Calgary mayor’s rude Uber comment to be integrity watchdog’s first investigation

[Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi didn’t know he was being livestreamed while using a Lyft service in Boston/YouTube]

Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi campaigned vigorously for the city to appoint its own integrity commissioner.

Now Nenshi will be the subject of the newly-appointed commissioner’s first investigation, after he was broadcast without his knowledge making comments about the ride-hailing service Uber and its officials.

Calgary city council voted this week to refer the incident to the commissioner.

The incident took place when Nenshi was in Boston, being taxied by a driver for the ride-hailing service Lyft.

Unbeknownst to him, the driver, who is also a part-time Uber operator, was livestreaming the conversation with the Calgary mayor on Periscope.

In the video, Nenshi says Uber has a “brilliant business model, and are dicks.”

Calgary, like many other cities, has been struggling to regulate the popular ride-hailing app and Nenshi goes on to discuss how officials have tried to assess the service.

“We sent people to sign up to be Uber drivers, to see if they could get through the background check,” Nenshi tells the driver.

He suggested those people were registered sex offenders and people with convictions for violent crimes.

“They all made it through Uber’s theoretical background screening, so we were like, ‘You know what Uber, we’re going to do the background screening, the cops are going to do the background screening.’”

The Calgary mayor apologized for his comments.

“It doesn’t matter that I didn’t know that I was being livestreamed or whatever. You should be the same person in private as in public and I always call for civility, and being nice, and I wasn’t being very nice,” he told reporters on Monday, after the video surfaced on Friday.

“It’s a bit embarrassing, of course, because I never swear and that’s probably the rudest word I’ve ever said, so to get caught up on that is not much fun, though I’m sure many people have called me that name many, many, many times.”

Questions arose about what the mayor may have known and disclosed about enforcement issues.

That is the issue that’s been referred to the Calgary integrity watchdog.

“We know, anecdotally, that someone made it through the process who had a criminal conviction and I think Calgarians deserve to know that,” Nenshi told reporters.

But he said if he made allegations that went further, that was incorrect.

“I’m very sorry that I made it sound like there was a lot more to it than that.”

Calgary successfully sought a temporary court injunction that barred Uber drivers from operating in the city. Last December, the San Francisco-based company agreed to suspend operations in exchange for the city halting court action for a permanent injunction.

Calgary has a bylaw but Uber has said it can’t operate under the rules.

Beyond the Twitter titter over Nenshi’s “dicks” comment, the incident also raises questions about the privacy of ride-hailing patrons — an ongoing issue for such services.

Neither Lyft nor Uber responded to a request for comment.

The Washington Post and other media have written about alleged abuses of Uber customers’ and drivers’ personal data. That included a feature called “God View,” an internal tool that allowed Uber to track individual users in real time.

In 2014, a privacy breach allowed access to the information of about 50,000 Uber drivers.

Uber says it has retired “God View” and tightened access to personal information.

In January, the company agreed to a US$20,000 fine and promised stricter privacy controls in a settlement with the New York attorney general’s office.

Last year, Uber said it had doubled the size of its privacy team, overhauled its data protection training for employees and hired a cybercrime expert as its chief security officer.

Lyft, which does not operate in Canada, does not appear to have privacy guidelines in terms of dashboard cams or video in operator vehicles.

Most states have laws against secretly recording conversations. Massachusetts has a wiretapping law that makes it a crime to record a conversation in-person or via telephone or any other medium without informing the other parties of the recording.

“This law applies to secret video recording when sound is captured,” according to the Digital Media Law Project.

As for Nenshi, he says he always knew he’d be the subject of the first complaint to the integrity commissioner.

“People complain about me more than anything else. It’s just I didn’t think it would be in a cab in Boston,” he told reporters.