Johana Bhuiyan

A 2017 Waymo suit accusing Uber and Otto of LiDAR trade-secret theft anchors coverage that tracks technology’s labor, surveillance, and safety accountability.

Who they are

Johana Bhuiyan appears in this corpus as a technology journalist whose work is associated with major platform companies and the consequences of their products and business practices. The stories linked to her range from Uber’s governance crisis and autonomous-driving dispute to police surveillance, workplace discrimination, generative-AI bias, and Tesla Autopilot liability.

The recent arc

The strongest concentration of coverage came in the mid-2010s, especially around Uber and the autonomous-vehicle ecosystem. Key stories include Waymo’s 2017 lawsuit against Otto and Uber over alleged LiDAR theft, reporting on more than 20 Uber dismissals after a harassment investigation, and the fallout that curtailed Travis Kalanick’s authority. Google, Waymo, Otto, Didi, and Uber recur as the companies through which this reporting examined platform power and mobility technology.

Recent appearances are less frequent but shift toward technology’s public consequences rather than a single company beat. The 2024 coverage includes Ring ending a Neighbors feature that enabled police footage requests, while the latest item concerns a jury finding Tesla partially liable over Autopilot’s role in a fatal crash; intervening stories cover military acquisition of app-derived location data, LAPD predictive policing, and biased WhatsApp AI sticker outputs.

The tension

The central tension is between technology companies’ expansion and the accountability demanded when their systems affect workers, users, or the public. Uber’s harassment and leadership crisis, Waymo’s conflict with Uber and Otto, Ring’s police-facing video-request tool, and Tesla’s Autopilot verdict all place corporate claims of innovation alongside allegations of unsafe conduct, misuse, discrimination, surveillance, or inadequate governance.

Why it matters

If this trajectory continues, the coverage will remain useful as a record of how scrutiny of tech moves from internal corporate conduct to the real-world effects of automated and data-driven systems. The Tesla, Ring, WhatsApp, and predictive-policing stories suggest that legal exposure, product changes, and public pressure can increasingly shape deployment decisions, though the corpus does not establish whether those pressures will produce lasting industry-wide reform.

Related: Uber · Google · Waymo · Alphabet's Waymo sues Otto and parent company Uber for trade secret th · Ring is sunsetting a tool that lets police request footage from users