The unprecedented leak to the Guardian of more than 124,000 documents – known as the Uber files – lays bare the practices that fuelled the company’s transformation.
According to the publisher, the leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to introduce the cab-hailing service into cities around the world by brute force. During the global backlash, the data shows how Uber tried to shore up support by discreetly courting prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, oligarchs and media barons.
The publisher states that revelations include:
- Emmanuel Macron secretly aided Uber lobbying drive in France
- ‘Violence guarantees success’: how Uber exploited taxi protests
- The Uber campaign: how ex-Obama aides helped sell firm to the world
- Uber bosses told staff to use ‘kill switch’ during raids to stop police seeing data
- Former EU digital chief secretly helped Uber lobby Dutch PM
The Uber files is based on 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian, says the publisher. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant's senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices. The records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world.
To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ.
