Apple In Preliminary Talks To Acquire Jay-Z's Tidal

Jamie Mccarthy / Getty Images

Apple is in preliminary talks to acquire Tidal, a competing music streaming service founded and run by Beyoncé's husband, Jay-Z. First reported by the Wall Street Journal, sources familiar with the talks independently confirmed the report to BuzzFeed News.

Jay-Z purchased Tidal for $56 million in 2015 and launched the streaming site in April of that year with promises of providing higher quality audio and ensuring better, more lucrative licensing deals for its suite of exclusive artists like Kanye West and Beyoncé. Tidal's start was tumultuous, the service came under harsh criticism from a portion of users for its steeper $20.00 per month price point and ran through several CEOs in it's first months.

Last summer, Apple joined the streaming wars with the launch of Apple Music, securing its own costly exclusivity partnerships with artists like Drake (to the tune of $19 million).

While talks are still in very preliminary stages, the potential deal would dramatically thin out the competition in the streaming music space for Apple and bring some of music's most popular artists onto its platform for potential exclusive releases, along with Tidal's 4.2 million subscribers.

If Apple is able to pick up Tidal for the right price, it would be the second considerable acquisition in two years — the tech giant purchased Dr. Dre's Beats Electronics (and its subsequent streaming service) for $3 billion in 2014. But a potential deal with Tidal, a staunchly pro-artist service, would fit well with Apple Music's current strategy of aligning itself with creatives and paying well for exclusive contracts.

But any real deal is far from complete — sources framed the talks as very exploratory — and the two companies have butted heads in the past. Last August, the companies sparred in the headlines after false reports that Apple stopped Tidal from streaming Drake's set at a Hurricane Katrina benefit concert. Though the dust-up was ultimately nothing, it showcased the high tensions in the battle for streaming supremacy.

John Paczkowski contributed reporting for this story.

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U.S. Opens Investigation After Tesla Driver Killed While Using Autopilot

Mark Schiefelbein / AP

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into Tesla's Model S vehicle and its "Autopilot" feature after a fatal crash occurred, the company confirmed Thursday.

"This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated," the company said in statement, calling the fatal crash a "tragic loss."

The fatal crash involved a 2015 Model S vehicle, Reuters reported.

This is a developing story. Check back soon for updates and follow @BuzzFeedNews on Twitter.

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Here's What Happens When Your Uber Driver Gets A DUI

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When Katie Gallion’s Uber driver started swerving across the road’s rumble strips only 15 minutes into her ride near Durham, North Carolina, on June 3, she decided to give him a pass. At 10 p.m., it was dark outside and raining hard, she told BuzzFeed News. She didn’t know he’d polished off four beers before starting to drive for Uber that night.

When the car crossed over a grass median, coming precariously close to the oncoming traffic lane, Gallion began considering her options. “I was getting really scared and contemplating that maybe I should nicely ask him to pull over,” the 33-year-old pharmacist said.

“I don’t know what would’ve happened ... if I didn’t get out of the car.”

But she waited, and after turning onto a two-lane country road, the driver veered off the road and into a ditch, where the ride continued. “I was a crying mess, thinking, Oh my god, what if he doesn’t let me out of the car?” Gallion said. “Then I yelled, ‘What is going on? Let me out!’”

Finally, the driver pulled into the parking lot of a closed minimart and let Gallion out of the car. “I’m a good driver,” Gallion said he told her in a halfhearted attempt to convince her to continue the ride. Then he offered to call her another Uber.

Gallion called a friend instead, and together they called Wake County police. “I really could have died,” Gallion said. “I don’t know what would’ve happened ... if I didn’t get out of the car.”

Gallion’s Uber driver was arrested for driving while impaired at 11:09 p.m. — about an hour after her ride began. According to Wake County Superior Court records, he had a blood alcohol level of 0.15 — nearly four times the .04 legal limit for commercial drivers. The driver, who had no prior arrest record, was also charged with failure to heed a light or siren.

Reached for comment, Gallion’s Uber driver told BuzzFeed News he had accepted one other fare on the night of the incident. He said his memory of Gallion’s ride is unclear. “I remember knowing that she was uncomfortable and it was raining,” he said.

Gallion reported the incident to Uber at around 1 a.m., after reaching her friend’s house. About 12 hours later, the company responded with a boilerplate email and a refund of $69.24 for her ride. In a follow-up phone call, a company representative told Gallion it was “working diligently” to investigate the incident but could not discuss it in detail because of its privacy policy. She asked if he had been deactivated. Uber declined to tell her, citing a company mandate “to respect the privacy of all users.”

Katie Gallion

“Uber has a zero tolerance policy for the use of drugs and alcohol, and upon learning of these allegations, we immediately removed the driver's access to the platform,” an Uber spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. Uber said this driver in particular had no prior safety complaints and was “highly rated.”

BuzzFeed News reported in March that screenshots of Uber’s internal customer support platform showed the company’s instructions for how representatives should handle incidents involving alcohol and drug use. “If rider does not wish to escalate with LE (law enforcement) or media, follow strike system, issue warning, and resolve without escalating.” Under resolution suggestions, the screenshot showed that for the “1st strike,” customer service representatives were instructed to issue a “final warning,” and to permanently ban drivers at strike two.

Emails provided to BuzzFeed News show that Uber first reached out to Gallion’s driver by email at 1 p.m. the following day, about 12 hours after she reported him to the company for drunk driving. Unable to reach him over the phone (he was in jail), a company representative asked the driver when he was available discuss a “concerning report” by phone. When he checked his Uber app, he saw he had already lost access to the platform.

The next day, June 5, Uber conducted a brief interview during which Gallion’s driver was asked to review the details of the allegations against him. The driver told BuzzFeed News that he confirmed to Uber that he had indeed been arrested for driving under the influence. The following day he received an email notification from Uber saying he'd been deactivated and his "partnership" with the company ended. “They handled it quickly,” the driver said.

This isn’t the first time an Uber driver has been arrested for driving under the influence. That said, Uber notes that ride-hailing can be a wise alternative to driving after drinking. According to a study the company conducted with the nonprofit group Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Uber's entry into a number of markets correlated with subsequent declines in DUI arrests.

Uber says it depends on riders to rate drivers and provide feedback, which its safety team reviews. “Uber may also deactivate a driver who receives several unconfirmed complaints of drug or alcohol use,” the ride-hail giant’s deactivation policy reads. The company told BuzzFeed it has a team of former law enforcement professionals on staff to help with police investigations. When BuzzFeed News asked if it has a system for learning about drivers’ law enforcement incidents instead of just relying on riders’ alerts, Uber said in some states background checks are “periodically” updated. Uber did not respond when asked if North Carolina is included among those states.

On Wednesday, Uber announced it is piloting app features aimed at making rides safer. In several markets across the U.S., drivers will receive daily reports on their braking, acceleration, and navigation. The goal, Uber told BuzzFeed, is to lay the groundwork to eventually create a system that gives the company real-time alerts about erratic drivers.

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Google Fit Has A Brand-New Look

The new Android Wear operating system isn't here yet — but this week, Google began rolling out some sleek new design updates for Google Fit in both app and watch form.

The idea is to give you a more detailed breakdown of your daily and weekly activities, so you can get an instant idea of how you're doing on your goals (and if you need to hit the gym ASAP).

Here's the new timeline.

Google

Here's where you pick your ~fitness goals~. (They're a lot more customizable now.)

Google

You can now see at a glance all your relevant stats for active minutes, steps, and more, for the week ...

... or just for the day.

Google

You can also check out a map to see how far you've gone (and pat yourself on the back).

Google

And you can get this info on your watch, too.

Google

Get the new app update here.

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Why Twitter Can't Even Protect Tech CEOs From Getting Hacked

It happened to Mark Zuckerberg. It happened to Sundar Pichai. It happened to Travis Kalanick. And it could happen to you, too.

Want to know how secure your Twitter account is? Here's an easy way to find out. Head to the Twitter applications settings page. There, you can see a full list of the third-party applications that have "write" access to your account: Apps that let you post to Twitter without being on Twitter dot com. A sliver of mine looks like this:

The point of giving third-party apps write access to your Twitter account is to make it easy to tweet about the stuff you do on these apps: For example, tweeting that you're listening to Justin Bieber on Spotify, or that you posted a picture of your dog on Instagram, or that you unfollowed 1,000 people in the previous week. It's supposed to make Twitter faster, more dynamic, and more open.

Over the past several weeks, however, a three-person hacking team called OurMine has made clear that years after the problem first came to light, third-party authentication is still a security nightmare for Twitter. By gaining access to apps with third-party write access, OurMine has been able to post to the Twitter accounts of tech bigwigs like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Thankfully — depending on your perspective — OurMine appears to be using these platforms to promote their fledgling security business. But it's very easy to imagine mischief of a much higher order: What would a tweet from Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter account that read, "Due to illness, I'm stepping down as Facebook CEO" do to the company's stock price? To the stock market?

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In other words, whichever write-authorized app connected to your Twitter is least secure — whether its a billion-dollar behemoth like Instagram or "Get It LIVE! by LiveMixtapes.com," which I apparently authorized at some point in 2011 so I could download a mixtape — is exactly how secure your Twitter account is.

True, these hacks usually don't give the hacker access to DMs or Twitter settings. But in 2016, when everyone from news organizations to financial firms use Twitter to make and announce important decisions, hijacked posting privileges are a big deal. And if it can happen to three of the most powerful people in tech, it can happen to anyone.

Regis Duvignau / Reuters

The scope of the problem is enormous. OurMine told BuzzFeed News that the apps it hacked to gain access to Twitter accounts ranged from the question-and-answer site Quora, to the URL shortener Bit.ly, to the social media manager Sprout Social. Though Twitter would not provide BuzzFeed News with the number of apps that can be authorized to write to accounts, practically any app can get this access. I have 29 apps that enable writing, and I hardly used Twitter before 2013. Taken together, the universe of third-party apps with Twitter write access offers hackers myriad ways to mess with users' Twitter accounts. Security experts call that an "attack surface," and for Twitter, this surface is planet-sized and full of holes.

"Any time you allow one application to post to another on your behalf, you are inviting security issues," Steve Manzuik, director of security research at Duo Security, told BuzzFeed News.

That's been true for some time, and it's hardly only true for Twitter. Any platform that allows trusted access by a third party necessarily relies on the security of that party. That's great and convenient if you're using your Google information to log into a smaller website; Google is a huge company with a massive security apparatus. It's much less good if you've given a variety of quasi-defunct (Seesmic, anyone?) or small apps lacking robust security precautions access to a major platform like Twitter or Facebook.

"When you’re dealing with large systems, it is much easier to breach them going through a weak partner," said Joseph Steinberg, CEO of SecureMySocial.

Still, the public nature of Twitter, whose main point is to share information as quickly and widely as possible, has made these attacks a much bigger issue for Jack Dorsey's company than they are for Facebook. And there's very little Twitter can do to solve the problem that doesn't defeat the incentives for third-party writing privileges in the first place: Speed and functionality. Adding layers of security — like an extra login — to access Twitter through a third-party app defeats the purpose of speedy cross-platform sharing. And disabling third-party writing would anger developers and hurt engagement, a cost Twitter probably isn't willing to bear.

If Twitter has any plans to address the problem, it isn't saying. A Twitter representative referred BuzzFeed News to the service's online help center in response to a question about third-party vulnerabilities.

There aren't a lot of obvious fixes Twitter could make, short of disabling third-party writing privileges. Culling old or defunct apps from the list of write-approved third parties might help, but Quora, the app used to hack Pichai and Kalanick, is valued at $900 million. In fact, large sites and apps are likelier targets for the data breaches where hackers find the login credentials that they then use to write to Twitter. That means the main way to stay safe from attacks like the ones against Zuckerberg and Kalanick is to revoke access to all the apps that have writing privileges to your account. That's something most users will probably not take the time to do.

The fact that Twitter allows these issues to persist may limit how seriously the public takes the service. If hacks of this kind are the acceptable price of having an open and convenient platform, a Twitter account can't really be thought of as an essential component of a person or organization's web presence the way a trusted utility, like email, is. Imagine how much more alarmed the reaction would be to messages coming from a hacked Zuckerberg or Pichai or Kalanick email account.

Indeed, the Twitter defacements have become so common in recent weeks that they're starting to hardly feel like news. That might be bad news for hackers trying to get attention. But for Twitter, which has staked its business on being the first place that people come to for information, it's even worse.

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Facebook’s Unsettling Referendum On News

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks on stage during the Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco.

Stephen Lam / Reuters

In a turbulent week that’s been largely defined by a controversial vote, Facebook just issued its own referendum on news and publishers. Put simply, the users have spoken and news lost.

This morning, Facebook VP of product management Adam Mosseri, announced the social network is tweaking its News Feed algorithm to show more stories from friends and family members — a move that indicates Facebook is worried professional publishers are crowding out the normal people in your life you care about. The decision, according to the post, is based on “research,” which is a way to say that Facebook has been listening to the myriad signals of the real people who use its platform each day.

With 1.65 billion active humans using the platform, Facebook is among the largest, most responsive focus groups of its kind. It's a formidable tool for studying human behavior. Every day legions of regular people across the world signal their preferences — voting with their News Feeds —in the form of likes, shares, comments, and friending/following/un-friending to Facebook’s data mothership, which collects these inputs with the utmost interest to inform the evolution of its products, like News Feed. A decision to tweak News Feed away from news is, in many ways, a reflection of the Facebook constituency’s attitude toward the news it sees.

When News Feed failed almost two years ago to reflect the centrality of Michael Brown’s murder and Ferguson's protests in our national conversation, Facebook took heat for simultaneously serving up an endless buffet of algorithmically delicious Ice Bucket Challenge videos. This would’ve been fine — Facebook is a social network, not a cable news network, after all — except that the company had become a major news destination, and made considerable, very public efforts and investments to ramp up its news capabilities. Simply put: Facebook indicated it wanted to be the internet’s best destination for news, but its mechanism for delivering news is designed to do almost the exact opposite: give you what you already want.

Despite hiring trending news curators, working with publishers, and paying them to create live content (BuzzFeed is a partner) hosting their articles, Facebook is still hampered by News Feed’s algorithmic design. I wrote during Ferguson that “if your friends don’t interact with the news, by either commenting or liking it, you’re less likely to see it, meaning that a decent part of the reason people aren’t seeing a glut of Ferguson coverage is that people don’t want to see it. Or that they don’t care. Or that they’re sending some other signal that Facebook takes to mean that the story is undermining their user experience.” It’s why some concerned Facebookers took to disguising Ferguson news inside big life updates like marriage announcements, which act as engagement candy and are usually promoted to the top of News Feeds.

Today, little is different. Sharing things that are incendiary to others in your network could cause them to ignore, block, unfriend, or in some way disengage with your content, which is Facebook’s ultimate signal that you’re having a subpar experience. That and people don’t “like” bad news. As Mosseri said today in Facebook’s announcement, “If the ranking is off, people don’t engage, and leave dissatisfied.” It’s clear as day.

Looking at Facebook’s recent strategy, this all makes perfect sense. Facebook’s last two developers conferences revealed a company that’s positioned itself to slowly inject itself into every facet of your life until it becomes the entire internet, largely via its Messenger app. But Messenger is only marginally a news platform and much more of a life layer — a place for your friends and your favorite apps and for making plans at a restaurant on the fly and hailing an Uber and then splitting the bill and then buying movie tickets for the group, all without ever leaving Facebook’s ecosystem. At its heart, Messenger is a budding commerce machine in which there’s very little room for news. Take another look at Facebook’s deeply ambitious 10-year plan, delivered this year by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and you’ll see something is missing:

Facebook

News is complicated: it can entertain, it can delight, it can enrage and dismay. Facebook’s argument is likely that person-to-person sharing is the strongest and that publishers should focus on making better, richer, unique content. This is good advice! And perhaps Facebook sees it as part of their mission to tweak the knobs until publishers stop churning out so much fluff.

But, as with Ferguson, the argument is also naive. News — especially when an outlet is going for comprehensive coverage — is not always uplifting, engaging. Nor is it always eminently sharable (Hi, net neutrality!). More importantly, media operations publishing at internet-sized scale must often produce news stories in bulk to make it worth their while financially — few publications have the luxury of moving away from scale.

Facebook has made a commitment to deliver news, but only in a manner that doesn't truly interfere with the overall experience. The central tension with news — giving you what you want to see versus giving you what you need to see — is an intractable one, especially since the former is the foundation on which the world's biggest social network is based.

Today’s announcement from Facebook is full of all kinds of night sweat-inducing details for publishers. It’s a devastating neg on the publishing world, the latest in what’s come to feel like an increasingly anxious courtship: your business lives or dies with us. Rest assured, you'll always be our secondary consideration!

Which is not to excuse Facebook for its mercurial approach to news and for a stance that may have led publishers to feel they have an overly important role in the company’s ecosystem. Facebook, through a combination of investment, publicity, and luck has become a primary news source for a generation at a time when the public opinion of the media is at an all-time low, which all serves to make today’s announcement even thornier. Here, for example, is the reaction from Facebook’s former head of news partnerships:

But the most dispiriting truth Facebook shared this morning probably comes from its users, who’ve been put in a system that essentially forces them to vote on everything that crosses their screen with their attention.

It’s a 1.65 billion vote referendum on the last few years of frantic publisher scrambling to reach audiences wherever they are (Facebook) and do it harder/better/faster/however the hell people want it. After years of wooing publishers to their platform with all manner of instant articles and content creation incentives, Facebook asked the world’s largest, most responsive voting body what it wanted to see on News Feed. Put simply, the people have spoken and news appears to have lost.

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Is Edward Snowden Trying To Get Vladimir Putin's Attention?

Mathias Loevgreen Bojesen / AFP / Getty Images

Edward Snowden’s public fight against a new Russian surveillance bill continued Wednesday, in a series of tweets calling the proposed legislation a “Big Brother law… an unworkable, unjustifiable violation of rights that should never be signed.”

The proposed "Yarovaya law," written by United Russia party member Irina Yarovaya in response to the bombing of a Russian passenger jet over Egypt in October 2015, would hand out prison sentences of seven years for writing in support of "extremism" on the Internet, criminalize failure to report "reliable" information about planned attacks, and require online providers to retain at least six months worth of users' communications, three years of "metadata," and to provide backdoors to decrypt this material.

On Friday, the legislation passed the lower house of parliament in a 325-1 vote. It now needs to pass through the upper house of Parliament and be approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Snowden has resided in Russia since leaving the United States in 2013, when he was charged with violating the Espionage Act for his leak of a trove of documents about the US’ surveillance program. The former National Security Agency contractor let loose a series of tweets this week expressing his concern that the law would impact Russia’s civil liberties, without improving their safety.

Speaking to the Interfax news agency on Monday, Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly G. Kucherena, said the tweets showed that Snowden was “a man of principles” who “criticizes Russia, too.” While Snowden has enjoyed relative freedom in Russia, appearing often at conferences through teleconferencing and tweeting to his millions of followers, he has said that he does not plan to die in Russia and hopes to return to the United States.

While some tweeted their concern that Snowden could risk losing his residency in Russia over the tweets, investigative journalist and author of The Red Web, Andrei Soldatov, said he did not think the tweets endangered Snowden. Putin has established himself as Snowden’s “protector and defender” Soldatov told BuzzFeed News, and might be pushed to respond to the tweets given Snowden’s high-profile position.

“In the past, I have been critical of Snowden for not commenting on the situation in Russia… But in this case I think his voice counts. We need his voice to talk about what is going on here, what is, in fact, a very horrifying law,” said Soldatov.

The proposed legislation, said Soldatov, had united privacy activists and internet companies in Russia.

“It is evident that this law would be impossible to implement. It would be so costly, so expensive for companies. The goal is for the Kremlin to force companies to come to them, to ask for permits, deals, etc,” said Soldatov. “Companies who have been frightened, silenced against the Kremlin have now become vocal. Now they talk. Many companies based in Russia are now speaking up. Internet users and internet companies are united against this legislation. Now Snowden is too.”

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Facebook To Decrease Publisher Reach To Show You More From Friends And Family

Facebook is making changes to its News Feed to align with newly articulated values, and it means you will soon see more stuff from your friends and families and fewer things from publishers and brands. It’s a move meant to keep the “social” in the world’s largest social network, but one that will likely cause some pain for publishers who have become reliant on its referral traffic.

Facebook sends enough traffic to digital publishers that many depend on it to survive. By and large, these publishers have dedicated significant resources to gobbling the most out of Facebook’s great traffic trough, building large "pages" and publishing to them with intense frequency (BuzzFeed is no exception). Their efforts have become so massive, and to some extent have so come to dominate the Facebook experience, that Facebook is worried professional publishers are crowding out posts from regular people. So the company is tweaking its all-powerful News Feed to display more from friends and family and less from publishers and brands overall.

“Your average friend probably posts a few things a week, the average publisher you follow probably posts hundreds of things a day,” Facebook VP of Product Management Adam Mosseri told a small group of reporters at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters last week. “We've made some ranking changes to try to better connect people with their friends.”

The hit will likely be most significant for publishers who get large amounts of Facebook traffic from their own pages, as opposed to individuals sharing their content. If a publisher’s content is shared widely by people who want their friends to see it, then the decline is likely to be smaller, says Facebook.

“I'd expect reach for publishers to go down a small amount, but a noticeable amount,” Mosseri said. “Reach for publishers always varies a lot by publisher, so there's no specific way to know that on a per publisher basis. Some publishers may go up, some publishers may go down, some publishers may go down more.”

Facebook is responsible for 41.4% of publisher referral traffic, per the digital analytics firm Parse.ly, so a small but noticeable decline could mean serious trouble for some publishers — especially those that “may go down more.” Facebook has more or less slaughtered publications in the past with News Feed algorithm tweaks, and today’s adjustment may bring more bloodshed for those overly reliant on brand pages.

giphy.com

The changes come on the same day Facebook is publishing a set of values it says informs the way the News Feed prioritizes stories. “News Feed is a system that's designed and built by people, those people have values, and those values are reflected in how we make decisions on a regular basis,” Mosseri said. Implicit in the statement: The News Feed isn’t “neutral.” It wants certain things, and Facebook is happy to tell us what they are.

Those things, in order, are: content from friends and family first, followed by informative content, and then entertaining content. Today’s News Feed tweak can be understood through this lens. “Connecting people with their friends and family is the value proposition on which this company is built,” Mosseri said. “It's also still often what people tell us they like most, or care about most.”

In some cases, content can be in more than one category. As Mosseri said at one point, “Actually, I love it when things are multiple [categories],” naming John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight as a content type that often hits both the inform and entertain buckets.

Facebook is experiencing a decline in original sharing on the platform, per multiple reports. Some attribute this to a high quality bar people may feel they need to meet when they post to Facebook — those amateur snapshots might look out of place surrounded by so much professionally produced content. Yet Mosseri said this update was not meant to address that social media stage fright. “Is there a quality bar that's sort of internally projected? I'm not sure. I don't know. But that didn't go into the thinking of this.”

Maybe not. But regardless of whether or not this was intended to encourage people to post more casual content, or just to surface it, Facebook and its newly articulated News Feed values will likely mean more selfies and fewer stories showing up in your daily social media diet.

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Uber’s Testing a New Feature That Tracks Erratic Driving

An Uber driver in San Francisco, California. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith/File Photo

Robert Galbraith / Reuters

Uber is piloting new app features across the U.S. in an attempt to give passengers smoother rides. It plans to measure navigation and how a car swerves and accelerates to give drivers daily in-app reports with feedback on how they compare to other Uber drivers. The ride-hail giant told BuzzFeed News those patterns will help eventually build a real-time alert system for erratic or unsafe drivers, and it will inform its research on how self-driving cars should behave.

In several cities, the Uber app will also send drivers speeding alerts for highways – but not local roads because Uber doesn't know where those speed limits change. Monitoring how quickly or slowly cars accelerate and drive will help Uber detect anomalies, like drivers who tend to speed or hit the brakes too hard.

The product managers for these features worked closely with the self-driving car team to figure out how Uber can use its existing fleet of drivers to collect more data on how cars should (and shouldn’t) move in different locations and scenarios.

Uber

Monitoring these factors will also help Uber fact-check bad ratings from passengers. Sometimes passengers report to Uber that their drivers were speeding. Now, instead of relying exclusively on someone’s word, Uber said it will be able to refer back to data collected by the app in cities where the pilot is running — something it had not been able to do before it began testing this feature in November in Houston. Now, it's expanding to more cities.

The daily report will pop up on the driver app and give grades for “smooth brakes” and “smooth accelerations,” with specific feedback, such as “several harsh accelerations detected,” according to a sample screenshot provided to BuzzFeed News.

Uber told BuzzFeed that for the near future, it doesn’t plan to deactivate drivers who score lower on its safe-driving metrics. Instead, the company hopes that drivers will be incentivized to ride a little more cautiously if they know they’re being watched. The goal, Uber said, is to build a system for figuring out which drivers don’t match the typical patterns for its other drivers in their city. Maybe they swerve more harshly and more often than others, for example. Then the company can investigate further.

In addition to the movement of the car, Uber will be looking at the movements of devices themselves. Some drivers hold their phones while they’re driving, or rest them on their laps. In about 20 U.S. markets, the app will log how much the phone moves. If Uber notices a driver’s phone moves too much, the app will ping him or her to purchase a phone mount to dock it to the dashboard. Docking the phone reduces the risk it’ll fall on the ground midway through a ride, and it leaves both hands free to hold the wheel.

Uber will also send drivers who are on the app during early morning hours or late at night “recharge reminders.” The notifications will be based on the time of day, not how long the driver has had the app on or how many consecutive rides he or she has driven.

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Hackers Gain Access To Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's Twitter

OurMine, the hacking group that in recent weeks has taken over the Twitter accounts of tech luminaries such as Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, has claimed another scalp: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

In a since-deleted tweet sent at 10:05 ET from Kalanick's account, the group announced that they had taken control:

It appears from the tweet that the group may not have had direct access to Kalanick's Twitter account, but rather gained control of his Quora account, which enables users to post directly to Twitter. That's how OurMine hacked Pichai.

The group told BuzzFeed News yesterday afternoon that they had not picked a new target and that its hacks take anywhere between an hour and several days to carry out. OurMine has been criticized by the security community for publicizing its business by hacking tech notables.

BuzzFeed News has reached out to Uber for comment.

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Airbnb Sues San Francisco Over Rental Rules

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

In what Airbnb is calling an "unprecedented step," the company is suing the city of San Francisco, challenging an ordinance the startup says violates legal protections for internet platforms and its free speech rights.

The new law that trigged the dispute requires home-owners to register their rental properties with the city, with companies like Airbnb on the hook for any unregistered hosts. Passed unanimously by the Board of Supervisors earlier this year, Airbnb could be charged $1,000 per day for every host that has failed to register.

"This is an unprecedented step for Airbnb, and one we do not take lightly," the company wrote in a blog post Monday. "Unfortunately, the rules do not work. There is broad agreement that the current registration process in the City is broken."

Beset by drastic housing shortages, San Francisco officials designed the rules in part to protect the city's existing housing stock. By limiting the number of days for a short term rental and introducing a registration process, city officials sought to address criticism that rental companies like Airbnb were exacerbating the housing crises by converting affordable homes into hostels.

"There is a need for policies that protect San Francisco’s housing stock and ensure the collection of hotel taxes," Airbnb wrote. But the company argues that for some of its hosts, the registration process is unworkable, describing the city's requirements as "confusing and ever-changing."

But David Campos, a member of the board of supervisors and a co-author of the new rental law dismissed Airbnb's opposition Monday evening, arguing that the lawsuit proves Airbnb "believes it's above the law."

"Airbnb wants to play by its own rules," he wrote on Twitter.

According to Campos, thousands of Airbnb's San Francisco hosts remain unregistered, which could force the company to absorb massive penalties or remove the listings from its platform when the rules kick in next month.

In its lawsuit, Airbnb claims San Francisco is at fault for violating what's known as the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that shields internet companies like YouTube, Twitter, and Yelp from being held responsible for the content posted by their users.

The city, looking to institute heightened accountability, sees things differently. "The ordinance doesn’t punish platforms that host user content, Matt Dorsey, a spokesman for San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, told Bloomberg.

“It’s not regulating user content at all -- it’s regulating the business activity of the hosting platform,” Dorsey said.

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You Just Stole $50 Million In Cryptocurrency — Now How The Hell Do You Spend It?

Archive Photos / Getty Images

Imagine that you are a master thief, a real Danny Ocean. In your latest caper, you discover a way into the vault of a brand-new bank, one thought to be pretty much uncrackable. And then, using the bank's own state-of-the-art systems against it, you steal about $60 million dollars. Finally, you escape — and no one knows who you are.

But there's a problem: The money you stole has to sit in escrow for a month. So you can't celebrate with a dinner at the French Laundry. Also, by the time you leave the vault, everyone knows that you stole the money and that it's in escrow — so they have 27 days to figure out a way to keep you from getting it, laundering it, and spending it.

This is basically what happened earlier this month when a hacker or hackers siphoned about a third of the money out of a state-of-the-art online investment fund called the DAO. Investors buy into the DAO — short for decentralized autonomous organization — with a year-old cryptocurrency called ether. At the time of the hack, the DAO had raised over $150 million worth of the stuff, which amounts to 15% of all ether in existence. Over the course of several hours on June 16 and 17, the hacker stole about 3.7 million Ethereum tokens from the fund. That's a large enough chunk of the total amount of ether to cause panic, and the price of the currency fell more than a quarter. Even after that crash, as of this writing, the purloined ether are still worth about $50 million.

The tricky part is, there is no way to directly withdraw from the DAO. Instead, to cash out, you have to create a so-called child DAO, a kind of escrow from which no ether can be extracted for 27 days. That gives the major stakeholders in the DAO and Ethereum a month to figure out a way to stop the hacker from ever getting their money.

"There’s been a lot of coordinated activity," said Joseph Lubin, one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the founder of ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company. He told BuzzFeed News that Ethereum developers, currency exchangers, and miners are working together to make sure the money never gets spent. "It's not going to happen," he said.

You Have to Outsmart the Bank a Second Time

In the Danny Ocean case, law enforcement's first step would be to freeze the assets in escrow, to prevent them from ever reaching the thief. But in the technolibertarian world of cryptocurrency, things aren't quite so easy. Who is law enforcement? And what are the laws? The idea behind the DAO, like the idea behind bitcoin and ether, was to create a code-based financial entity with no cops and no centralized control — meaning there's no Fed to step in during a crisis.

Ethereum, which has attracted attention from JPMorgan Chase, IBM, and Samsung, differentiates itself from bitcoin because it's more than just a cryptocurrency; instead, it is a platform for different distributed applications, of which ether (currency) and the DAO (funding) are only two. Just last month, Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of the leading bitcoin wallet Coinbase, wrote that "Ethereum is ahead of Bitcoin in many ways and represents the bleeding edge of digital currency."

It's unclear to what extent American securities laws apply to Ethereum, or to the theft. So far the SEC has expressed "concern," and little else, over the hack. Also, major changes to the DAO are supposed to happen by consensus, per its distributed nature, or not at all. So the theft, or rather the response to the theft, poses major questions for Ethereum and for cryptocurrency in general. Namely: Is it a theft at all, or a natural consequence of the philosophy behind the currency? And if the hack forces Ethereum's applications to become more secure, is it an improvement?

Vitalik Buterin, the 22-year-old Canadian programmer who invented Ethereum, was quick to propose freezing the hacker's ill-gotten money. Known as a "soft fork," the asset freeze involves updating the Ethereum code in a way that prevents money from moving into or out of the hacker's unique address.

Sounds simple, right?

It is, sort of. The soft fork is just a basic software update. Because of the way Ethereum works, though, 51% of the cryptocurrency's nodes (basically, users) would have to update their software for the freeze to take effect. And that gives the hacker some room to come up with a bold plan.

On June 18, someone claiming to represent the hacker wrote in a DAO slack channel, “[S]oon we will have a smart contract to reward miners who oppose the soft fork ... 1 million ether + 100 btc will be shared with miners.” In other words, the hacker plans on bribing Ethereum miners with nearly a third of the stolen money if they reject the software update.

Lubin told BuzzFeed News that 85% of Ethereum miners have already agreed to accept the soft fork, and that the legitimate businesses that deal in Ethereum have too great a stake in its success to cooperate with the hacker.

"No one is going to attempt to take bribes from stolen money," Lubin said. "The implications are nightmarish, socially and legally," he said.

Congrats, You Finally Got Your Money — Now You Need to Launder It

But let's say the nightmare comes true: lots of Ethereum miners take the bribe and in a few weeks the attacker withdraws the ether from escrow. What then? Well, then they would need to launder their score, which would in this hypothetical be whittled down to 2.7 million ether, or $37 million. However, they couldn't exchange it all at once for dollars.

First of all, the currency can't be easily exchanged without affecting its price. "As soon as you start withdrawing, the value will drop precipitously," Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security, told BuzzFeed News.

And second, many of the exchanges where the hacker could trade the ether for dollars (or more likely, bitcoin) require identification, so even if they did do business with the thief, it would unmask them.

A more feasible option, according to Philip Daian, a software engineer who researches Ethereum, would be to use an exchange that doesn't require ID, like ShapeShift, or to take the money to a Dark Web exchange and try to sell it at a discount or for more liquid goods — like, say, drugs or weapons.

"He might be able to get a million dollars out if he tried really hard," said Graham.

Today, that seems implausible. The soft fork patch has been released, and it looks likely to pass. While that would mean our master thief never gets to spend their ether, it doesn't necessarily mean they haven't already enjoyed a windfall. The Ethereum community has widely speculated that the hacker or hackers placed a short bet on the currency prior to carrying out the attack. As the value of Ethereum plunged, such a bet would have paid off handsomely. In that case, any ether the attacker is able to get from the hack itself would be a bonus.

(Regardless of whether the attacker makes any money, he or she appears to have destroyed the DAO. In a likely next step after the soft fork, a so-called hard fork would freeze the DAO and let all of its investors withdraw their initial investments. There are a number of reasons why this hard fork would happen, including loss of confidence in the DAO code by investors and the public relations damage to the Ethereum platform beyond the DAO if the hacker is allowed to keep the money.)

As a Hail Mary, Why Not Sue the Bank You Robbed?

But the hacker hasn't exhausted all their options yet: They could always sue the bank. In an open letter published to Pastebin, someone claiming the be attacker wrote, "A soft or hard fork would amount to seizure of my legitimate and rightful ether, claimed legally through the terms of a smart contract. ... I reserve all rights to take any and all legal action against any accomplices of illegitimate theft, freezing, or seizure of my legitimate ether, and am actively working with my law firm." In the world of cryptocurrency, where code is the ultimate authority, funds gained by technical means — which is exactly how the thief pulled off the heist — are legitimate.

This is not an unpopular view. "The whole reason for cryptocurrency is to get out of the idea of the big guys manipulating the system for their own benefit," Graham told BuzzFeed News. "I hope that he wins, philosophically." Graham is right — an intervention in the DAO would favor the interests of people who have lot of ether.

In other words, imagine our master thief suing the bank they stole money from for trying to get it back. And then, imagine the other customers applauding them for teaching the bank a lesson.

All of this means the very bureaucratic bodies that crypto-purists detest are probably going to get involved. Said Lubin, the Ethereum co-founder, "It's almost certain entities like the FBI and the SEC are going to investigate this matter."

So now imagine your single heist calling into question the very principles of the currency you've stolen. Even Danny Ocean never did that.

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Now You Can Ask Alexa To Order Your Lyft

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - FEBRUARY 03: Lyft passengers and drivers in a Lyft ride on February 3, 2016 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Lyft)

Mike Coppola / Getty Images

You already talk to Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant embedded in the company’s Echo speaker, every day. And now you can ask Alexa to order your Lyft ride, without lifting a finger.

Lyft and Amazon announced Tuesday that you can ask the voice-controlled smart home device to call your Lyft, Lyft Line, or a larger Plus vehicle. Lyft is following Uber’s lead, which integrated with Amazon Echo earlier this year but doesn’t currently allow users to call shared UberPool rides via Alexa. The two largest ride-hail companies in the U.S. are in a fierce competition to retain drivers and riders, so they often match each other’s offerings.

Through Alexa, you can request Lyft rides, ask for estimated arrival times and trip times, get fare quotes, or check for Prime Time (Lyft’s version of surge-pricing). You can also rate and tip drivers and save work and home addresses so you can simply say, “Alexa, ask Lyft to call a Line to work.”

For ride-hail companies, adding the ability to call cars through virtual assistants is part of their efforts to seamlessly mesh into their users’ lives. Lyft also plans to integrate with Siri in the fall. (Apple announced at its annual World Wide Developers Conference earlier this month that it would soon open up Siri to third-party app developers.)

Amazon is also pushing to make its already popular Echo device a fixture in more homes by expanding Alexa’s skills and services. In just the last month, developers have integrated more products with Alexa, growing the virtual assistant’s number of skills by 50% to 1,400, according to Steve Rabuchin, vice president of Amazon Alexa.

Roy Williams, a software engineer at Lyft who developed the Alexa project, told BuzzFeed News, “I’m someone who’s always running late, so being able to call a car, or ask where my car is, or see if it’s Prime Time now without having to pick up my phone was really interesting,”.

Williams and his team also had a little fun by programming some “Easter eggs” into the software. Just try asking Alexa what color Lyft’s mustache is, and if Alexa likes self-driving cars. Or even ask Alexa what we do on Wednesdays: “On Wednesdays, we wear pink.”

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Holy Fucking Shit, Twitter Has Stickers Now

I’M GOING TO LOSE MY MIND

Ok check this out. Just a boring fucking pic of a guy doing a backflip off an elephant.

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A Father-Daughter Team Wants To Take On Uber With A Women-Only App

William Jordan and his daughter Savannah, who was the inspiration for creating See Jane Go.

A father-daughter team wants to take on Uber with a women-only ride-hailing app called See Jane Go. It’ll begin beta-testing in Orange County, California this summer. It joins SafeHer, another women-only ride service that wants to launch nationwide; both are marketing themselves as safer, more comfortable options for women than Uber or Lyft.

See Jane Go says it wants to solve ride-hail’s woman problem. BuzzFeed News reported earlier this year that Uber has received thousands of support tickets that include the words “rape” and “sexual assault.” There is even a website dedicated to tracking news reports about Lyft and Uber drivers accused of sexual assault.

When William Jordan’s 18-year-old daughter expressed interest in driving for ride-hail companies, he was uncomfortable with the idea of her picking up male strangers. So they decided to launch See Jane Go together.

“I’ve heard all of my girlfriends feel very uncomfortable at some point or another,” Savannah Jordan said. “I personally have never taken an Uber ... because of all the stories I have heard.” She said the same applies for Lyft and other ride-hail companies that put her at risk of being stuck in a car with a man who behaves inappropriately.

Of course, a new ride-hail startup like See Jane Go faces significant challenges as it attempts to break into an already well-established market. Uber and Lyft are the biggest players in the U.S., and they often match each other’s promotions to retain riders and drivers. It’s extremely unlikely that SafeHer, See Jane Go, or any other new company can convince women to delete their other apps and shift allegiances, or convince investors to throw cash at a new niche competitor. Uber has also raised $12.5 billion at this point, according to CrunchBase, and Lyft has raised $2 billion. See Jane Go has raised just a small fraction of that.

William, president of a wealth management firm, is mostly self-funding the app for now, though he’s searching for private equity investors. The app has raised $1 million, with the largest share coming from William himself, a spokesperson said. Synoptek, an IT company based in Irvine, California, and NetQuarry, an enterprise application platform in Fullerton, California, are developing the app.

A screenshot of See Jane Go's app, provided to BuzzFeed News.

Based on their market research, See Jane Go’s founders estimate the app will receive interest from about 400 riders before it launches. It will determine which cities to expand to outside of Orange County based on driver and rider sign-ups. The company will take a 20% cut from fares, which is in line with other ride-hail companies. It also plans to match competitors’ fare rates.

Its drivers will undergo “comprehensive” security screening, including background, criminal, and driving record checks. Uber and Lyft’s background check policies vary based on state and local requirements. Both companies say they conduct their own background checks and screen for criminal records, but they left Austin after the city demanded that they start fingerprinting drivers.

Among other features See Jane Go plans to offer is giving riders a say in how they interact with their drivers. Do you want to chat? Should the driver play music? Would you prefer silence? Riders will also be able to select from those options based on their mood. Female riders will also have the option to bring along male companions.

To avoid potential allegations that the app discriminates against men — which is an issue that SafeHer has had to deal with already — See Jane Go says it plans to approach other apps to partner with so it can divert male riders to competitors. The app says it will identify its customers’ genders based on their drivers’ licenses.

The company wouldn’t allow BuzzFeed News to download the app early, but says its beta version will be available in August.

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say women have to be concerned about their safety, whereas men don’t have to be as worried,” William Jordan said. “If a woman would prefer a distinctly feminine company … we can be their app.”

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Twitter's Best Idea For Keeping Up With News Is Buried Too Deep

Two major news events unfolded this week with the kind of incremental and quickly evolving updates that made Twitter an ideal place to follow both. On Wednesday, a group of congressional Democrats staged a sit-in on the House floor to protest gun violence. And on Thursday, Britain voted to leave the European Union. Throughout both, informed insiders tweeted bits of news and information you simply couldn’t find elsewhere. But unless you were already following those people, or saw a retweet, their updates may as well not have existed; they were trees falling in empty forests. It doesn't have to be that way.

Twitter is built on a follow model, which is great for some use cases, but also means you’re going to miss a lot of great stuff from people you don’t follow. Unless you followed certain Democratic lawmakers, you likely missed lots of action from the House floor during the sit-in this week. But there’s a solution to that: A Twitter that temporarily inserts relevant tweets from the right people at the right moment into your timeline would be a much more useful Twitter. Amazingly, this Twitter already exists but is buried puzzlingly deep within the platform’s user interface.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is fond of pitching his service as the place you go to see what’s happening 10 to 15 minutes before anywhere else. And it’s true — possessing this information is what’s helped grow Twitter to over 310 million active users. But the company has struggled to grow beyond that, largely because the information Dorsey references is very, very difficult to unearth.

Alex Kantrowitz

That’s why Twitter released a product last fall, called Moments, that attempts to solve this problem. Moments curates the best things happening on Twitter and presents them in a collection format in a dedicated tab. These curated stories are often fairly anticlimactic, though, since, by virtue of being curated, they’re both after-the-fact and highly selective.

But there’s another component to Moments that’s been fantastically useful the past few days — if you could find it. Moments also includes an optional temporary follow function that, if you opt in, inserts tweets into your timeline from people you don’t follow when they’re pertinent to the news, sports, or entertainment event you’re following, and then, when the event is over, the temporary follow ends.

You don’t have to check in on the Moment to see these; they appear automatically in your timeline — which means you can stay up to date on events as they happen, without having to either follow lots of new people, or check in again and again on a live Moment.

During both the congressional sit-in and Britain's EU vote, Twitter’s temporary follow function was indispensable. It pushed through tweets from political journalists, beltway insiders, and members of Congress during the sit-in, and updates from British bloggers, politicians, and even a BBC bot during the referendum. And it did so all in that 10- to 15-minute early window, so if you opted in, you experienced the value of Twitter with just a single click.

This function works for new and casual users trying to figure out how (and why) to use Twitter. And it also works for power users who have geared their feeds toward other interests.

The temporary follow was one of the initial ideas for Moments, yet it’s surprisingly difficult to find. It is buried in the Moments tab, accessible via a “Follow” button that’s sometimes there and sometimes not. In a (very unscientific) poll I conducted on Twitter yesterday, only about a third over 175 participants said they knew the function existed.

Conversations with Twitter insiders and tech executives often come back to Twitter’s need to emphasize the temporary follow. “Twitter would be great to add ways to let people follow topics and individuals temporarily. Either to see all of their tweets or even just the best ones,” former Twitter product manager and now venture capitalist Josh Elman told BuzzFeed News.

Twitter seems to have added extra attention to the temporary follow function this week, with the U.K. Moments team playfully teasing the U.S. team about whose would run for longer. But it’s unclear whether the company plans to unleash it further. Asked if there were any plans to make the temporary follow more prominent, Twitter declined to comment.

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Uber Documents Suggest Price Cuts Don’t Always Raise Driver Wages

Aaron Fernandez / BuzzFeed News

On Jan. 8 of this year, Uber announced its now annual winter fare cuts for 2016. In a blog post titled “Beating the Winter Slump: Price Cuts for Riders and Guaranteed Earnings for Drivers,” Uber Regional General Manager Rachel Holt touted fare cuts as “the single most effective way to boost demand” during the cold winter months. “Higher demand means more time moving people, less time spent waiting around and more money for drivers,” the blog post reads.

That may well be the case in some cities — but not all. Internal company documents provided to BuzzFeed News, as well as conversations with Uber economists, suggest that while the company claims lowered fares mean more money for drivers, Uber actually knows less than it publicly suggests about the relationship between price cuts and driver pay. Many drivers, meanwhile, say they lose money when Uber reduces prices.

"When they lowered the rates in January, a bunch of drivers quit.”

The documents, provided by a source with access to Uber’s pricing models, include a trio of spreadsheets that the company used to model the impact of price cuts in three major markets: Denver, Detroit, and Houston. They also include internal Uber communications, such as guidelines for Uber employees that clearly indicate these spreadsheets did not “widely” support the company's higher-demand-means-more-money-for-drivers claim. Indeed, warning text on these documents explicitly cautions employees against publicly making “implicit or explicit claims that price cuts cause earnings to rise by increasing trips.”

Uber told BuzzFeed News that these warnings exist because the company has “hundreds of new employees joining every month and it’s important these people understand what they can and cannot say given that pricing is by its nature a complicated subject."

If pricing is complicated for Uber, it's even more so for drivers, many of whom say the company's fare cuts do more harm than help. As one of the many Uber drivers interviewed for this article told BuzzFeed News, "Uber said, ‘We're going to lower the fares, but you're going to get more rides out of it, so that will make up for it.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, no, it didn’t really.’"

When Uber announces its typical January price cuts, which are sometimes followed by additional price cuts later in the year, it argues that doing so will entice passengers to take more rides during periods of seasonally lower demand. Uber told BuzzFeed News that the idea that price cuts cause driver earnings to drop is “not true” and a “misperception.”

But that doesn’t stop Uber drivers from complaining — and in some cases protesting — that fare cuts do just that. "When they lowered the rates in January, a bunch of drivers quit,” Steve Rogers of Detroit told BuzzFeed News. “I went strictly to Lyft."

Price cuts in Detroit were so drastic — from 70 cents a mile to 30 cents a mile with the base fare slashed in half — that the number of passengers in search of rides soon outstripped the number of Uber drivers on the road. So Uber's surge pricing kicked in to restore the balance between the two, raising fares to encourage more drivers to hit the roads.

"We feel we're Uber's experiment.”

Uber says that in Detroit, drivers’ gross pay went up after it cut prices. But a big factor was surge pricing, the higher rates Uber charges during times of high demand. Indeed, when Uber said it was cutting prices in Detroit this past January, the average fare actually went up.

Uber’s price swings frustrate drivers — and make some distrust the company. Jeff, a Detroit Uber driver who asked to be identified by first name only, theorized that the city's economic depression made Uber confident it could dramatically cut fares without losing many drivers. "We feel we're Uber's experiment,” he said.

On April 13, 2016, a little over three months after Uber’s January fare cuts took place, that experiment changed yet again when Uber increased fares, though not by as much as it had cut them in January. In an email to drivers, Mike White, Uber’s general manager for Michigan, wrote, “Earlier this year we lowered prices in Detroit to encourage more riders to use Uber. We promised that if those price cuts didn’t work for driver-partners like you, fares would go back up. Today we are keeping that promise and raising uberX prices by 10% in Detroit.”

Even so, Uber said that it is “not unusual” for the company to wait months to reverse price cuts that hurt drivers in certain markets, lending credence to drivers who complain that price cuts can wreak havoc on their financial stability.

In order to better understand how Uber’s pricing works, company employees use forecasting models. Three of these models — for the Denver, Detroit, and Houston markets — were provided to BuzzFeed News. Uber repeatedly emphasized in conversations with BuzzFeed News that these models are hypothetical, and don't reflect drivers' reality.

The spreadsheets seem to estimate how many more rides price cuts would have to generate in order to keep gross driver earnings stable. But that increase in rider demand is not guaranteed. Further, gross earnings don’t account for the additional expenses (fuel, vehicle depreciation, etc.) incurred while driving more trips.

In fact, instructions in two of these models explicitly tell Uber employees to adjust how many trips drivers would have to make each hour to break even — on gross earnings, before taking into account expenses. But there are no similar instructions for net earnings, or take-home pay, which is what drivers say matters most to them. Uber uses these larger gross earnings figures (minus Uber’s commission) in most of its driver recruitment ads.

Uber says the pricing models seen by BuzzFeed News are not the main tools the company used to determine price cuts in Denver, Detroit, and Houston, and don’t predict the true effects of price cuts, but “simulate various scenarios that could happen.”

But these models do make it possible to generate rough estimates of how much demand would have had to increase in order for drivers’ gross pay to remain stable.

For example, in Detroit, Uber’s model estimated that under the fare cuts the company ultimately implemented in January 2016, drivers who had been making a median of 1.43 trips per hour would (all else being equal) need to drive 1.77 trips per hour to collect the same paycheck as before. That’s a 24% increase.

In Denver, drivers who previously drove 1.6 trips per hour would (all else being equal) need to do 1.82 trips per hour to make the same amount of money, a 13% increase, while drivers in Houston who had been doing 1.21 trips per hour would need to raise that to 1.52 trips per hour, a 26% increase, to take home the same paycheck.

Extra time on the road means more money spent on gas, car maintenance, and other expenses. Uber’s pricing models do estimate these expenses, but the calculations are oversimplified and, by the company’s admission, inaccurate.

“I did more rides after fare cuts, but I didn’t make more money.”

Uber's forecasting may be imprecise, but the company does have data on what actually happened after price cuts. How was driver take-home pay impacted in each of these three cities following Uber’s January 2016 price cuts? The company declined to say. Uber told BuzzFeed News that “individual driver costs vary widely, and so are hard to estimate accurately.”

Uber did say that drivers’ gross earnings in both Houston and Denver remained “stable.” Pressed to explain what that meant, one Uber economist said “stable” in this case means earnings could have gone up a little bit or down a little bit. The economist also noted that because there are so many factors in play, it’s difficult to precisely identify the degree to which price cuts affected overall earnings.

Uber told BuzzFeed News that these pricing models are relatively new, and that the company is still developing its forecasting methodology. It acknowledged that it is possible price cuts will not always increase the amount of money drivers actually earn, and noted that the company offers drivers some recourse should that happen.

“There have been instances where a model predicted a decrease in earnings, but earnings actually increased,” Uber told BuzzFeed News. “That’s why we offer drivers guarantees to ensure that they are not worse off. It’s also why we reverse cuts when it’s clear they are not working for both riders and drivers."

Uber says its guarantee is simple: If drivers don’t earn above a certain minimum average wage, Uber promises to pay the difference.

But drivers BuzzFeed News spoke with say the guarantee comes with so many complicated stipulations that it’s almost worthless. The guaranteed rates are available only during certain time slots (for example, 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. on Friday) and only to drivers who accept and complete a certain percentage of rides (for example, 1.5 rides per hour completed with a 90% acceptance rate). If drivers fail to meet any of these criteria, the guarantee doesn’t apply.

“The stipulations aren’t realistic,” said Jeff, the Detroit driver. “You really have to know how to work it. At the end of the day, it's not worth it.” Other drivers said Uber’s fine print renders its guarantee “difficult” if not “impossible” to collect.

Internal Uber communications seen by BuzzFeed News concede that guarantees “can be confusing.”

Hourly guarantees are "not in place perpetually," according to Uber, but if a price cut really isn’t working out for drivers, Uber says it will reverse course and raise prices.

Since 2015, the company says, price cuts have been reversed in 50 cities. For comparison, in January 2016, Uber enacted price cuts in about 100 markets.

Uber says it can take “some weeks” to determine how its price cuts are impacting driver earnings, and an Uber economist told BuzzFeed News that it’s not abnormal for these reversals to take 16 weeks to come into effect — a considerable amount of time for a technology company with expertise in real-time data and logistics.

Only individual Uber drivers can know exactly what they’re pocketing at the end of any given week. But given the imprecision of the Uber price-cut models reviewed by BuzzFeed News, and the length of time it takes the company to reverse fare cuts that don’t work out, it’s clear the price-cut program can make it difficult for drivers to know how much money they’re going to make.

“I did more rides after fare cuts,” Steve F., who has been driving for Uber in Detroit since last May, told BuzzFeed News, “but I didn’t make more money.” Instead, Steve says it felt like he was working harder just to earn less.

“If you’re making 20 bucks an hour at your job, and your boss says, ‘Steve, you’re going to make more money, but I’m cutting your per-hour to 11 bucks, and you’re going to work 80 hours per week to make up for it,’ why would you want that?”

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What Happens When A Stan Retires?

When Myleeza Mingo first watched Keeping Up With the Kardashians as teenager in a small town in Louisiana, she didn’t see the show as a sign of the impending fall of Western civilization, or 22-minute chiaroscuro of the vapid nature of celebrity. She saw three stylish sisters, whose humor and charisma made the show incredibly watchable. But it was the ridicule of and negatively toward Kim after her breakup with Kris Humphries that turned Mingo from casual admirer to a true stan, ready to defend Kim against her haters.

The use of the term “stan” to mean superfan comes from the Eminen song “Stan”, about a fan so passionate he becomes homicidally deranged. Now the term is used to describe online superfans who are so ardent they devote their entire online existence to the celebrity or artist they stan for.

Typically, stans support female musicians like Beyoncé or Britney Spears — the kind of female solo artists who attract slavish devotion. Some of these tribes have their own names: the Beyhive, Arianators, (Lady Gaga’s) Little Monsters, Swifties, (Rihanna’s) Navy. On Twitter, you can easily identify a stan because they’ll likely have a photo of their idol as their avatar, and often use a fake name that incorporates the singer’s name — for example, if I were @KatieSpears, you’d know I was a Britney stan. True stans carry the flag for their diva, and will ruthlessly fight for them. (A recent Twitter thread by a Beyoncé stan laid out a brutal and hilarious evisceration of all current pop divas, ending commentary for each with “She doesn’t have the range.”)

All this devotion sometimes leads stans into sometimes extremely boring waters. Music stans are obsessed with statistics about album sales and metrics, flaming rival stans with facts — otherwise known as “receipts” — about how, say, Selena’s album sold more units in the first week than Demi's, thereby proving Demi is a “flop.” Recently, a Change.org petition launched by an Arianator demanded that Metacritic, a site that averages critic’s reviews into a numerical score, remove a lukewarm review of Ariana Grande’s recent album on Rolling Stone based on a detailed, point-by-point explanation of how the review did not fully examine the brilliance of Grande’s voice.

While the classic stan is a female pop-diva fan, there are also stans of other celebrities — like Kim Kardashian. And Mingo, aka @MyleezaKardash, considers herself the number one Kim stan of all time.

Right now, Mingo is facing a new chapter in her life — she just graduated college — and so she’s considering retiring from the stan lifestyle. But can a true stan ever give it up? I talked to Mingo on BuzzFeed’s Internet Explorer podcast to find out what happens when a stan retires.

Twitter: @KimKardashian

When Myingo tweeted that she was considering retiring, Kim manually retweeted her, begging her not to. “It was one of the saddest moments ever,” said Mingo about Kim’s tweet.

“I've been doing this since I was 14 years old,” she said. “It's something I love to do; it’s really become my hobby, so it's like giving up something you've been doing for almost 10 years and you realize it's time to hang it up. It's just a sad sad day. I grew up so fast — I'm about to be 22 in August and I have to be an adult.”

What’s exceptional about Mingo as a stan is that she has actually interacted with Kim, something most stans would die to do. Kim once replied to her on Twitter, and she actually recognized Mingo when she showed up to a perfume-signing event. The two struck up a friendship; Kim invited her to a Kanye concert and even visited her on her birthday.

For Mingo's recent college graduation, Kim sent an expensive gift. “I had tweeted asking if the Apple Watch was really worth it. I was a broke college student, and it was like $300,” Mingo said. “[Kim] DM'd me and said, ‘Hey, congratulations on graduating, I want to send you a gift.’ We get to my graduation, and I opened it up and it was this Apple Watch I had tweeted about. You can tell she's so connected and in tune with her fans — she knew I wanted it and was considering getting one, and she got it for me.”

As a true stan of a controversial celebrity, Mingo has done her fair share of fighting on Twitter, but she’s mostly stopped. “I've gotten so much better with it because Kim told me I could handle it,” she said. “I try to be more mature because I know I'm older than these people. But I used to argue with anyone who mentioned me, and I'd have arguments that lasted for days and days and days. When I see someone talking crazy, I try my best to ignore it. But yeah, there's times you argue all day with one person. You're just trying to prove your point … A true stan knows you can end up arguing all day.”

instagram.com

Mingo majored in public relations and business, and she knows that the sizable audience she's built on social media (26,000 Twitter followers and 21,000 on Instagram) is seen as an asset in those industries. If she goes through with her "retirement," she plans to keep those accounts active, but just switch over to less stan activity and have each of them function as more of a personal account. However, she’s unsure if she’ll keep the @MyleezaKardash handle or switch it to her real name. People know her by her handle so well, classmates would even call her that; she even occasionally accidentally signs restaurant bills as “Kardash” instead of her real last name.

Still, she’s not sure she’s fully ready to break up with Kim. “I'm not 100% dead on it, but I think it's just the right thing to do. I'm 22, I'm getting ready to start my career, I just graduated college, and I just really think that it's time, even though I'm reluctant to give it up. I've had my fair share of years on Twitter cursing people out, all things a real stan does. But it's time to hang up my stan shoes.”

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After Britain's Exit, Uncertainty Hits Europe's Tech Future

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Britain voted to leave the European Union Thursday in a stunning referendum that risks damaging the UK's financial standing, while spurring tremendous uncertainty across industries in Europe, including the tech sector.

The economic impact of the momentous vote is only just beginning to be felt, with the value of the British pound plummeting, and stocks around the world absorbing massive blows.

While the leaders of Silicon Valley have chosen to remain silent on Brexit, the initial market turbulence will lead to a prolonged period of confusion and unpredictability, experts say, with the repercussions felt on the continent and across the Atlantic.

In recent years, the European Union has emerged as an antagonist to Silicon Valley, challenging the ambitions of American tech giants on an array of issues: taxation, data privacy, surveillance, and antitrust. Within the EU, Britain has largely taken a pro-market stance, in opposition to other national governments like Germany and France who have staked a more aggressive regulatory approach against dominant U.S. tech firms.

But now that Britain is slated to exit the EU, an important counterbalance will soon depart, Daniel Hamilton, the founding director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University, told BuzzFeed News.

"The UK has always been a voice for open markets," he said, "and has been for light regulations in the EU context on all things — and that includes tech issues." The vote may also lead to an exodus of capital and businesses out of London, Hamilton added.

“This is probably of outsized importance to Google," wrote Ben Thompson, the founder of Stratechery. "The U.K. is one of their best markets, and the company needs all the support it can get in an increasingly suspicious Europe that is pursuing multiple antitrust cases against the search giant.”

Google declined to comment.

The confounding Brexit vote also comes at a time when the European Union is trying to unify the continent's fragmented internet economy, and renegotiate a crucial data protection agreement with the United States. On both these fronts, the departure appears to frustrate the EU's commercial goals.

"They will have to renegotiate thousands, tens of thousands, of agreements that have knitted the UK into the EU," Hamilton said. "The immediate implication for tech and for everything else is massive uncertainty for a period of years."

The EU's plans to foster a pan-European market for digital goods and services was designed to consolidate a paralyzing patchwork of national laws. The so-called Digital Single Market was built with the hopes of shaping Europe into a more attractive trading partner, as well as developing the kind of capital and talent-rich hubs that have defined the success of Silicon Valley.

But government officials fear that Britain's vote may trigger other referendums, undermining the deep economic integration that underpins the EU, and the broader political and cultural project of unifying the people of Europe.

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Here's Why Apple Is Bringing Meditation To Your Wrist

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Apple wants you to take a deep breath, savor the moment, and slowly let it go. Preferably while wearing an Apple Watch.

Last week, Apple unveiled Breathe, an app that will be the tech giant’s first foray into quantified mindfulness when it becomes available on the Apple Watch this fall. Breathe will join the hundreds of other meditation-themed apps that aim to help users find calm. But while scientific research indicates that meditation can improve conditions like anxiety, depression, and pain, there is scarce evidence that meditation in app form also has the same health benefits.

“Just doing some deep breathing can have some great benefits for a lot of people,” whether they’re taking a break from a busy work day or winding down for the day, Jay Blahnik, Apple’s director of fitness for health technologies, told BuzzFeed News. And with an app like Breathe, “it wouldn’t be hard for them to do it, regardless if they were a beginner or were very experienced with having more mindfulness in their day.”

While meditation takes many forms, it usually involves sitting in a quiet location, focusing on something in the present (like your own breathing), and relaxing your mind with the goal of becoming calmer and improving your well-being. It has become all the rage over the last few years in Silicon Valley, with tech workers flocking to conferences like Wisdom 2.0 and companies like Google sanctioning on-site meditation workshops. The idea is that employees who strengthen their self-control and improve their emotional intelligence can create better products — and get ahead at work.

Apple

Annie Wood, a yogi who writes about mindfulness, said that guided meditation apps similar to Breathe are useful for beginners because they send you reminders: “It’s like having a yoga teacher tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, take a breath.’” Though she hasn’t used a meditation app on a smartwatch, she thinks they sound promising. “Anything that gets you in a positive habit and trains your brain to think more about these things ... that’s a great idea,” she said.

Creating a meditation app is a reasonable move for Apple, since some of its watch’s most popular features focus on a wearer’s wellness, like the reminders to stand up and the activity rings that show your progress on daily exercise goals.

The concept behind Breathe is straightforward: Every four hours (by default, but this can be adjusted), Breathe pops up with a prompt reminding you to inhale and exhale for one to five minutes. You can follow along while you watch concentric circles shift around on the screen, or you can respond to a series of haptic touches on your wrist. At the end, you see your heart rate.

Apple tested and honed Breathe internally on “hundreds” of employees, and the development team also talked to outside mindfulness and psychology experts, according to Blahnik. Testing revealed that, for example, seven breaths per minute was the most comfortable rate for most people (though the app can be set to between four and 10 breaths per minute).

The easy-to-access, low-commitment nature of the feature also turned out to be key. At work, especially, Blahnik said, the prospect of taking “a minute between meetings, to push away from their desks, quiet their mind, relax their bodies, [and] just take deep breaths, seemed to be appealing to a lot of people.”

Apple isn’t marketing Breathe as a medical device, so it’s not under obligation to share internal data about how the app works, said Dr. John Torous, a staff psychiatrist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He said it makes sense in the abstract to use digital tools to practice meditating — but “we haven’t really studied what difference a platform make[s],” he told BuzzFeed News. “If we deliver it via an app or a watch, is it different, is it better, is it worse, it is changed?”

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

A 2015 review of 560 iOS “mindfulness” apps found that with the exception of Headspace, Smiling Mind, iMindfulness, and Mindfulness Daily, few apps got high ratings in areas like information quality. Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology also noted that “little evidence is available on the efficacy of the apps in developing mindfulness.” That conclusion wasn’t much different from an earlier 2013 review by the University of Zaragoza of 50 apps of this kind. There was an “almost complete lack of evidence supporting the usefulness of those applications,” with no randomized clinical trials evaluating their effects, the researchers wrote.

Apps like Breathe have “a low likelihood of harm,” Torous told BuzzFeed News. “The biggest question is, if it’s not effective for many people, will they think they’re not going to benefit from behavioral treatment, and not seek out other forms of care that may be more effective for them?”

Beyond convincing people of Breathe’s benefits, Apple will have to contend with the many other relaxation apps out there — including one that’s also called Breathe. Like Apple’s creation, the app reminds you to take a deep you-know-what throughout the day, but it’s been in the App Store since April 2015. It’s only been downloaded about 7,000 times, with about 4,300 devices actively receiving notifications, according to co-founder Ben Erez.

Erez learned about Apple’s Breathe app last week “with a mixed bag of feelings.” He told BuzzFeed News, “There are startling similarities.” (Blahnik said that he had not heard of the app.) But Erez doesn’t plan to take legal action — he hadn’t trademarked the name — and in general, he’s looking forward to seeing the tech giant push meditation into the mainstream.

Still, he has reason to be skeptical about whether the wrist is a good place to practice mindfulness. Erez and his co-founder had a Breathe Apple Watch app — but they pulled it six months ago when Apple’s wearable sales weren’t what they’d expected.

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Should You Retweet Yourself?

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Soon You Can Invite Guests To Your Facebook Live Video Streams

Soon, Facebook is going to let you invite guests to your live streams, the company announced today. The new feature will allow you to go live with someone in another location, making the product much more conducive to interviews and conversations, which are difficult to conduct on the platform as it is now. (BuzzFeed is among a group of Facebook Live paid media partners.)

“Going live with a friend or fan can make broadcasts more fun and interactive, and there are tons of new possibilities with this format: interviews, debates, duets, collaborations, and more,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “To start, this will begin rolling out to Verified Pages, but we plan to make this available to people more broadly in the future.”

The feature is expected to first go live this summer.

Facebook is dealing with a decline in original sharing, according to reports, and Live is one way the company might reverse the trend. Live videos are by their nature more raw and less polished, so people may post live videos without thinking they have to meet the high quality bar many believe is required to blend in with Facebook's News Feed, which can be saturated with professionally produced content from news organizations and public figures.

Facebook also announced two other new features: an MSQRD integration that will allow you to go live on Facebook with effects similar to Snapchat's selfie filters and face swap features. It will also add scheduled live videos, where broadcasters can notify their followers of an upcoming live video and allow them to wait in a "lobby" before it starts.

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Peter Thiel Got More Facebook Shareholder Votes Than Mark Zuckerberg

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In the leadup to Monday's annual Facebook shareholders meeting, the question was this: Would Peter Thiel, the secretive libertarian billionaire who funded a legal campaign that drove a liberal news organization to bankruptcy, be pushed off the company's board of directors? Would Facebook use its new perch as the most important company in journalism to send a message that the fourth estate should not be legally harassed by billionaires?

The answer was no. And it turns out, it was a strong, unequivocal no.

In voting for re-election of board members, Thiel received more "for" votes than all but one current member of the board, including Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to an SEC filing, With 6,044,350,047 "for" votes, Thiel had over 400 million more shares voting for him than for founder Mark Zuckerberg, and only 750,000 less than Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who secured the most yes votes.

It's a remarkable reflection of the confidence of the company's major shareholders in Thiel — and it goes well beyond the CEO and founder. Mark Zuckerberg owns or controls 60% of the total voting power of Facebook, but beyond that, shareholders are clearly sticking with Thiel in a big way.

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Uber Data And Leaked Docs Provide A Look At How Much Uber Drivers Make

Aaron Fernandez / BuzzFeed News

Uber says that its drivers are as much its customers as its passengers are, and that its ride-hail platform is a path to personal freedom and financial independence. In 2013, the company told the Wall Street Journal that the “typical” Uber driver takes in more than $100,000 in annual gross fares. (Uber now disputes this characterization.)

More recently, Uber chief adviser and board member David Plouffe has touted the ride-hail platform as a pathway to a modest, more attainable American dream. But according to leaked internal price modeling data, and Uber’s own calculations provided to BuzzFeed News in response to that leak, drivers in some markets don’t take home much more than service workers at major chains like Walmart when it comes to net pay.

Internal Uber calculations, provided to BuzzFeed News by Uber, based on data spanning more than a million rides and covering thousands of drivers in three major U.S. markets — Denver, Detroit, and Houston — suggest that drivers in each of the three markets overall earned less than $13.25 an hour after expenses.

In addition, BuzzFeed News examined a trio of spreadsheets, provided by a source who worked with Uber pricing data, that contain separate but related data on tens of thousands of trips taken in the Denver, Houston, and Detroit markets during two- or eight-week periods in late 2015. Uber employees used these spreadsheets to evaluate potential outcomes of the very price cuts the company would ultimately implement in January 2016.

These documents and the internal Uber communications associated with them offer an unprecedented look at the data on which Uber builds its business, and on which the company’s drivers build their livelihoods.

Uber says it doesn’t know how much drivers on its platform actually earn per hour, after expenses. Still, Uber’s internal pricing models, found in the spreadsheets provided to BuzzFeed News, do generate rough estimates of driver net pay. But in internal communications seen by BuzzFeed News, Uber explicitly discourages employees from comparing these estimates to the minimum wage.

A BuzzFeed News review of the rough internal net pay estimates contained in the leaked documents determined that the models Uber used are highly abstracted and oversimplify certain key calculations. Rather than relying on Uber's figures, BuzzFeed News conducted an independent analysis of the raw trip data and driver data. Uber subsequently recalculated BuzzFeed’s estimates using a broader and more detailed set of internal data — which it declined to share directly with BuzzFeed News. The company did, however, conduct this recalculation according to BuzzFeed News’ methodology — which it said was “solid” — and did so in the presence of a BuzzFeed News editor and reporter.

Based on these calculations, it’s possible to estimate that Uber drivers in late 2015 earned approximately $13.17 per hour after expenses in the Denver market (which includes all of Colorado), $10.75 per hour after expenses in the Houston area, and $8.77 per hour after expenses in the Detroit market, less than any earnings figure previously released by the company.

To be sure, not all drivers net the same hourly income; more experienced drivers may, for example, gross more fares per hour or manage their expenses more carefully. And, because the Uber spreadsheets reviewed by BuzzFeed News didn’t contain hard data on each driver’s expenses, this analysis relies on a few basic assumptions — based in large part on the same assumptions Uber used in its pricing models — which made it possible for BuzzFeed News to roughly estimate drivers’ overall effective hourly wages.

Those assumptions:

• Contractors drive a $16,000 vehicle, which has a 250,000-mile lifetime, resulting in depreciation costs of 6.4 cents per mile.
  
• Gas costs drivers $1.75 per gallon and the vehicle gets 25 miles per gallon of gas, resulting in gas costs of 7 cents per mile.
  
• Insurance, maintenance, and miscellaneous costs add up to $3,000 per year, or $1.50 per hour if the contractor drives 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year.
  

(Read more about the methodology here.)

Aaron Fernandez / BuzzFeed News

Detroit

“I like the job. But financially, it’s not doing it for me.”

This according to Steve Rogers, a 61-year-old driver who told BuzzFeed News that he’s been on the platform about a year. His experience jibes roughly with the data Uber gathered on Detroit, where the typical full-time driver barely earned more than Michigan’s current minimum wage of $8.50 per hour.

Of course, because Uber drivers are not employees of the company, Uber is not legally obligated to pay them the minimum wage.

That’s less than the $10 an hour Walmart promised to pay its employees in 2015.

Uber’s data represents all trips taken in Detroit between Dec. 7 and Dec. 21, 2015. During that period, Detroit drivers earned approximately $13.70 an hour before expenses and — given the assumptions above — about $8.77 an hour after expenses, according to BuzzFeed News estimates that were supplemented by additional data from Uber. That’s less than the $10 an hour Walmart promised to pay its employees in 2015.

Contract and wage work are not perfectly comparable. Uber argues that retail employees at companies like Walmart don’t enjoy the same independence and flexibility as Uber drivers. But as employees, Walmart workers are often entitled to benefits that contract Uber drivers don’t receive.

Rogers, a retired manager at an inventory company, said Uber is his primary source of income. He said he drives about 30 hours per week and makes around $400 before expenses, $90 of which he spends on gas. His plan is to keep driving for about a year, until he qualifies for Social Security. “I’m kind of stuck doing this until I find something else,” he said, “which is hard to do at my age.”

Aaron Fernandez / BuzzFeed News

Houston

Drivers in Houston appeared to make a better living than drivers in Detroit, according to Uber’s data. During the period of Dec. 7 to Dec. 21, 2015, Houston drivers earned approximately $14.18 an hour before expenses and about $10.75 an hour after expenses, according to BuzzFeed News estimates supplemented by additional Uber data. That’s significantly less than the $15 wage fast-food workers across the country are fighting for.

John Cerasuolo of Houston calculated that his earnings are "consistently anywhere from $12.50 to $17 an hour, depending on the surge." When Cerasuolo first signed up with Uber in early January 2016, he said learning the ropes was frustrating and financially disappointing. Now that he better understands the system, Cerasuolo said his earnings improved — but the long days can be draining.

“Yesterday morning I got up, headed out at 4:45 a.m., took a break to come home and bring my son to school, then worked until 3 p.m., and I grossed $102,” Cerasuolo told BuzzFeed News during a May interview. “I could have gone back out that night, but I was exhausted.” Cerasuolo first began driving for Uber to earn some additional cash alongside his day job, but he’s been out of regular work since early May. After searching for something more manageable than Uber, Cerasuolo decided to switch career tracks altogether and plans to earn his teaching certificate this summer.

Aaron Fernandez / BuzzFeed News

Denver

Of the three markets for which BuzzFeed News received trip data, the Denver market was the most lucrative. Drivers working between Oct. 19 and Dec. 14, 2015, earned approximately $16.89 an hour before expenses and about $13.17 an hour after expenses, according to BuzzFeed News estimates supplemented by additional information from Uber.

Jody, a Denver driver who asked to be identified by first name only for fear that Uber might deactivate his account, said that driving part-time for Uber during the weeks when this data was collected worked out pretty well — until he was laid off from his part-time tech support job in mid-January, right around the same time that Uber cut prices.

“It’s just enough to cover bills,” Jody told BuzzFeed News.

Jody said he typically drives from 6:30 a.m. until early afternoon, when he takes a break during the slow hours to avoid wasting gas, which costs him about $100 a week. If gas prices continue to rise, Jody said that continuing to drive for Uber full-time may not be sustainable. “I'm hoping to get out of it in the next month or two,” he said. “But that depends what kind of luck I have finding a full-time job.”

In early 2015, a study commissioned by Uber found that drivers in 20 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston, were grossing around $17 an hour. The study, co-authored by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Uber head of economic research Jonathan Hall, relied on data provided by Uber and produced the most modest estimates of driver earnings prior to this article.

But the $17-an-hour figure was based on data from 2014, when Uber rates in most cities were higher than they were in late 2015. It was also based on gross earnings and did not account for driver expenses. Krueger told BuzzFeed News he decided to base his estimates on gross earnings alone because he “did not have data on mileage or any of the other information required to make a credible estimate of expenses."

Uber says it “retained” Krueger to study “driver flexibility,” and as such, driver costs were not “part of the scope” of his 2015 report. The company told BuzzFeed News that the economist has been working independently on a follow-up paper aimed at estimating driver expenses, for which the company has furnished mileage data.

According to the calculations provided to BuzzFeed News, the cost of gas, vehicle depreciation, and insurance can eat up roughly a quarter of drivers’ gross pay. The data suggests that expenses amount to roughly 22% of full-time drivers’ gross pay in Denver, 24% in Houston, and 31% in Detroit.

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who reviewed Krueger’s paper, told BuzzFeed News that "with Uber's data on trip mileage it would have been possible to come up with reasonable estimates of the net pay of drivers, after deducting expenses.”

Internal Uber communications show employees were instructed that because of “variable driver activities” the company couldn’t calculate “the costs actually incurred by drivers.” And, indeed, every driver is different; expenses vary based on the cost of insurance, maintenance, and gas, as well as the vehicle’s efficiency and rate of depreciation, among other factors. But the spreadsheets obtained by BuzzFeed News made it possible to calculate a rough estimate. Another economist who spoke with BuzzFeed News also argued that Uber has the data necessary to estimate driver net pay.

“It might as well say partners are earning $1 million an hour."

“They know how many hours the app is on. They know what the miles are,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “They can readily determine whether workers are making the equivalent of minimum wage.” The Economic Policy Institute recently published a report on Uber which argued that drivers should be classified as employees.

Perhaps more impactful than how Uber calculates actual earnings is how it advertises potential earnings. Uber uses a wide variety of channels — text message, radio, Craigslist, banner ads, TV ads, and even direct mail — to encourage people looking to earn money to drive for Uber.

But those potential earnings are advertised in “total fares,” with no mention of commission or expenses, which some drivers feel is misleading. For example, in Denver, Craigslist ads from the time when the data was pulled said drivers can earn up to $688 a week in fares; in Houston, ads from September said $660 in fares.

None of these advertisements mention driver expenses. The same goes for the alerts Uber sends to drivers — sometimes five times a day or more — telling them that other drivers on the road were making $20 or $30 an hour in gross fares. Uber said this is because “there are significant differences in the cost of gas, new tires, an oil change or insurance depending on the city and the driver’s individual circumstances/choices.”

But many of the drivers and some of the former Uber employees interviewed for this article told BuzzFeed News the company could do a better job educating drivers about the difference between net and gross earnings.

"That's not net. That's just gross. And that's if you get lucky. That's the best, best, best-case scenario,” said Houston driver John Cerasuolo. “It might as well say partners are earning $1 million an hour."

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