I’m working on a novel with self-driving cars, privacy compromises, a persecuted journalist, and chock full of human failure. So this week’s Uber news couldn’t be more relevant.

Uber is a pretty good approximation the infrastructure basis of how self-driving vehicle travel might operate one day. The downside is that pretty much every trip goes into a big database somewhere. Who gets to look at that database? If you answered ‘just about anyone’ congratulations, you get a gold star. If you answered ‘the execs when they go after a critic of the company’ then you don’t get anything, because you read the articles already. The behavior of the creeper CEO before and after the indecent only emphasizes the main point:

The technology issues are tractable. The people issues, not so much.