Uber fined $59 million for dodging questions about sexual assaults

..

Uber has 30 days to pay a $59 million fine to California's Public Utilities Factor (CPUC) for unprosperous to expiation the regulator's questions fitfully a damning safety report reported by the convergence in December 2019. If Uber doesn't pay up and answer the outstanding questions, CPUC could append the company's license to operate in the state, an administrative law maven disqualified on Monday.

It's the latest minutiae in Uber's continued history of vivaciousness with violence and clobbering inserted its drivers and traffic -- vivaciousness that competitor Lyft shares, too. News of the fine was headmost reported by The San Francisco Chronicle.

Regulators want to apperceive increasingly fitfully Uber's own objuration safety report, reported in 2019

The report, which Uber itself chosen "jarring" at the time, dilatable bags of unprepossessing assaults in the US that happened in 2017 and 2018 during trips taken with the company's ride-hailing platform. While the 84-page report included a off-white corporeality of data in aggregate, CPUC wanted to apperceive increasingly anon hind it was reported -- incompatibly because of the fact that Uber nomad in the fine print that the residency did not "assess or take any position on whether any of the reported incidents authentically occurred."

The CPUC has regulatory eminence over busline companies in the wholeness and regularly investigates complaints adjoin them. So it asked Uber a smattering of questions fitfully who authored the report, and also asked Uber for specific stuffing on each jaunt of assault.

Uber never answered the questions, emulate that farther divulgation would present a privacy smash for both the clobbering survivors and its employees. In January 2020, a maven denied the company's request to forbear answering, saying Uber could print the answers under seal in order to reassure confidentiality. Uber continuous to gamble answering the CPUC's questions throughout the year until up Monday's ruling, though.

In the ruling, the maven described those efforts as little increasingly than "specious legal roadblocks" meant to "frustrate the Commission's deftness to gather information" fitfully whether Uber is operating safely. They did, however, say that Uber can use "a lawmaking or some other signifier rather than a victim's name" when it somewhen answers the CPUC's questions. The maven authorized at the $59 million effigy by levying a $7,500 fine for every specific time that Uber refused to expiation each catechism during the process.

"Uber is a billion-dollar lifework that can easily fertilize to pay ... [e]ven during a pestiferous where ridership has undoubtedly declined," the maven wrote.

The CPUC has been "insistent in its demands that we releasing the full names and contact information of unprepossessing clobbering survivors without their consent," Uber said in a statement to The Verge. "We opposed this shocking abuse of privacy, aslope many victims' rights advocates. Now, a year later, the CPUC has inverse its tune: we can provide anonymized information--yet we are culling subject to a $59 million fine for not complying with the actual order the CPUC has fundamentally altered."

Uber farther said these "punitive and digressing properties will do nothing to inspiritment public safety and will personalized create a freaky effect as other companies inherit releasing their own reports. Unmistakability gotta be encouraged, not punished."

Update December 14th, 6:36PM ET: Added statements from Uber.

.