Uber

In a victory for Uber, a federal judge Thursday dismissed claims brought by a Lyft driver alleging the company tracked his whereabouts for competitive edge, driving the final nail in the coffin in a class action struck earlier this year.

Presiding over the case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, federal magistrate judge Jacqueline Scott Corley sided with Uber in dismissing with prejudice a claim that the company violated the Stored Communications Act by using spyware to spam Lyft drivers with “fake ride requests” and intercept, access, monitor and transmit driver data. The dismissal joins three others on claims brought by plaintiff Michael Gonzales, repped by attorneys at Audet & Partners and Zimmerman Reed, effectively ending the class action.

Repping Uber in the lawsuit are attorneys from Shook, Hardy & Bacon, led by D.C.-based partner Patrick Oot, who was admitted pro hac vice. Oot didn't immediately respond to requests for comment, but his team argues in their August motion to dismiss that plaintiff's claims are “based mainly on an article [he] read online.”

“Though this case is supposedly about egregious conduct that seriously harmed former Lyft driver Michael Gonzales, like the first two complaints this one says virtually nothing about him. Was he harmed? How does he know he was harmed? “ they write.

In plaintiff's telling, Uber both created and deployed a spyware nicknamed “Hell,” which infiltrated Lyft's computer systems and servers to impersonate customers searching for rides via Lyft's mobile app. “Using Hell,” the July complaint states, “ Uber's employees, contractors, and/or agents were able to harvest the data transmitted by Lyft drivers, including their locations and Lyft ID's,” i.e. Social Security-like identification numbers that Uber used to track its competitor's drivers. This process, plaintiffs claimed, was repeated “millions of times” from 2014 to 2016 “to gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace.”

“Essentially, Uber was looking for overlap between its location data and Lyft's so that it could inundate drivers who used both platforms with work, encouraging drivers to use Uber's platform exclusively, and thus harm drivers who only used the Lyft platform,” plaintiff says. “By reducing the supply of Lyft drivers, Lyft customers saw increased wait times, which ultimately led Lyft-only drivers to experience decreased overall earnings, decreased earnings per fare, cancelled fares, and a decrease in the quantity of fares per shift.”

And the data “unlawfully accessed,” plaintiffs argued, fell under the SCA's definition of “electronic storage” — information stored by “for the purpose of backup protection of such communication” for purposes such as driver analysis, a viewpoint with which judge Corley disagrees.

“By Plaintiff's reading, all data stored by a corporation in more than one location would fall under the Stored Communications Act, regardless of the purpose of its storage,” Corley writes in a Wednesday order. “Plaintiff's view is clearly refuted by the plain text of subsection (B) [of the SCA], which covers only storage 'for the purpose of backup protection.”

Lawyers from Audet didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.