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Uber Ran a Secret Kill Switch to Wipe Its Servers During Police Raids. France's Economy Minister Was Helping the Company the Whole Time.

124,000 leaked Uber records show a kill switch used against police raids in six countries and a $90-million-a-year lobbying operation that reached Emmanuel Macron while he was still a minister.

The Complaints Department

The Complaints Department

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Uber Ran a Secret Kill Switch to Wipe Its Servers During Police Raids. France's Economy Minister Was Helping the Company the Whole Time.
Photo by Erik Mclean / Unsplash

In July 2022, The Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Uber Files: 124,000 leaked internal records — including 83,000 emails, iMessages, and WhatsApp exchanges — covering Uber's expansion between 2013 and 2017. The documents came from a former Uber lobbyist and showed the company running a program to remotely wipe its own offices' data during police raids, at least twelve times, in at least six countries.

They also showed who was helping the company that was doing the wiping. One of them was sitting in the French cabinet.

The Kill Switch

Uber's "kill switch" cut local offices' access to company servers the moment investigators arrived with a warrant, so that by the time authorities reached a computer, the data on it was unreachable. The leaked files document its use during raids in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, India, Hungary, and Romania. Uber activated the protocol as regulators in multiple countries tried to determine whether the company's drivers and pricing model complied with local transport law — the exact question the seized data would have helped answer.

Greyball

A separate tool, Greyball, first reported by The New York Times in March 2017 and detailed further in the Uber Files, let the company identify likely government investigators posing as riders and serve them a fake version of the app — one showing empty streets, or cars that would never arrive, or a ride that was immediately cancelled. Uber built the profile of a "likely enforcement" user by cross-referencing credit card data against cards associated with police credit unions and by checking whether a rider's device or social media activity suggested a government affiliation.

  • Portland, Oregon transportation officials found Uber used Greyball to identify and evade at least 16 city enforcement staff attempting to order rides in December 2014, before Uber was licensed to operate there.
  • An internal 2014 message from a member of Uber's communications team, later published in the Uber Files, read: "sometimes we have problems because, well, we're just fucking illegal."
  • In 2017, following the Times report, Uber pledged to stop using Greyball against regulators and faced a U.S. Department of Justice criminal inquiry into the practice.

Weaponizing the Violence

In January 2016, French taxi drivers protesting Uber's entry into their market attacked Uber vehicles and, in some cases, the drivers inside them. Leaked messages show then-CEO Travis Kalanick telling colleagues to keep Uber drivers out on the road during the unrest anyway, writing that the risk was "worth it" because, in his words, "violence guarantee[s] success." Uber executives internally discussed how continued confrontation would generate press coverage and government pressure that worked in the company's favor.

Access to the Top

The Uber Files describe a lobbying and public-relations operation the company spent roughly $90 million a year running at its peak, built around a target list of more than 1,850 "stakeholders" to influence across 29 countries. Uber lobbyists secured private meetings with at least six heads of state or government, one vice president, and three deputy prime ministers. Among them was France's then-Economy Minister, Emmanuel Macron, who met privately with Kalanick shortly after taking office in 2014 and, according to the files and a subsequent French parliamentary inquiry, provided the company informal help navigating French regulators without disclosing the relationship. That inquiry, reporting years later, criticized Macron's dealings with Uber as "privileged" and "opaque."

The Reckoning

Kalanick was forced out as CEO in 2017 amid a separate set of scandals over workplace culture and a since-settled trade-secrets lawsuit. His successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, brought in former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to review and overhaul the company's practices. Responding to the Uber Files in 2022, an Uber spokesperson acknowledged "mistakes" made under prior leadership and said the company should be judged as "a different company" than the one described in the leaked documents, pointing to the five years of changes since Kalanick's departure.

The techniques in the Uber Files were not deployed against a competitor or a hostile government — they were deployed against the elected officials and civil servants of the countries Uber was operating in, using tools built for exactly that purpose, while the company's own lobbyists were, at the same time, meeting privately with more senior versions of the same officials. The company that built the kill switch is now judged, by its own request, only on what it has done since 2017.

Filed from public reporting:

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