From Russian election hacking to #DeleteUber, here are the biggest scandals in tech this year. 2017 has been a reckoning of sorts.
Years of sexual misconduct in the tech industry (and elsewhere) were brought to light this year.
Tech giants like Facebook and Google had to answer questions about their roles in swaying the 2016 election.
Apple finally owned up to intentionally slowing down old iPhones.
Even YouTube star PewDiePie had a fall from grace, losing out on a lucrative deal with Disney for making anti-Semitic comments.
In short, it’s been quite a year in tech.
What follows are the biggest scandals in the tech industry over the course of the last year. Grab some popcorn:
January: Uber’s very bad year kicks off with #DeleteUber.
It’s been an extraordinarily rocky year for Uber. Its bad luck began in January when the #DeleteUber movement led to a flurry of account deletions by customers upset about the company’s ties to President Trump. It lost more than 200,000 customers in just one weekend. As the year progressed, CEO Travis Kalanick resigned amid an investor revolt, many of Uber’s other top executives resigned or were forced out, shady business practices were revealed, and more than 20 employees were fired as a result of an investigation into bad behavior in the workplace that includes sexual harassment. (Plus, there was the Susan Fowler letter, the Waymo lawsuit, and the data breach, all of which deserve their own separate slides — more on those scandals to come.) By December, Japanese investment firm SoftBank announced it had bought up around 15% of Uber at a 30% discount. SoftBank offered $33 per Uber share, which puts the company’s value at $48 billion, a significant decrease from the $69 billion valuation it had after its last funding round. Uber has said it still plans to go public by 2019.
February: Former Uber engineer Susan Fowler alleges sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the company.
In February, a former Uber employee named Susan Fowler said in a personal blog post that she was sexually harassed and experienced gender bias during her year at the company. The allegations were made in a post Fowler titled “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber,” which detailed how she was propositioned for sex by her manager, was ignored and lied to by HR, and was excluded based on her gender. CEO Travis Kalanick immediately launched an internal investigation into sexual harassment and gender discrimination at Uber, which eventually led to his own resignation. Meanwhile, Fowler has a movie deal, and is expected to have a book deal soon.
February: Disney drops YouTube star PewDiePie after he posted videos containing anti-Semitic messages.
In February, Disney dropped YouTube star PewDiePie after he posted a series of videos that featured anti-Semitic messages. PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, is known for making gaming videos that often contain expletives and other colorful language. While a review by the Wall Street Journal found several videos containing anti-Semitic jokes, it was a video from January 11 that likely cost Kjellberg his deal with Disney. In the video, Kjellberg hired two men to make a sign that read “Death to All Jews” using the freelancer website Fiverr, where you can pay someone $5 to do something for you. Kjellberg later said the video was a joke that had gone too far. Soon after, YouTube killed the second season of “Scare PewDiePie,” and removed Kjellberg from its preferred advertising program. Then, in September, Kjellberg used a racial epithet in an expletive-laden outburst during one of his popular live streams. He later apologized, saying, “I’m really sorry if I offended, hurt, or disappointed anyone with all of this.”
February: Self-driving-car company Waymo sues Uber, accusing it of stealing its technology.
In an explosive lawsuit filed in February, Waymo accused Uber of using stolen technology to advance its own autonomous-car development. The suit, filed in the US District Court in San Francisco, claimed that a team of ex-Google engineers led by Anthony Levandowski stole the company’s design for the LIDAR laser sensor that allows self-driving cars to map the environment around them. Uber denied the claims. Months later, the lawsuit has gotten ugly. In October, Waymo sought at least $1 billion in damages and a public apology from Uber as conditions for settling the suit, but Uber refused. And in December, an explosive letter was unsealed that contained allegations that Uber had internal teams tasked with bugging hotels, infiltrating sensitive WhatsApp groups, and obtaining trade secrets from its competitors.
March: Brands boycott YouTube after their ads appear alongside extremist content.
In late March, advertisers pulled their ads from YouTube after The Times’ investigation revealed that their ads appeared alongside extremist or hate content on YouTube. More than 250 brands reportedly froze all their campaigns with Google aside from search, after the issue — which first seemed isolated to the UK — spread globally. Major US advertisers soon began to boycott the online ad giant too, and according to The Times, the money pulled amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. At the time, analysts predicted that Google could lose up to $750 million from the boycott. By June, the Wall Street Journal reported that while some big brands has returned to advertising on YouTube, many had not.
June through December: Several powerful investors, bloggers, and CEOs are accused of sexual harassment or misconduct.
June: Six women working in the tech industry told The Information that Binary Capital cofounder Justin Caldbeck had made inappropriate advances to them while in a business setting. In the same month, “Shark Tank” judge and investor Chris Sacca issued an apology for helping make tech hostile to women after being accused of touching a female investor without her permission at a tech event in 2009. July: Dave McClure, the founder of startup incubator 500 Startups, resigned from his position as general partner following an investigation into claims of sexual harassment. In that same month, a former BetterWorks employee sued the company and its CEO Kris Duggan over allegations of assault, sexual harassment and a hostile work environment. September: SoFi cofounder Mike Cagney resigned as chairman and announced he would step down as CEO by the end of the year amid allegations of widespread sexual harassment at the company. October: Tech blogger Robert Scoble was accused of sexually assaulting two women and behaving inappropriately with other women in the tech community. December: Venture capitalist and early Uber investor Shervin Pishevar resigned from VC fund Sherpa Capital after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct. He has now been accused of sexual misconduct by six women in total.
Tech: The 17 biggest tech scandals of 2017
