Lyft Calls Out Uber On Its ‘Witch Hunt’

Lyft is alleging that Uber is prying into its confidential information by cloaking its data requests behind the investigation of Uber’s data breach that affected 50,000 drivers.

The company pleaded a U.S. judge to put a hold on Uber’s request for Lyft’s classified information as part of its attempt “to conduct its own witch hunt” and “to dig into its competitor’s internal, confidential and trade-secret information,” Reuters reported.

Early last year, Uber began investigating the perpetrator behind the May 2014 hack that exposed the personal details of its drivers by filing a civil lawsuit in San Francisco federal court.

Lyft was pulled into the whirls of Uber’s data breach investigation when a security key used in the data hack was associated with a Comcast IP address linked to Lyft CTO Chris Lambert, two sources told Reuters. However, Lambert or any other Lyft employee hasn’t been publicly named in any of the court filings.

For now, Lambert’s connection to the case is somewhat loosely tied to the hack, as his IP address doesn’t match the one traced back to the breach incident.

In its filings, Uber has subpoenaed the unnamed Lyft employee and has reportedly asked for a wide range of information, including the Web browsing history of the Lyft employee, any communications they had with Uber drivers and passengers and any documents that were “scraped, crawled, spidered, copied, downloaded or otherwise accessed from Uber’s computers, servers or services.”

Lyft, in its response, says that Uber’s demands are “abusive and harassing” and that the company is hiding behind litigation to get access to its “confidential and sensitive Lyft information.” It further said that it hasn’t found any evidence that would link the data breach to any of its employees.

While Uber didn’t respond to Reuters’ request for a comment, the company said in court documents that it wasn’t “currently seeking anything under the custody or control of Lyft.”