Over the past week, more than 200 thousand Uber users have deleted the program from their smartphones and deleted their Uber account. This time, the reason was not the threat of leakage of confidential data , but dissatisfaction with the company's foreign policy. The fact is that Uber acted as a strike-breaker , refusing to take part in a general taxi drivers strike at the airport to protest the ban on accepting refugees in the US (the strike was announced on Saturday for 1 hour ). Uber has continued to take orders at the International Airport. John Kennedy. It seemed that she seemed to agree with the scandalous decision of D. Trump.

Uber did not just make the breaker, which is traditionally considered to be traitors and traitors to common interests. She did even worse, because during the strike announced the abolition of the raising tariff . That is, clearly showed that he wants to cash in thanks to the strike. But it turned out exactly the opposite. Due to public outrage, Uber suffered serious losses.

General indignation was also aroused by the fact that Uber executive director Travis Kalanick (Travis Kalanick) was a member of the economic council under President Trump.
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What if users delete accounts? Complicate the procedure

The massive deletion of accounts has become unprecedented in the history of Uber. When the #deleteUber boycott campaign became viral among the population, the company even took an unusual step and made the procedure more difficult . Many users began to complain that the company began sending emails. Deleting an account now requires two additional steps: 1) follow the link in the letter; 2) re-enter the password.


Users started receiving such letters this week while trying to delete a Uber account.

The company's management has assured the public that all accounts that people ask to delete will be deleted. Just before, this procedure was carried out in manual mode, and now the company can not cope with the flow of requests. Therefore, she introduced an automatic procedure with confirmation by mail and re-entering the password.

Simultaneously with the boycott of Uber, the number of downloads of the competitor Lyft’s application began to increase. On or about January 30, 2017, Lyft outpaced Uber in the list of the most downloaded iOS apps for iOS — this happened for the first time in history. In the list of the most popular programs in all categories, Lyft climbed to 4th place, and Uber dropped to 13th.



According to analysts, the number of downloads Lyft increased by about 78% compared to the usual level.

Travis Kalanick’s departure from the presidential council

The final chord of this unprecedented flashmob was the departure of Travis Kalanik from the Economic Council under the President. Unlike Ilona Mask , he decided not to annoy the society any more, especially since he had previously called the President’s decree banning the entry of immigrants from seven countries where Muslims constitute the majority of the population (segregation along ethnic and religious lines) called “unfair”.

The presidential decree banning the admission of refugees and immigrants was extremely unpopular in the IT community, because many members of this community are themselves refugees and immigrants. The leaders of IT companies are now under heavy public pressure to clearly express their protest against this presidential decree, which many people call illegal and unconstitutional. For example, Google co-author Sergey Brin took part in a demonstration in San Francisco and said that he himself was a refugee . As is known, Sergey's family emigrated from the USSR in 1979, when Jews segregated when they enrolled in higher education institutions (limits were set on the proportion of Jews among students, and talented employees of this nationality were often hampered by the career ladder).

Sergey Brin clearly expressed his position. Travis Kalanik also expressed it, but joining the presidential council turned out to be a mistake.

“Joining this group [Economic Council under the President] should not have meant the approval of the President or his program. Unfortunately, this was incorrectly interpreted in this way, ”wrote Travis Kalanik in a letter that he sent to his staff on the occasion of his resignation as economic advisor. He added that immigration and openness to refugees is “an important part of the success of our country and, frankly, Uber”.

I wonder how long Ilon Musk will endure, who is now being criticized for speaking with the scandalous American president.



So in the pursuit of petty profits (what could she earn in 1 hour at the airport?) Uber suffered serious losses. The loss of more than 200 thousand users and a blow to the reputation are expensive. It's better not to joke with civil society.

It is noteworthy that now, in the wake of refugee support, Uber accounts were deleted by far more people than two months ago when the update of the Uber client application with the tracking of user coordinates was released not only when the application was launched, but after the trip (Trip Related Location Data). The coordinates are tracked for another 5 minutes after getting out of the taxi, the application works in the background process. It turns out that for people some things are more important than privacy?

Uber has more than 40 million users in 60 countries , including Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Uber Taxi carries more than 8 million passengers daily. At least, such statistics were before the start of the #deleteUber campaign.