The idea of fooling Apple, the main distributor of Uber’s app, began in 2014. At the time, Uber was dealing with widespread account fraud in places like China, where tricksters bought stolen iPhones that were erased of their memory and resold. Some Uber drivers there would then create dozens of fake email addresses to sign up for new Uber rider accounts attached to each phone, and request rides from those phones, which they would then accept. Since Uber was handing out incentives to drivers to take more rides, the drivers could earn more money this way.
To halt the activity, Uber engineers assigned a persistent identity to iPhones with a small piece of code, a practice called “fingerprinting.” Uber could then identify an iPhone and prevent itself from being fooled even after the device was erased of its contents. There was one problem: Fingerprinting iPhones broke Apple’s rules. Mr. Cook believed that wiping an iPhone should ensure customers that no trace of the owner’s identity remained on the device.
So Mr. Kalanick told his engineers to “geofence” Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., a way to digitally identify people reviewing Uber’s software in a specific location. Uber would then obfuscate its code from people within that geofenced area, essentially drawing a digital lasso around those it wanted to keep in the dark. Apple employees at its headquarters were unable to see Uber’s fingerprinting
Putting aside the topic that Apple could easily crush a $70 billion business by merely deciding to take it off the Apple store which deserves its own discussion, at its core, the NYT's profile reveals just just how willing the driven, pardon the pun, Uber CEO was to not only approach the thin line that breaks the rules, in some cases illegally - but on more than one occasions cross it altogether. As Isaac states, "in a quest to build Uber into the world’s dominant ride-hailing entity, Mr. Kalanick has openly disregarded many rules and norms, backing down only when caught or cornered.
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In addition to "fingerprinting" users, Uber appears to have been actively involved in some - apparently legal - corporate espionage against its biggest competitor Lyft. The NYT reports that Uber "devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft’s business. (Lyft, too, operates a competitive intelligence team.)"
Slice confirmed it sells anonymized data (meaning that customers’ names are not attached) based on ride receipts from Uber and Lyft, but declined to disclose who buys the information.
Of course the brother of Emanual Rahm is in...
But more generally how widespread are these practices insie silicon valley? What happened? If you needed a better reason to never use a closed source software ever, I think this article illustrate it well. It's a shame.
For me it looks to be the obama admin unmasked. Bullshitting on some principles while it's just a foger for big looting and scamming operations.
Arresting and stripping these uber uber management would maybe redtore some sense of morality inside this valley...
What a shame!
On the other hand, they want private software... enjoy your fleecing.
