2017 has been a year of controversies for Uber with lot of allegations against their company’s top management employees. Allegations are against Uber’s head of self-driving car unit Anthony Levandowski of stealing and illegally downloading 14,000 files based on which the company had set up their self-driving car unit. Uber denies the allegations by stating that the 14,000 files downloaded never reached their technology unit. Recently, company’s President Jeff Jones resigned without any prior intimation. Then the self driven car met with an accident in Arizona.
The court war is among two technology giant companies, Waymo and Uber relating to the self-driven car technology. The case has taken a dramatic turn after the US district attorney claims on Wednesday that he has never encountered such strong records in his past 42 years of experience. The US district court has ordered Uber to provide proofs to prove their defense. Against which Uber attorney claims that they are working on it and didn’t find any hits, which would prove Waymo’s allegations to be true. Waymo was taken over by Google
In a new revelation on Thursday, Levandowski’s attorney told the court that Levandowski would appeal to use his fifth amendment right in order to avoid disclosure of any information related to the documents that would ultiamtley lead to accepting the allegations. Against this, the US district attorney claimed that by Using this amendment Uber has been hiding something from the court and keeping them in the dark. According to Waymo, Uber was completely aware of the Mr. Levandowski’s stealing of the documents.
Currently, more than 40 ex-Google employees are working in Uber’s Self-driving car unit and Uber has selected 7 employees excluding those 3 employees mentioned in the complaint lodged by Waymo to investigate their systems and database to check for those stolen 14,000 files by Levandowski. Uber claims to have investigated whole database of 12 terabytes to search for those stolen files.
In the past one week this case has taken lots of twists and turns and its very interesting to see if Uber could withstand the allegations imposed by Waymo and get clean out of it. Currently the US district attorney is more focused upon the fifth amendment right utilized by Levandowski. Meanwhile, Uber would be starting its preparation for its defense against the allegations by Waymo on Friday. Till date, Uber is not being able to prove or justify its defense against Waymo’s allegations and didn’t co-operate with the US district court with the orders related to searching for the 14,00 files in their database system.
