Image: Trevor Nichols
A senior manager with UBER Canada was in Kelowna today, calling on B.C.’s government to finally let ridesharing services into the province.
At a Kelowna Chamber of Commerce luncheon Nov. 23, Michael van Hemmen said UBER is ready to come to B.C. as soon as the provincial government makes it possible.
van Hemmen repeated UBER’s request that the province produce a document establishing “the safety and insurance framework needed to enable our and competitor operations” in B.C.
“If the government put forward a framework that supports ride sharing, we’d be here as quick as we can,” he said.
van Hemmen’s request came on the same day Green Party leader Andrew Weaver announced ridesharing legislation is on its way to a legislative committee.
The committee, Weaver said, will produce a set of recommendations that will help “bring forward ridesharing in 2018.”
Those recommendations will come out in February, around the same time as a government report on the state of the province’s taxi industry.
van Hemmen called the announcement a “positive,” and said it was a “great step forward.”
In the meantime, he said he believes UBER remains banned in the province because “change takes time.”
“It takes a lot of people saying ‘yes we want this.’ I think politicians from all parties have now heard that people want ridesharing in British Columbia, in Kelowna… and that’s why there’s a report from the government on the taxi industry, and there’s going to be an all-party committee,” he said, adding that 200,000 British Columbians have already downloaded the UBER app.
To help make that happen, he said UBER needs to continue to point out how regulations have been implemented across North America, and how similar rules can be implemented in this province.
On hacking
van Hemmen also responded to questions about the recently revealed hack at UBER, that saw two people steal millions of users’ personal information.
Two days ago, UBER’s new CEO revealed and apologized for the hack–a full year after it happened–laying out what the company had since done to try and rectify the mistake.
“We subsequently identified the individuals and obtained assurances that the downloaded data had been destroyed. We also implemented security measures to restrict access to and strengthen controls on our cloud-based storage accounts,” Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in a blog post.
van Hemmen confirmed the individuals behind the hack had taken email addresses and driver’s license information of UBER users.
“They then asked for some money in order to not release that information–kind of a bounty,” he said.
“I think it’s really important for us to be transparent with our customers, and that’s what our new CEO has done by making this event that happened over a year ago public, as soon as he was made aware of it,” he added.
van Hemmen added that Khosrowshahi has “made an important action and an important signal..that UBER under his leadership takes this stuff seriously.”
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