Silicon Valley’s Hippest Church Is Going Public

Courtesy C3 Silicon Valley / Via Facebook: C3SiliconValley

This spring, C3 Silicon Valley (C3SV) — an independent offshoot of a Pentecostal megachurch, with three Bay Area locations — posted a rap video on its Facebook wall advertising Easter services. The lyrics were written by a former Google employee who now works full-time as a pastor for the church, and they are heavily laced with startup lingo.

"I've made so many errors you can't even debug it / Like an elephant in the room, there's no seeing above it / Got a job making money, but don't even love it," a young black man dressed like Mark Zuckerberg tells the camera. Quick cuts of distraught people and graffiti-covered buildings flash by as he continues rhyming about faith, skepticism, and venture capital: "If I had a startup, it would get a network effect / The valuation goes up, but is my value still met?"

Members of the church who work at Facebook — and there are many — used their allotted credits to boost the visibility of the post. As of this writing, it has about 61,000 views, roughly 80 times as many as the online recording of the Easter sermon itself.

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Silicon Valley might seem like an odd place for a religious revival, but the founders of C3SV have nonetheless appointed themselves missionaries to the locals, and are happily spreading the good word in the seat of innovation. The church is led by Adam Smallcombe, a charismatic 35-year-old pastor with an alt-country undercut, a winsome rhetorical style, and an affinity for motorcycles. Smallcombe and his wife, Keira, moved here from Sydney, Australia, in 2012, leaving jobs as youth ministers to "plant" a church in the Bay Area.

The C3 in the church's name refers to C3 Global, formerly Christian City Church International, a Pentecostal (or "charismatic") institution that launched in 1980 and went global as part of the wave of similar megachurches that emerged out of Australia in recent decades. The most famous of them is undoubtedly Hillsong Church, which has cultivated a youthful following despite its controversy-plagued leadership. Global outposts have attracted fashion models, NBA stars, and even Justin Bieber through upbeat, musically oriented sermons and rock star–like preachers who broadcast glamorous lives on social media.

A recent billboard for a C3 church in Toronto, for example, reads "For God So Loved the 6," a reference to the rapper Drake's nickname for his hometown.

C3SV is not affiliated with Hillsong, but it too aims to propagate its gospel by attracting the cool, young people in its own neighborhood — except that in Silicon Valley, those millennial influencers tend to work in tech. The constitution for Christian City Church International actually encourages a sort of modular adaptability, so that each individual church can be dressed up to blend into its environment. The church has "no particular 'style,'" the constitution says. Rather, ministers are instructed to present New Testament principles in a "culturally relevant manner." (A recent billboard for a C3 church in Toronto, for example, reads "For God So Loved the 6," a reference to the rapper Drake's nickname for his hometown.)

And so here in Silicon Valley, the Smallcombes are selling religion like a software product to to a room studded with Apple employees and data-startup engineers. C3SV's website, with its fresh design and frictionless commerce, looks like it could belong to any number of Valley startups; its donations page starts with the words "INVEST IN ETERNITY" and could just as easily work as crowdfunding for a cryogenics company. On Facebook, where C3SV has 7,000 fans, the church's posts read with the chipper cultural fluency of any savvy #brand. Last month, at the apex of Pokémon Go mania, one said, in part, "To sum it up..we want to be the 'Pokemon Go' of churches. After all, the Great Commission is clear: GOTTA CATCH EM ALL!"

In Palo Alto, services take place in a rented Jewish Community Center a six-minute drive from Google's headquarters and a 12-minute drive from Facebook (in Valley tradition, the Smallcombes refer to the location as a "campus"). The San Francisco campus's co-pastors are Vance Roush, a former quality associate for Google who wrote the rap, and his wife, Kim. The co-pastors of the San Jose campus, Adam and Amy Hahn, are also a married couple: Adam recently left his role as a recruiter for Facebook to work full-time for the church, and Amy works as a recruiter for Apple.

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"We didn't start this church just to create another church," Smallcombe told me this spring. "We wanted to create a church that really appeals to the engineers of Silicon Valley."

"We didn't start this church just to create another church. We wanted to really appeal to the engineers of Silicon Valley."

Available research indicates that, generally speaking, what appeals to the engineering class is secular thinking. Less than 5% of Silicon Valley residents attend church on Sundays, according to data from the Barna Group, an evangelical polling firm. Prevailing sentiment is that tech workers consider themselves too smart, too rational, and too comfortable to need God.

And so C3SV's sales pitch cannily inoculates itself from skepticism. Despite its Pentecostal roots, C3SV calls itself nondenominational, and at the end of the Easter video, it declares onscreen, "NOT RELIGIOUS? NEITHER ARE WE." Drive around the Bay Area long enough and you'll see the same mantra splashed across billboards along the region's highways.

But if "not religious" applies to C3SV's marketing, it does not apply to its message, a distinction that became clear a few minutes into Easter services, when the fog machine kicked in and the worship team (a band of volunteers dressed in skinny jeans, flat-brimmed baseball hats, and flannel shirts) started playing soulful renditions of Christian pop hits. Lyrics like "The resurrecting King is resurrecting me" were displayed, karaoke-style, on a screen behind them. Smallcombe's Easter sermon was called "Jesus Turns Tables," and he delivered it with a big picture of the Last Supper in the background.

The dress code was Wholesome Coachella — maxi dresses, floppy felt hats, brightly colored jeans — and newcomers were handed a little cloth drawstring pouch that included a disposable cup, redeemable for a free cup of Apostle Coffee, sold in a little stand outside the auditorium ($3.50 for a flat white, $4.50 for a mocha). A pre-services slide deck included a call for designers and front-end developers to help the church with its design skills, and the main sermon was part of a series called Going Public.

"We're not talking about an initial public offering," Smallcombe explained. "We're talking about being bold with the message of love, being bold with the message of grace, and really trying to change people's perspective with how they see the church." Like coming out of the closet as a Christian? "Absolutely," he said.

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The Smallcombes never thought they'd end up in the US. "We weren't thinking California — we were thinking Sydney, Australia. We've got beautiful beaches, amazing coffee. We thought, Hey, we'll suffer for Jesus in the northern beaches of Sydney," Adam quipped.

The first time Smallcombe told me the story of how he ended up in Silicon Valley, he said it started with a tweet from "a dear friend" who posted that he would love to see more churches in the region. Smallcombe didn't mention the fact that there was already another C3 church in the Bay Area, or that the friend was his uncle, who founded C3SF (a separate institution from C3SV's services in San Francisco) 13 years ago.

Smallcombe's grandfather was also a church planter in Australia. When I asked about the family business, Smallcombe said, "I guess you could say it's in the family to do ministry," as though the connection had just occurred to him.

The rest of the details, however, remained consistent between tellings. The Smallcombes were driving when they saw the fateful tweet that suggested planting a church in San Francisco. The couple, both college pastors, decided to visit, almost as a way to cross it off their list, and decided to swing by Stanford. In line at a Starbucks, the guy in front of them struck up a conversation. Smallcombe told him they were considering a startup church. "He looked at me really funny, as you can imagine, and he began to tell me the reasons why we shouldn't start a church in the Bay Area. People have too much money, nobody needs God, everyone's way too intellectual for that kind of thing — everything negative he was saying, maybe it's just my nature, was confirmation for us. It was like waving a red flag to a bull. We're like, 'This is it, we're going to do this.'" His wife nodded.

That's not to say that the Smallcombes' beliefs have blended frictionlessly with Bay Area culture. For all the emphasis on making people feel welcome, Smallcombe's response to questions about the church's stance on homosexuality was evasive. "There's a big difference between acceptance and approval," he said. "I might not approve of somebody's lifestyle, but I don't need to approve of it. If I'm at a dinner table with them having a conversation, what I will do is, if they invite my perspective in, I will tell them what I believe and what I see the Bible's position is but fundamentally I love them. I love people if they never ever change."

Not coming out in support of gay marriage is a position, I said. Smallcombe replied that his position was love.

C3SV's parent, C3 Global, has plans as ambitious as any startup's. Right now, it claims to have 400 churches in 64 countries; by 2020, it plans to have 1,000 outposts with 500 members apiece. Smallcombe said the church is "aggressive" with sending out church plants, which "doesn't necessarily come with church funding — you have to raise that yourself, missionary-style."

Richard Flory calls this kind of expansion the "franchise model." Flory, a senior research director at the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture, visited Pentecostal megachurches for an upcoming book about changes in the religious landscape. Planting a new offshoot usually begins with "a soft launch in somebody's apartment," he said. In C3SV's case it was at the Smallcombes' rental home in San Jose. ("We rent as a church and we rent as a couple and a family as well," Smallcombe told me.)

Even when there is no direct financial connection, churches benefit from support networks. "They will go to each other's conferences and they will essentially bring their own followers," said Flory. Franchisees can also capitalize on the name brand and global reach through music, which allows them to grow very quickly, he said.

In less than four years, C3SV has drawn in more than 3,000 visitors, mostly from congregants inviting their friends, co-workers, and family members. The church has about 1,500 active members, and across all four Easter services, Smallcombe said about 1,300 people showed up. Stripping religion off the veneer of the church makes it easier to introduce it to others. Smallcombe said he wanted to create a church where members "weren't ashamed or afraid to invite people."

But he shrugged off the notion that acting as a missionary to Silicon Valley was a calculated move. "We definitely were aware ... that the influence out of this region is unlike any other region in the world," he said. "Our church is definitely not being funded by wealthy people. It's by people who are just normal, average people, but they're generous, even though [they are] paying [exorbitant] rent. They have seen what God has done in their life and for them I think it's just a way to honor God and glorify God and give back."

C3SV recommends tithing 10% of your income, though Smallcombe stressed that all you needed to do to be a member of the church is show up. This year, the donations page of C3SV's website featured a video of a young black couple, Luke and Michelle, who met while they were undergrads at Duke. Luke is a software developer who used to work for Cisco before moving to a smaller data startup. Michelle, a lawyer, is also Australian. The video looks like an advertisement for a financial services startup. In it, the couple explain how they were able to donate "almost three times what we had pledged" to the church after Luke got the idea of selling their condo.

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C3 isn't the only religious institution to see the Bay Area as an opportunity. The number of new churches evangelizing to the tech set is trending up. And in February, Hillsong announced plans to open a San Francisco outpost.

Flory said that although megachurches would like to give the impression that they make converts through evangelizing, his research has shown that they often target gentrifying urban areas in search of people who were already religious, but looking for a new place to worship. Flory calls it "church-switching." Indeed, all the C3SV church members I spoke with were Christian before joining.

Justis Earle, a startup entrepreneur from Santa Cruz, had been actively attending church for about 15 years and was looking "for something a little bit more culturally relevant and exciting," he said. He discovered C3SV through music. His "faith-based heavy metal" band, Above the Storm, were featured on a compilation album series called God's Love for Hardcore; one of the other bands are fronted by a married couple who attend C3SV and play on the church's worship team. The husband, a software engineer, moved from Yahoo to Facebook, and Adam Hahn, co-pastor of C3SV San Jose, helped in the recruiting process.

"There are all these cool-looking diverse young people jumping around having fun at church. Sometimes you go to a church and you're like, nobody's ever having fun here."

Earle works in tech too, at at a solar energy company, but he is trying to get his own product — Hansnap, a Velcro strap that stabilizes video footage from a smartphone — from Kickstarter to Shark Tank. (He's currently on the waiting list.) Earle started attending C3SV a few months ago at its San Jose outpost and was drawn in by the energetic service. "There are all these cool-looking diverse young people jumping around having fun at church," he said. "You go out to a club, go out to a concert, and have exhilaration. Sometimes you go to a church and you're like, nobody's ever having fun here."

Smallcombe's preaching style, which relies on Bible verse and not just "positive thinking or pop psychology," also appealed to Earle. So did the idea of integrating one's spiritual and professional life. "It is hard to find someone who is able to synergize their belief system on the weekend with what they actually do in the world," he said.

"Like everyone else in the Bay Area, we moved out here for work," Adam Hahn told me. He and Amy came here from Indiana and were looking for a place to "get plugged in" and make some friends. "Out here, man, time is money and people are always hustling, [to] innovate the next big thing, writing the next code," he said. "Being Christian on top of that made it even tougher."

Silicon Valley companies are well known for perks like free food and on-site amenities. But there's a downside, Hahn said, to "having everything available to you" — when tech workers go home at night, he said, they think to themselves, I know literally no one out here besides my co-workers.

According to Hahn, tech's infamously blurred line between the personal and the professional made it easier to broach the subject of religion at Facebook. He regularly posted about going to church, but waited for curious colleagues to approach him first. "The biggest question that I get a lot," he said, "is, 'How can I believe in an invisible god — why is that real to me?'"

A number of co-workers at Facebook inquired about the Easter video. In a few instances, they argued that if C3SV were really not religious, it shouldn't be a church. "Man, I get that," said Hahn. "They have had an experience where they have been burned by a church." When people had a negative reaction to the video, Hahn would respond by saying, "I'd love to know why you don't agree with what this video is portraying."

This kind of provocation is exactly what C3SV wanted. Like the church's billboards, it's another way to start a dialogue with residents who might otherwise ignore their message. "When you look at Jesus, all his disciples, all the people he touched and performed miracles on," said Hahn, "it all starts with a conversation."

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The Meatless Burgers Of The Future Have Arrived

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Meat is juicy and tender. It's filling. It gives barbecues a reason to exist. Without it, it's almost impossible to imagine sandwiches, pizzas, spaghetti, hot dogs, and burritos. So it's no surprise that the average person in the United States consumed a whopping total of 211 pounds of red meat and poultry last year. In 2014, the US industry was worth an estimated $186 billion.

But a growing number of food entrepreneurs and scientists are looking at meat through a Silicon Valley lens. Harmful for health and the environment, they say, it's due for a serious 21st-century overhaul. Red meats — beef, pork, and lamb — are relatively high in cholesterol and saturated fat compared to the leaner alternatives of chicken, fish, and beans. Livestock generates 14.5% of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. And scientists and doctors are concerned about safety issues in meat like heavy antibiotics, which help livestock grow faster, but can actually make them more susceptible to bacteria.

So a handful of startups are trying to reinvent meat from scratch in labs, with the goal of cooking up products that are very similar or even indistinguishable from the real thing (unlike Tofurkey). But whether or not their creations will be satisfactorily meaty to seduce carnivores and vegetarians alike has yet to be seen.

This summer and fall, two of those companies — Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods — are rolling out their competing meatless burger patties across the nation. (Both of them even "bleed.") Just this week, the Impossible Burger made its debut at the Momofuku Nishi restaurant in New York City.

Here are the "meats" coming to a grocery store or restaurant near you in the near-to-distant future.

Beyond Meat

Beyond Meat

Beyond Meat spent more than seven years developing its patty, the Beyond Burger, out of plant proteins (mostly pea), and the result is soy-, gluten-, and GMO-free. When it went on sale in one Whole Foods in Colorado this spring, they sold out in an hour. The Los Angeles startup is backed by $17 million from bold-faced investors like Bill Gates, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and Obvious Ventures (co-founded by Ev Williams, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter). Packages of two quarter-pound patties for $5.99 will be widely available by the end of the year, according to the company.

We got an early taste — here's what we thought.

Impossible Foods

Impossible Foods

Dr. Patrick Brown used to be a biochemistry professor at Stanford University who made a name for himself studying gene expression. Then in 2011, he decided to ditch academia and dedicate himself full-time to a side project that became Impossible Foods, a Silicon Valley startup with $182 million in venture capital. The company aims to create meat as well as dairy products from plants, and its first product is the Impossible Burger. Now available in New York City ($12 at Momofuku) and coming to San Francisco in the fall, the vegan burger's made of wheat (so it's not gluten-free), coconut oil, potato protein, and heme protein.

Here's what we thought of the burger.

Fun fact: Google tried to buy Impossible for $200 to $300 million, The Information reported in 2015 — but it didn't work out, because the company wanted more money.

Memphis Meats

Memphis Meats / Via youtube.com

Memphis Meats — which is actually based in the San Francisco Bay Area, not Tennessee — is also creating beef and pork from scratch. But unlike Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, whose patties are made of plants, its approach is to grow cow and pig cells in a lab and harvest the resulting skeletal muscle into hot dogs, meatballs, burgers, and sausages. The startup told The Wall Street Journal in February that it plans to go to market in three to four years.

Modern Meadow

Co-founder and CEO Andras Forgacs

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Like Memphis Meats, Modern Meadow grows animal cells. Its meat won't end up in food, though, but in leather — think a closet full of animal-friendly jackets. The New York City startup announced last month that it had raised $40 million, bringing its total raised to $53.5 million.

Mosa Meat

Mark Post at TEDxHaarlem

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In 2013, Dutch professor Mark Post of Maastricht University made global headlines for growing a burger in a lab with the backing of $330,000 from Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Since that taste-test in London, Post has pressed on with the project and co-founded Mosa Meat. He told the BBC in October, "I am confident that we will have it on the market in five years."

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Apple CEO Tim Cook To Host Hillary Clinton Fundraiser

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Apple's chief executive Tim Cook will host a fundraiser with Hillary Clinton next month, as the Democratic nominee becomes the first woman in American history to lead a presidential ticket of a major party.

Cook, joined by Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, will help raise money for the Hillary Victory Fund, according to an invitation obtained by BuzzFeed News. The fund is a joint fundraising committee that contributes to the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and 38 state parties. The fundraiser will take place on August 24, with an address to be provided to guests.

Cook is hosting the event as a private citizen, as Apple does not have its own political action committee and the company does not donate to either party's candidates. Last month, Cook hosted a fundraiser for one of the Republican party's star figures, Speaker o f the House Paul Ryan, a sign that Apple's chief wishes to build relationships with leaders of both parties.

The invitation for the Cook-Clinton fundraiser lists three different contribution levels: $50,000, $10,000, and $2,700.

Apple and the Clinton campaign declined comment.

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Scientists Are Really Using Fitbits To Study Health

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During all hours of the day, Fitbit wristbands monitor people's steps, heart rate, sleep, calories burned, and more. This continuous tracking has made them useful not only for fitness fanatics, but also potentially for scientists who want a constant and close-up view of people's health.

Today, Fitbit revealed just how often scientists have consulted activity-trackers in their research. Over the last four years, researchers have published more than 200 studies based on more than 2 billion minutes of Fitbit data. (Those numbers are according to both Fitbit and Fitabase, a platform that collected the devices' data on behalf of scientists.)

Fitbit is highlighting its relationship with the scientific community at a time when the CEO has said he wants to go beyond fitness-tracking and push deeper into health care, an area that comes with potential regulatory risks.

Traditionally, researchers rely on study participants to self-report some information about themselves to get a sense of their health in everyday life. But people can inadvertently report the wrong information, or forget to keep track altogether. The potential benefit of Fitbit devices, according to the company, is that they can remove subjectivity from the data. They're also easy to wear and relatively inexpensive.

"When a wearable device like this simply just captures the number of steps they're taking in a given day, that's a pretty important parameter."

"The way we'd normally have to ask [for health information] is, you see people in the clinic every week or couple of weeks, [and] you ask them how they were," Dr. Kevin Patrick, a UC San Diego family medicine and public health professor who researches health-behavior management, told BuzzFeed News. "When a wearable device like this simply just captures the number of steps they're taking in a given day, that's a pretty important parameter."

Patrick, who says he has no financial ties to Fitbit or Fitabase, plans to use Fitbit in four to five upcoming studies, including one that will track activity levels in cancer patients.

Scientists are still in the early stages of exploring how to incorporate the popular wearables into their work. As examples of Fitbit's influence on research, the company in its press release cited a 2015 letter to the editor of the International Journal of Cardiology. After outfitting 23 adults with Fitbit devices, the authors concluded that they could be "an accurate, reliable, and efficient tool for physicians to track the adoption/maintenance of physical activity programs and support their patient's attempt at an active lifestyle."

Another 2015 study highlighted by the company, this one in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, suggested that people can be reliably expected to wear a Fitbit for research purposes. It reported that 51 women who underwent a 16-week fitness regimen wore their Fitbits 95% of the days.

However, there are some caveats to how much confidence scientists can place in Fitbit. A Fitbit tracker is officially a consumer product, not a medical or scientific device that meets the rigorous standards of the US Food and Drug Administration. The company does not publicly share the algorithms its devices use to generate data, and Fitbit doesn't reveal the study results that it says validate its algorithms' accuracy.

Fitbit CEO James Park

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But Fitbit CEO James Park has hinted that he'd like the company to push further into medical technology, an area more prone to FDA scrutiny. "We're not there yet," Park told Bloomberg in April. "But we think five to 10 years down the line, the power of these devices to help consumers, health-care providers, the whole health-care ecosystem track and give diagnoses to people — I think it's incredibly tantalizing."

More studies using Fitbit devices are in the works, the company says. Researchers from Northwestern University and UC San Francisco want to monitor patient activity before and after spine surgeries to understand how quickly they recover. Separately, UCSF is also exploring if physical activity can reduce patients' likelihood of becoming hospitalized before getting a liver transplant. And an Arizona State University researcher is using Fitbit data in part to see if getting customized wellness tips will nudge people to adopt healthy habits.

"Fitbit's consumer-friendly technology provides our customers with an accurate, meaningful way to capture 24/7, real-time data and design innovative study protocols in ways not possible before," Fitabase CEO Aaron Coleman in a statement.

Outside the academic community, of course, plenty of people have made discoveries about their own bodies by way of their activity trackers — like the fact that they're pregnant, when they're most fertile, and the exact moment they felt heartbreak.

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A Video Challenge Awaits Facebook

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Facebook's business is booming. Its earnings results blew away Wall Street for yet another quarter today. And its competition can't seem to get it together. Yet rather than stand still and spend the next bunch of years milking its core business, Facebook has embarked on an overhaul, shifting the dominant content format of its core product from images and text, where it stands today, to video.

"Our community and business had another good quarter," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement accompanying today's earnings release. "We're particularly pleased with our progress in video as we move towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services."

Facebook earned $6.4 billion in the quarter, and the lone comment from Zuckerberg in the earnings release marking that achievement talks about video. That's called sending a message. You want to know where Facebook is headed? Read that line again.

Facebook needs video, lots of it, in order to take its next step as a business. Strength in video brings with it access to TV advertising budgets, which exist in a very different world than the digital and social media spaces in which Facebook has long operated. TV advertising budgets are BIG and, in this era of smaller TV audiences, increasingly ripe for the picking.

Twitter knows this well. It is investing in streaming professionally produced sports events, news, and entertainment video — including games from the NFL, NHL, and MLB. Asked about this approach yesterday, Twitter CFO Anthony Noto told BuzzFeed News that there's "a significant opportunity for us to leverage the live streaming deal to capture new budgets."

Facebook is angling for those budgets as well. Of course, as both of these platforms move toward video, they'll essentially be competing to keep their users based on who has the best stuff — and against other video providers. Which is why Facebook's move is not without risk.

Facebook recently tweaked its algorithm to emphasize content from friends and family. But amateur video can be tough to watch, which is part of the reason why Facebook is paying a reported $50 million to professional content creators and nothing to your uncle Bob.

"Our primary focus is on shortform content, not longform content," Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said today in response to a question about video, indicating that Facebook doesn't plan to make its experience a place to only watch the pros.

Candace Payne, aka Chewbacca Mom, came up more than once in Facebook's earnings call today. Facebook would love that type of live video from its users to become commonplace. But so far, with Facebook Live months in, there's only been one Candace Payne.

Figuring out a way to get the quality video from its users needed to make "video first" work may be a bigger challenge for Facebook than many are anticipating. Still, with another wildly successful quarter in the books, the social giant has some time to figure it out.

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A Woman Is Suing Uber After Her Driver Was Convicted Of Sexual Battery

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A Los Angeles woman is suing Uber for negligence after her driver was sentenced for sexually battering her after giving her a ride in July 2014. But Uber told BuzzFeed News the attack happened after the driver completed the woman's trip, so the incident occurred "off the platform."

Keather Taylor, 27, filed a lawsuit against Uber in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Thursday that alleges the ride-hail giant "was in conscious disregard of the rights and safety of others" and "breached their duty to own, manage, maintain, design, control and operate their business so as to prevent any violence or attacks on individuals using their transportation services."

"We do know the driver accompanied the rider to her apartment. The trip had ended at that point. Anything that occurred happened off the platform." — Uber

Uber told BuzzFeed News that the company doesn't comment on pending litigation, but that Taylor's Uber driver marked the ride as complete in the app before the incident. "After the trip concluded, we do know the driver accompanied the rider to her apartment," Uber said. "The trip had ended at that point. Anything that occurred happened off the platform."

Taylor said she woke up wearing nothing but a torn bra on the morning July 21, 2014 after drinking with friends. The toilet seat was up, implying a man had used her bathroom, and there was a condom wrapper on her nightstand. She was confused — her last memory of the night was getting into an Uber to go to the apartment of the man she dating, she told BuzzFeed News.

Her Uber ride receipt showed she was in the car for about 16 minutes. According to its map, the car drove from her apartment toward the home of a man she was dating, overshot it, and then turned back. It retraced the same route and stopped a 5-minute walk from her apartment, where the ride ended, according to the receipt. Her roommate Allison let her into the apartment, along with a man her roommate assumed Taylor knew. But when Taylor and Allison checked her ride receipt the next morning, they realized her driver's photo matched the man who followed her into her room, Taylor told BuzzFeed News.

Taylor called 911, and the police took her to a rape treatment center. About three months later, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office charged Walter Alberto Ponce, Taylor's driver, then 24, with rape of an unconscious person and assault with intent to commit rape. In January 2015, Ponce pleaded no contest (which is conceding without admitting guilt or presenting defense) to criminal sexual battery and was sentenced to three years of probation. He also had to register as a sex offender and complete a one-year counseling program.

After repeating that it doesn't comment on pending litigation, Uber told BuzzFeed News that Ponce, Taylor's driver, was highly rated on its app, with "no prior significant complaints," and he had no prior criminal record. Uber said it deactivated Ponce on July 21, the day of the incident, after Taylor's sister used her phone to tell Uber what happened while Taylor was in the rape treatment center.

This is yet another case in which Uber drivers have been accused of sexually assaulting or harassing passengers this year. On Saturday, an Uber driver in East Palo Alto was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault. And earlier this month, an Uber driver in Chicago was charged with criminal sexual assault and aggravated kidnapping.

BuzzFeed News reported in March that screenshots of Uber's internal customer service database showed a search query for "sexual assault" returned 6,160 Uber customer support tickets, while "sexually assaulted" returned 382 results, and "rape" returned 5,827 individual tickets from December 2012 to August 2015. Uber told BuzzFeed News then that during that time period, it actually received "fewer than 170" claims of sexual assault directly related to an Uber ride.

In February, Uber agreed to pay $28.5 million to 25 million riders after a pair of lawsuits accused it of falsely advertising that Uber offers "the safest ride on the road."

Uber said incidents like Taylor's show how its "two-way feedback" system helps investigate drivers after one party reports a bad experience. In the past, the company has said it's not responsible for its drivers' actions because they are independent contractors, not employees. But courts are starting to challenge this idea. In San Francisco, a federal judge ruled in May that the company can still be sued for negligence in its hiring of drivers. And in February, Uber agreed to pay $28.5 million to 25 million riders after a pair of lawsuits accused it of falsely advertising that Uber offers "the safest ride on the road." The company will relabel its "safe ride fee" as a booking fee.

Taylor's lawyers told BuzzFeed they spoke with Uber before filing the lawsuit to ask the company to add more safety features for riders, such as an in-app SOS button, which Uber introduced in India in 2015 after a passenger in New Delhi alleged that her driver raped her. They also said they suggested that Uber fingerprint drivers, which proponents say could deter drivers from committing crimes. Uber has fought this measure in several cities. (The company pulled out of Austin in May, after voters there upheld a city requirement that drivers undergo fingerprint checks.)

Taylor's lawyers said they also told Uber it could set up an alert system that notifies the company if a driver is at a pickup or dropoff location for an abnormally long period of time, or if a trip goes off-route or takes much longer than the estimated time.

"We proposed these safety measures. They don't see the need for them," Antonio Castillo, one of Taylor's lawyers, told Buzzfeed. "They're blaming Walter Ponce. They feel he's the one to blame and they don't have any responsibility."

Uber told BuzzFeed its logs show that Taylor didn't enter her destination into the app, and likely verbally told the driver the address instead. The route outlined on the ride receipt shows that the driver started going toward Taylor's intended destination, Uber said, but then turned around and ended the ride near where it started – Taylor's apartment. Given that she didn't enter her destination in the app, it's unclear that if such an alert system existed, it would have been triggered in Taylor's case.

Uber also told BuzzFeed it does not plan to expand the panic button to locations outside of India because in the US, riders can dial 911. (India is in the process of developing its own centralized emergency line, 112.) The company did announce in June that it's testing a feature that tracks driving to eventually build a real-time alert system for erratic drivers, though that safety score rates drivers' navigation and braking smoothness and isn't a direct response to the sexual assaults passengers have reported while using the company's service.

via BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2aLeFKg

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