Over the last year and a half, Uber has radically restructured its customer service operations and moved most of its contractor support staff to Southeast Asia. These customer service reps say that they've been marginalized by Uber, and that the quality of safety on the service has declined as a result. Specifically, the sheer volume of complaints has overwhelmed the platform, and incident reports pertaining to rape or sexual assault sometimes get missed by the company.
[Johana Bhuiyan | BuzzFeed News]

On this week's "Re/code Decode" podcast with Kara Swisher, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter talks about the FBI's case against Apple, public-private sector partnerships and online threats posed by Russia, China and ISIS.
[Eric Johnson | Re/code]

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that various mutual funds and private equity firms were writing down the value of their stakes in unicorn startups like Zenefits and Jawbone. Bloomberg's Matt Levine has the clearest explanation of what this means: Private financing markets aren't much different from public markets anymore, and they won't shield companies from market turmoil.
[Matt Levine | Bloomberg View]

Cloud computing technology is quickly becoming a standard part of the Internet infrastructure for many American business, and it has made people with expertise in the area suddenly very, very valuable. Companies like Amazon, Oracle and G.E. are raiding one another's ranks as the competition heats up.
[Quentin Hardy | The New York Times]

Last year, Mercedes, BMW and Audi bought Nokia's Here Maps technology for $3 billion. Now, the Here Maps consortium is looking to add members, like Renault-Nissan, to get more resources to further develop Here's self-driving car applications.
[Ilona Wissenbach | Reuters]