Business & Tech Top 10 Airbnb Scams Bamboozling Users Out of Money Across the World “The plumbing suddenly broke” is the new “dog ate my homework” on the often-inhospitable hospitality platform.
Business & Tech Walgreens to Pay $7.5 Million to Two Bay Area Counties Over Phony Pharmacist The Walgreens pharmacy chain has agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle a case in which an employee succeeded in impersonating a pharmacist for 11 years and illegally wrote prescriptions for patients in Alameda and Santa Clara counties.
Business & Tech Uber Inadvertently Disables 'Small Number' of Accounts With Cash Balances A complaint arrived from an SFist reader this week who found that his Uber account had suddenly been disabled while he was traveling in Hawaii. To make matters worse, he had an Uber Cash balance on the account of over $1,400.
Business & Tech United Airlines Suspends 48 China Flights, Including 8 Routes From SFO, Amid Virus Outbreak The quickly spreading coronavirus outbreak in China is set to begin impacting air travel to Asia as United Airlines just announced it is suspending 48 flights between the U.S. and China.
Business & Tech Bay Area Couple To Be Jailed For Massive Ponzi Scheme Worth $1 Billion A Martinez couple who was operating a seemingly legitimate business selling solar generators pleaded guilty Friday to various charges stemming from a Ponzi scheme that netted them $1 billion in fraudulent income — affording them an extremely lavish lifestyle.
Business & Tech Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri's SF Home Got Swatted In just one of multiple incidents in the last year in which a high-profile tech executive saw their home descended upon by police and SWAT teams, Facebook's head of Instagram Adam Mosseri had both his homes in New York and San Francisco swatted in November.
Business & Tech Google/Alphabet Joins Apple and Microsoft in the $1 Trillion Club Alphabet officially reached a valuation of $1 trillion on Thursday, becoming only the fourth American company — and the fourth tech company in history — to reach this once unthinkable milestone.
Business & Tech Apple Clashes With Justice Department Yet Again Over iPhone Backdoor A case backed by Attorney General William Barr is escalating quickly at the Department of Justice that will once again pit Apple against the federal government in a fight over smartphone privacy.
Business & Tech Small Oregon Coast Town Pushes Back On Facebook Plan To Land Trans-Pacific Cable There Residents of the tiny Oregon beach town of Tierra del Mar were attempting to go to battle with Facebook as the company moves to begin drilling a landing spot there for a fiber-optic cable from Asia, but Facebook won out with the county because there was no legislation against such projects.
Business & Tech Prepare for Ubers to Start Rejecting More Trips As AB5-Related Changes Roll Out After a new state law just took effect with the intention of protecting gig-economy workers, Uber is taking the position, temporarily, that it just has to make some changes to its driver-side app to comply with the law. And those changes are likely to impact riders across the board.
Business & Tech City Aims to Shut Down 'Rogue' Scooter Company Go X for Operating With Allegedly Forged Permit Calling the business's actions "next-level craziness," the SFMTA and the City Attorney's Office are seeking to shut down the e-scooter company Go X, which has been operating in San Francisco without a city permit now for a year.
Business & Tech Facebook Bans Some Deepfakes, But Not Those Made for 'Satire' In a seemingly cynical and tactical move ahead of another congressional hearing, Facebook announced today that it is officially banning intentionally manipulated video aimed at misinforming the public, a.k.a. deepfakes.
Business & Tech Uber and Postmates Join Forces To Seek Injunction In Gig-Worker Law AB-5 The two local app-based companies that rely on contract drivers are challenging a new California law that is set to go into effect on January 1, and which poses an existential threat to the so-called "gig economy."
Business & Tech The 2010s: When Tech Transformed How We Think, Talk, and Consume Media Companies based in the Bay Area are largely to thank — and blame — for how much the American psyche has changed. And as we close out this tumultuous decade, let's take account of the impacts the local tech industry has had on the world in a short span of time.
Business & Tech Bumble Deleted Sharon Stone's Profile Because They Thought It Was Fake Bumble, the dating app that lets women make the first move in hetero pairings, just made a gaffe when it deleted sometime Bay Area resident Sharon Stone's dating profile, believe it was a fake. It was not!
Business & Tech Hyatt Regency Converts Hallways Overlooking Embarcadero Into Tiny Rooms The grandly Brutalist and angular Hyatt Regency at the foot of Market Street has 15 new guest rooms thanks to some underutilized, oversized hallways that had some excellent Bay views.
Business & Tech Guy Implants Tesla Key In His Hand, Possibly Hastens Cyborg Revolution Tesla fanboys worldwide are surely wetting themselves with fascination as a Utah man has implanted his Tesla key into his hand, obvious medical and surveillance concerns be damned.
Business & Tech Twitter and Facebook Remove Falun Gong, Saudi Disinformation Campaigns Both Twitter and Facebook announced Friday that they were removing hundreds of inauthentic accounts with links to the Falun Gong spiritual movement — of Shen Yun fame. And Twitter also admitted it just had to remove 88,000 fake accounts linked to Saudi Arabia.
Business & Tech Uber Riders Tell Harrowing Story Of Feeling Kidnapped By Driver In Oakland A mistake by an Alaska Airlines gate agent and a very angry Uber driver led to a 911 call and a kidnapping story fit for local news — not to mention a fresh bit of bad PR for Uber.
Business & Tech Smash-and-Grab Thief Takes Facebook Hard Drives With Sensitive Employee Data A thief broke into the car of an employee in the payroll department at Facebook last month and made off with hard drives that contained banking and salary information for 29,000 Facebook employees.
Business & Tech Google and Facebook Slip Out of Top Ten In Glassdoor Ratings By Employees Two of the Bay Area's big tech companies that have long been evangelized by their employees and praised as places to work are steadily slipping in their popularity rankings on Glassdoor.
Business & Tech San Francisco Loses Major Convention, Oracle's OpenWorld, to Las Vegas Following several years in which the convention bureau has been decrying the visible homelessness on downtown streets as a deterrent for organizers of lucrative professional conventions, the city is losing one of its longstanding mainstays, Oracle's OpenWorld.
Business & Tech Apple Rolls Out Its Most Expensive Computer Ever, Topping Out at $53K The newest Mac Pro desktop models go on sale today, and while the base model costs just a dollar under six grand, add-ons bring the top-of-the-line version to $52,599.
Business & Tech Facebook Says It Will Fight Disinformation About the 2020 Census It's not only an election year next year, it's also a census year, and Facebook is saying that it plans to treat the census like a high-profile election — only in this case it will actually take down ads that spread lies.
Business & Tech It's Not Even Built Yet, But Downtown's 61-Story Oceanwide Center Is Already For Sale Chinese developer Oceanwide Holdings looks to be trying to exit the U.S. market, either partially or fully, putting its considerable development portfolio in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all on the market at once.
