, the party with 100x+ the monetary resources and power of the other party, with no input from that other party and not subject to any negotiation whatsoever, "agreements." They are not what any reasonable person would call an agreement. There is no meeting of the minds, and the terms are entirely controlled by one party.
Don't forget that same party is also able to change them at any time, Darth Vader style!
It sure is contextual. And nobody would disagree with your examples. The difference here seems to be more of a power imbalance than any objection to terms. In particular, terms of service are often very dense documents. Many people are only presented these documents at the moment they sign up for a service. And people are not usually careful in these situations. I bet most of the Uber signups were outside of bars or venues where someone really needed to get home. So there’s some duress there. So it’s probably not that cut and dried. It’s more analogous to presenting a contract to harvest your wheat field the day before a big rain. If you’re the only guy with a combine for miles then that puts you in a position of relative power. And historically the US hasn’t permitted people to exploit their positions to the maximum extent, usually when it would be immoral by the standards of society. I think this exists in a gray area. It’s not that easy.
I think my gripe is less that it exists and more so that it's not a negotiated agreement. I think it should only be allowed if the contract was negotiated between two parties with full authority to offer any terms in the negotiation. If it's a standardized, take it or leave it, contract where one party has no opportunity to offer alternative terms that get proper and full consideration by the other party, it shouldn't be allowed. In most of the examples you give, they are contracts that have been clearly negotiated between parties, not click-wrapped take it or leave it, my way or the highway, terms.
The line that minimum should be against using this as a tool against consumers. To the extent it should exist at all, which is arguable, it must be between parties that are either equal in standing or have genuine commercial disputes between duly organized business entities.
I think such terms should require signatures and initials. Holding people to terms they are unaware of is not fair.
Arbitration isn't the issue. The issue is when one of the parties has vastly more legal resources than the other, and gets to pick the arbiter.
Arbitration is fine for two equal parties when a third party neutral arbiter is chosen. I've been through that kind of arbitration and it was great.
But when the huge company gets to pick the arbiter (or even just threaten the arbiter with taking away all their other cases), that is when you have problems.
Secret justice is not justice.
An interesting take, never really thought about it. Why isn't it justice?
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/star-chamber/
I'm not the right person to explain English history, secret courts, and the American revolution. Suffice to say, public courts a vital check on the power of the state by way of the court of public opinion. The real final court of appeal.
Where is the power of the state involved here?
Courts are a function of the state.
Not open, not accountable by the public, lack of juries. It's not hard to see how arbitration mostly benefits corporations and not the civilians.
So should guilty pleas, nondisclosure agreements, and trials where juries can't decide on degree rather than prosecutors.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49761654
All these companies are universally sleazy and refuse to take responsibility, no matter what. It's pretty much par for the course: deny you are responsible, try to control the court case in such a way that you inflict even more suffering on the victims and their families and ultimately, even if you're found to be in the wrong do everything to stall payment until each and every legal avenue to do so is exhausted.
The dream of every major tech company, making ridiculous profits while taking zero legal responsibility for what you create...
The bad guy here is the driver. Could Uber have done more? That's what the arbitrators concluded.
But the reality is that this is a victory for the driverless cars (Waymo, Tesla, etc.). If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.
Do you expect that Waymo will not take responsibility for the driverless car?
There was no world in which driverless cars weren't the eventual outcome anyway.
And, it's not exactly taking responsibility for the driver. It's taking responsibility for the safety of the passenger using their service. This is a different thing. Driverless cars still can't allow their passengers to get injured and killed which is going to present a lot of technical and social challenges for these companies.
They all thought that playing a word game would get them out of the difficult problems all transportation companies have to solve and be liable for.
There's this prevailing narrative that someday self-driving cars will eliminate all human-controlled driving and that these types of stories are like milestones in the path to that future utopia.
But I don't think that's the case anymore than the narrative that LLMs will eventually displace all software engineers.
The invention of the automobile didn't eliminate all horses, but it certainly replaced the vast majority of horses.
In 7 years we've gone from GPT-2 to Fable and Astra. There seems to be no sign of slowdown, except from the top AI labs who want to slow down out of caution. It would be incredibly surprising to me if in another 7 years, my software engineering skills were still useful. AI capabilities will get to the point where even the best human is adding noise to the system, similar to today's chess engines and calculators.
Self-driving cars will take longer to roll out because they require new hardware and changes to laws, but I don't see how a career such as "truck driver" or "cab driver" exists in 20 years. At most it would be for a few niche uses and tourism novelty (similar to steam locomotives or horse-drawn buggies).
I mostly agree. However, I do actually think that many of the skills you use as a software engineer will still be useful in 7 years. It's just that, as you suggest, no one will let us near any actual code.
This profession has always required reskilling/ changing based on new technologies. How many people are still meaningfully employed as pascal programmers?
Almost every career requires staying on top of new developments to remain competitive. Even mechanics must learn about new systems in vehicles to be able to repair them. Not many people are still meaningfully employed as Model T mechanics.
The difference with LLMs is that they are a substitute for more general cognitive skills. Right now they are also a complement (using them increases the productivity of humans writing software), but it's only a matter of time before they improve to the point where they fully substitute. And it seems quite likely that the timeline for that is significantly shorter than my remaining career.
If you are confident that there will be specific tasks that LLMs can't accomplish in 2033, I'm happy to entertain such ideas. But considering the current rate of progress, I can't think of anything like that.
Self-driving cars and trucks will eliminate human-controlled driving in the same way that engines (ICE, electric, steam, whatever) have eliminated human and animal powered transportation.
Yes, there are a few people around who ride horses, have an ox-cart or pedal their own bikes, but in a commercial sense, those are rounding errors.
Compilers have already replaced software engineers producing native code by hand. (Apart from a handful of exceptions.) LLMs will and do have a similar impact one level higher.
I'm really, really happy when I see my less technical friends suddenly vibe-code things they have dreamed up!
And when will the self driving car be able to orthogonal park a trailer by backing down and alley?
I don't know what that means. But presumably you are talking about some difficult technical feat that one can perform with a vehicle?
I'm fairly sure, if it's something mechanical and a human can do it, the computers won't be far behind. But even if not, we can redesign the vehicles to make it easier for a computer, eg we can make all axes or even all wheels independently steerable and control their velocity individually. A human would be overwhelmed with that, they can barely keep hold of a steering wheel, but a computer wouldn't mind too much.
Not difficult just an edge case with a more questionable value proposition for implementation.
Yes I considered independent wheels but a basic trailer is $3k, which doesn't leave much room for anything complicated.
The point is there's a million of these edge cases for which autonomy will not economically compete for another hundred years.
No. The easiest thing to do would be arbitrate against uber. Deploying a fleet of self driving cars would be much, much more complicated.
To use the force of law and government to force them to take responsibility.
Every other answer is bullshit.
This sounds about right. When Uber's driverless car killed someone they got off pretty easy:
*"In March 2019, Arizona prosecutors ruled that Uber was not criminally responsible for the crash. The back-up driver of the vehicle was charged with negligent homicide, pled guilty to endangerment, and was sentenced to three years' probation." [0]
0:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
So.. there's a driver in driverless cars. A fall guy that will take all the blame should the company needs to produce someone to be arrested, but don't otherwise have leverage to earn a decent living
Are you seriously pretending the driver doesn't have agency here? This accident was easily preventable by the safety driver, which makes the "fall guy" characterization misleading. Sure, maybe there was some risk of complacency, but what's the alternative? Should uber have gone full workplace surveillance and have a camera trained on the safety driver's face, to make sure she was paying attention?
But.. they did have that? What a bizarre argument.
And yes, if you make software that drives the car, release it into public traffic, and then your software runs someone over that would be plainly visible to a reasonable human driver (the misleading dashcam footage you release to make it seem way too dark [to a shitty dashcam sensor] notwithstanding) - you should absolutely bear responsibility! How is that even a question? You did that! Not whoever you put there as a "safety driver". We can adjudicate their responsibility separately, but it's certainly not 100%.
The driverless car that very much had a safety driver, which got distracted because she was watching TV shows on her phone?
How well would you handle being paid to do nothing without distractions, 8 hours every day?
The driverless car which, as well as having an insufficient and negligent safety driver (a regime that the Air Transport and Train industries would be happy to provide the hundred years worth of evidence that allows us to know ahead of time that this is not going to work), also had safety devices disabled.
The point being, you shouldn't be allowed to just hand off liability to someone you know won't handle it. I don't care what you put in any contract, hiring someone should not be a get out of liability free card. You should be on the hook for putting in the effort required to be confident that liability is managed well.
You should in fact not be allowed to do something dangerous, but say you were not liable because the danger was someone else's responsibility. No! The danger was your responsibility, no matter who you hire to manage it!
We can agree that the driver made bad choices but I feel like you are skimming over the 2 women's responsibility in this situation. Intoxicated to the point of vomiting, arguing over the cleaning fee, and wandering away from the car while parked, yes illegally, on the freeway.
Not sure what your experiences have been with drunk people but I can tell you that dealing with 1 drunk person can be hard to control, let alone 2.
I'd be interested to hear where other people draw the line on the driver's culpability. If he left them at a gas station and one of them was still hit and killed by a car would he still be at fault? In my mind Uber/Lyft provide transportation, they aren't babysitters, there has to be a limit to their responsibility. Perhaps the driver was more at fault here but this outcome (how the driver reacted) is not in the slightest bit surprising to me given everything I know about Uber and how it treats drivers and passengers.
If you don’t punish the corporation they won’t ensure they vet their employees and have strict policies and procedures around handling customers.
So in my mind the driver was at fault criminal negligence, but when the driver can be any untrained pleb with a phone, the company assumes the risk and should be held liable.
I’m not at all opposed to Uber getting slapped. I just think that “the driver is the bad guy” is incredibly reductionist and absolves Uber of the responsibility that I think we both agree that hold.
The driver IS the bad guy. Any driver who stops and forces their customers onto a freeway doesn’t know how to drive, let alone shuttle people around for money. They would rather put people at risk than spend an hour cleaning their car. This is practically the definition of criminal negligence.
Except for the fact that they don't actually know that's what happened.
What if that's what you want?
Why should we be pressuring corporate middlemen to be regulators and law enforcement? They're not only bad at it and in no position to do it well, their attempts do more harm than good.
How is a corporation supposed to "vet" drivers? The only plausible tools they have are things like background checks. So now you have someone who is only trying to put food on the table getting excluded from some of the only work it's easy to get quickly because they have an unrelated drug conviction from when they were 19 years old. Meanwhile the same thing happens in the case in question because that driver can pass the background check.
Whereas if you put the liability on the driver, i.e. the person who is actually there and making the decision, then losing their fancy new car and maybe going to jail provides the right incentive to not dump people in a dangerous place, to the person who is actually choosing to do it.
Dropping them off at a gore is basically throwing them in the middle of the highway, many of them don't have easy access to a safe location without crossing the highway.
The court itself said taking the nearby exit would have allowed him to drop them off at a safe location. Yes, they could have injured themselves after that, but it's not the same.
Why don’t you read the case in question before wildly speculating as to the responsibilities of a rideshare driver?
You can’t dump your passengers on the freeway, for any reason. It’s not safe for them or for the other drivers on the road.
I did read it. In fact, I read a good bit of the PDF, not just the wiki. There are a lot of unanswered questions, and the PDF admits that. No one can seem to agree on exactly what happened or the sequence of events.
What’s not in question is that the two women were extremely intoxicated to the point of vomiting on themselves. The PDF alleges that one of the women shouted that there was an emergency, which is what originally caused the driver to pull over where he did.
It’s still not clear to me how much of this was the driver forcing them out and leaving them, and how much was they got out, refused to pay the cleaning fee, and so he just left them.
We aren’t getting clear views of what happened at all from the two people left alive.
What we can ask, however, is why isn't there a worldwide " I need help" button? Doesn't matter what your problem is, of what variety, you need help. The driver could have rang that, either of the women could have. Instead, one of the three people are dead. Oh well.
I’m not at all trying to downplay Uber’s responsibly here, I also am not pretending the driver is not at fault, however everyone seems to want to put the full/majority of the blame on the driver while reserving a bit for Uber as well. This whole subthread posits that self-driving cars would solve this (I find that laughable).
My point is: where do we draw the line? Intoxicated people are going to act irrationally and at what point does “low paid person who shuttles people from point A to point B” become responsible for the actions of their riders?
It’s still unclear how much of this was “forced out of the car” and “got out to argue and refused to get back in”, the timeline of events is incredibly muddy (as the linked PDF agrees) and having dealt with very intoxicated people I can easily imagine the challenges the driver (who doesn’t appear to speak English well or at all given they needed a translator in the arbitration) faced dealing with 2 drunk and irrational passengers.
Let me be crystal clear, I don’t at all think “oh well, someone died”. But attacking the driver isn’t going to fix the system that caused this.
I don't understand. What would such a button have done?
If somebody needed help, the driver may very well have to decided to stop ASAP, at the same gore point, and the women could have then chosen to immediately get out, and one of them would have gotten killed. Literally nothing would have changed.
Indeed, it sounds like one of the women was shouting there was an emergency, so the driver stopped. That is effectively "I need help". What would your button do any differently?
If you’re a taxi driver you have a duty of care not to dump your passengers on the side of a freeway where pedestrians aren’t allowed. Same with a railroad crossing
And if you stop the car because a passenger was yelling there was an emergency? If your passengers refuse to get back in the car and wander off?
The “facts” of this event are highly contested and not at all clear. I’m not saying what I typed above is what happened, but it’s just as likely as the other scenarios presented. The linked PDF acknowledges this and presents a few of the conflicting statements made by the surviving passenger and the driver.
The problem here is where he stopped. Since when would you consider letting anyone out at a gore point?! General rule is your skill takes someone into hazard, you are expected to get them back out of hazard. In this case, they're drunk--traffic is a hazard. Gore points are not supposed to be occupied at all, let alone let out passengers there.
I question the $20M, but I have no problem at all with finding fault.
The linked PDF says the driver alleges that one of the passengers yelled there was an emergency which is why he pulled over where he did, that “fact” is contested and we will probably never know exactly what happened. But I’m not ready to buy into “driver forced them out at a gore point” given everything I’ve read. I agree that was the final outcome, they were left there, but I can come up with a number of scenarios (some backed by the driver’s testimony) in where the driver isn’t quite the monster some people in this thread want to make them out to be.
I’ve had personal experience dealing with drunk people in my car, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how you would get to this point. And that was with drunk people I knew, and mostly liked, not strangers. Drunk people do not normally act logically, especially if they are to the point of throwing up on themselves due to their level of intoxication.
Uber is bad too for not training drivers to not do something like this.
I've driven busses and I was never trained not to do this. This falls under common sense.
Maybe not common sense, but if you have a drivers license you should absolutely know it
(in my country, to get a bus driver license, you have to go through training that explain how to act in weird situation, how to identify dangers and which danger to prefer. You have a whole hour about always stopping at a safe place (parking, bus stop, red lignt, stop sign) before getting involved with anything that happen inside)
In the US, in employment, there is no such thing as common sense. People come from diverse backgrounds. When you have a million employees, anything is possible as as an untrained baseline. Everything has to be trained.
You all realize that when AI takes everyone's jobs the only way people will survive is by pledging allegiance to AI companies so they feed and house them right? Its not going to lead to some utopia where people are free to paint and write novels all day. People will basically become slaves to these companies.
I would think twice about pushing for driverless cars and replacing people with agentic workflows.
Isn't their entire business model build around bypassing the regulations build around the taxi industry? Things like training for new drivers and I think they even refused to do mandatory background checks early on.
When their driverless car ran over a cyclist they pretended it was too dark to see anything, using a video from a cheap camera as "evidence".
Cars are an amazing way to shift liability around. Try to start your own rail line, good luck. Have 10,000 drivers with 10,000 accidents? no problem.
Yes the driver made a poor decision in a situation that he was not trained for. However enrolling and onboarding the driver is a part of Uber's process. The situation may have been avoided if Uber had this strict clause in its onboarding manual to never stop the car or drop the passenger at unsafe spot. The driver and rider are bound by the Uber negotiated contract atleast until the end of ride.
On the driverless cars, the chances are that the companies would come up with some innovative legal clause to add to their terms and services to avoid taking any liability from the driverless car's action.
You think they don't?
Pretty sure they don't.
Its interesting, saying sorry for your mistakes using plain words does not have the same impact as saying it in a convincing manner as if you mean it. Giving them a 10 page long documentation and asking them to just acknowledge it as a part of onboarding process wont do the job. We are talking about human life here and an emphasis on security should be baked into mind by regular training, and it is usually required for such jobs in general.
Being responsible for some one else's safety should have a higher bar than being responsible for your own safety.
I cannot claim to have done the onboarding process myself, tried to look up online and the most I could find is that a good amount of time is spend on doing background checks. I was able to find Uber's employee onboarding information for their corporate employees and it turns out that there is indeed some training required for people who are managing your corporate property. Ironically I do not see any mandatory (ideally paid for) training provided by Uber to drivers when they are handling other human beings (passengers). And to be fair its hard to predict everything, mistakes happen unfortunately, the goal should always be to get to a better state than where we are as of today.
A company is liable for the actions of its workers whether they are W2 employees or 1099 independent contractors. That distinction governs the relationship between the worker and the company, not the company and its customers.
A worker's criminal actions also usually do not entail criminal liability for the company except in very rare situations.
And surely the DMV has far greater 'vicarious liability', as they're the ones that issue licenses.
So Uber took this into forced arbitration to avoid the courts and then the arbitration blew up in their face. Sorry, but there’s some strong schadenfreude there.
They'll select a more favorable arbitrator next time.
Arbitration has no particular basis in law so much as agreeing that a third party reaches some conclusion to resolve a civil dispute, though the law may be used to justify the conclusion, the conclusion is binding regardless, so as to make it so there's no appeals, etc., right? So by participating in the arbitration it means there's only the conclusion and no basis to object or appeal, right?
Federal law [1] and at least one state [2] provide routes for appeal to real courts.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/9/16
[2] https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=7.06.050
Another frustrating aspect of forced arbitration is Uber can now avoid ever using that arbitrator ever again.
People do that with judges too. It’s why all mp3 sharing lawsuits were in the same district of Texas.
The MP3 lawsuits were filed in the districts in which the defendants resided. Almost all of the 94 districts had MP3 sharing lawsuits.
You are probably thinking of patents. For a long time the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX) was by far the most popular choice for patent lawsuits by far, especially against big tech companies.
Then there was a Supreme Court decision (TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, 581 U.S. 258 (2017)) [1]. It made it so corporations can only be sued for patent infringement in the state where they are incorporated or a district where they have both infringed and have a regular and established place of business.
EDTX is largely a rural district with no really major cities. Most big tech companies have no physical offices there.
Many of those cases moved to the Western District of Texas (WDTX). WDTX includes Austin, and a whole lot of big tech has offices there.
There was one judge in Waco whose court was particularly attractive to patent lawsuits, due to having plaintiff-friendly procedures and a rapid trial schedule. 100% of patent cases filed in Waco went to him. In a few years his court was handling 20% of all patents cases in the entire country.
The Supreme Court and Congress did not like so many patent cases being handled by a single judge, and the WDTX Chief Judge making it so patent cases filed in WDTX are random distributed among its 13 judges.
Cases against big tech companies mostly moved to Delaware (where many big tech companies are incorporated) or Northern California.
EDTX regained the number one spot for patent cases after that, although not from big tech cases. Delaware and Northern California remain the big places for those.
EDTX is #1 because even though it is rural and has almost no big tech presence, it still has major retailers, grocery chains, distribution centers, and communication hubs. For patent suits not against big tech it still works fine.
Also, Heartland did not apply to international defendants. They can still be sued in any district in the US.
The biggest reason EDTX is a popular choice if you can pick it is not plaintiffs do particularly well there. It depends on when you look because it has varied quite a bit, but there are often other districts where plaintiffs win more.
The big reasons are:
• Patent litigation is complex, both for the court and the attorneys. Regardless of which side of the case is on you want a court with experience. If the court is inexperienced the case can drag on which is expensive, burning up lots of billable hours of the expensive patent litigation firm you are using. EDTX has many patent experienced judges, and has developed rules and procedures to move cases along.
• In addition to cases moving along efficiently once they get going, the get going faster in EDTX.
Patent suits are civil cases. They take a back seat to criminal cases. EDTX simply does not have much federal crime (or state crime that ends up in federal district courts).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TC_Heartland_LLC_v._Kraft_Food...
At no point in time has anyone ever suspected that companies requiring arbitration was in the best interests of the consumer. This is very plainly an attempt to avoid responsibility and consequences. It's a margin-improving policy. The safety of its customers are merely a number on a spreadsheet.
Imagine how this could've gone if Uber had used its tracking and vast knowledge of roadways to know to follow up with riders on a cancelled ride on the highway or even deny drivers the right to cancel the trip on the highway because that is unsafe. Could've prevented all this, have they learned from this case to prevent future incidents?
If the driver wants you out, being unable to cancel the trip on the app won't stop them throwing you out.
But if it means they'll be out of a job they will be less likely to do it.
I don't think its unreasonable to argue that Uber has a duty not to hand riders over to known reckless drivers.
So wait. There’s a literal DEATH involved here and it still went to arbitration?!
The driver that actually killed them wasn't part of this arbitration. This is arbitrating the lead up.
Previously: "Disney says man can't sue over wife's death because he agreed to Disney+ terms of service" https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...
This is what happens when every single company we have an app for forces us to re-agree to new TOC (most this year, but last year too).
Go check your e-mail - look at all the TOC agreements you had to make recently. How many added a new (or amended an existing) arbitration clause?
Too many. And consumers are stuck either agreeing blindly/under duress, or uninstalling the app? These are apps we use and rely on, and don't have enough competition to refuse.
Lyft and Uber. Name one other competitor in the app space. Without googling it
Rant over (it wasn't even a rant at the beginning but couldn't help myself)
ESH. Everyone sucks here. The person that hit them. The driver that dropped them off. The girls drinking to the point of stupor. Uber for not training drivers enough.
An important detail, according to the driver he didn't force her out. The girl got out after he pulled over to argue about / inspect the vomit and assess the situation.
"Tran argued that he responded reasonably to a perceived sudden emergency caused by the passengers' prior excessive drinking, of which he said he was unaware, & that he could not anticipate that Normandin-Parker would leave his vehicle and wander into traffic."