Identify a recent incident within last six months and discus

Identify a recent incident (within last six months) and discuss illegal, unethical, and socially responsible business actions in the current news. Include a link to the news article in your discussion post.

Note: If we read the Wall Street Journal or maybe Barrons Business Review we will find daily reports of corporate activities. True, the media (TV and Internet sources) also tend to perpetuate any business transaction not considered ethical or properly aligned with current leadership. Let’s keep our examples to true business reports and avoid the political side which currently dominates the media.

Solution

The following article was published in The New York Times on 15-Dec-2017.

Uber Engaged in ‘Illegal’ Spying on Rivals, Ex-Employee Says by Mike Isaac

The article illustrates how Uber is being accused of stealing private and intellectual assets of its rival companies and in that context, how the claim is evidenced by a 37 pages letter from one of the former security employees of Uber - Richard Jacobs. According to Jacobs\' claim, Uber has its special secret team for the purpose of acquiring trade secrets from its major ride-sharing competitors. The activities of the team include infiltrating chat rooms, on gaining access to competitors\' website by employing hackers (a payment of $100,000 was made to a hacker in Florida for this purpose). This leads to an additional amendment to the already ongoing litigation Uber is fighting against Waymo who has said that the former stole information about driverless-car technology from it. The head of the security team Joe Sullivan has been fired by Uber in this context.

Though the truth can only be discovered when the litigation is over, we can comment on the unethical and illegal behavior relating to infiltration of the trade secret by the company. It is definitely unethical and illegal because it is nothing but stealing the assets (which is intellectual assets) of others. In the United States, trade secrets are protected under state law, and states have adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. The United States also has the federal law in the form of the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, which makes the theft or misappropriation of a trade secret a federal crime. This law contains two provisions criminalizing two sorts of activity. The first criminalizes the theft of trade secrets to benefit foreign powers. The second criminalizes their theft for commercial or economic purposes. Therefore, the second provision will be applicable here.