Man Files €45M Lawsuit Against Uber for Tipping Wife of Extramarital Affair

Uber is not exactly the most popular ride-hailing app these days, especially after the whole #DeleteUber debacle, but it looks like one particular person in France dislikes the company even more to the point of filing a lawsuit against them to the tune of €45 million. The plaintiff wishes to keep his identity anonymous but what is known is that he is a businessman from Côte d’Azur. His lawyer David-Andre Darmon lodged the case at a court in Grasse, claiming that his client was a victim of a bug in the application.

The plaintiff once requested an Uber driver using his wife’s iPhone while logged in to his own account. Despite logging off, he claims that Uber kept sending notifications to his own phone as well as his wife’s iPhone so she was privy to his comings and goings via Uber, which eventually led to a confrontation about the extramarital affair and a divorce.

To test the man’s claim, the French newspaper Le Figaro which reported the story, conducted a test on their own replicating the dual notification bug and vindicated the man’s claims. The glitch apparently affected iPhones before an update was rolled out on December 15. This bug specifically affected iPhones and Android phones were unaffected.

When asked for comments, Uber France responded by saying that they do not “publicly comment on individual cases, in particular the case involving divorce proceedings between spouses”. The first hearing for the lawsuit is scheduled on March 2017.

Online activity and social media is playing a larger role in divorces and have been used as evidence in many proceedings. In 2010, a study by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers cited that one in five divorces involved Facebook in the United States.