SAN FRANCISCO — It’s one thing for Uber Technologies Inc. to get sued by its competitors. It’s another for the embattled ride-hailing company to get sued by its drivers. But in a new class action filed in federal court in San Francisco, Uber is getting sued on behalf of its competitor’s drivers.
Lawyers at Audet & Partners in San Francisco and Zimmerman Reed in Manhattan Beach sued Uber on Monday, claiming that the company created spyware to track drivers providing rides on the rival platform run by Lyft Inc. The complaint, which draws heavily from an April 12 report in The Information, claims that Uber designed a software-based program code-named “Hell” which used fake Lyft accounts to track how many Lyft drivers were on the road and where they were at any given time. The complaint block-quotes more than two dozen paragraphs from the original news story and claims that Uber violated the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the California Invasion of Privacy Act. Those laws carry statutory penalties of thousands of dollars per individual violation.
