It took me about 8 paragraphs in to figure out what Greyball is, so to save you the time: Uber used various data sources to identify which people are likely government officials who are trying to collect incriminating data on them, and then blocks them from the service so they can't be caught in sting operations.
But there's a lot in the article that doesn't make sense:
>Other techniques included looking at the user’s credit card information and whether that card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union.
I couldn't find a good source, but it doesn't seem like that's something a CC merchant would have access to. Do they really get to see that?[2]
Also, how were they able to do it so accurately without disrupting their service? Most city employees and police aren't going to be involved in sting operations against car services, so their customer support will have to deal with a torrent of very confused government employees [1] who keep getting mysterious rejections when they try to use they app, and which support can't give a truthful answer on.
Plus, this seemed to require significant on-the-ground intel and human intervention:
>If those clues were not enough to confirm a user’s identity, Uber employees would search social media profiles and other available information online. Once a user was identified as law enforcement, Uber Greyballed him or her, tagging the user with a small piece of code that read Greyball followed by a string of numbers.
So, I'm surprised it worked at all.
[1] identified by the fact of that person having more-than-usual activity inside something recognized as a government building
[2] EDIT: Okay, I get it -- you can look up banks from the CC number. Can we not have further comments just to point this out?
Maybe not a popular opinion but I find this entire thing pure genius.
>I couldn't find a good source, but it doesn't seem like that's something a CC merchant would have access to. Do they really get to see that?
The first 6 digits of a credit card can identify the issuing bank (BIN number - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_card_number). If you ask your merchant they can readily provide you and up to date list.
I agree. It's genius in a Lex Luthor kind of way. If I understood the full scope of the application, I like to think i'd decline to work on that. It's easy to imagine engineers working on small parts of the system, and never really connecting the dots that the whole point is to evade law enforcement.
There's a big difference between keeping secrets for market advantage and to evade the law. In the first case, I want to tell people because i'm building cool stuff, but i can't, at least not until the product is ready. In the latter case, i'd be at least embarrassed, if not ashamed of the tools.
But I agree, it's slick. It's easy to be an armchair quarterback when it's not my career at stake. With millions or billions of dollars on the line, my ethics might erode much faster than i want to admit. In that case, I'd hope evil jfoutz (or ethically devoid jfoutz) would build such a sophisticated tool.
>If I understood the full scope of the application, I like to think i'd decline to work on that. It's easy to imagine engineers working on small parts of the system, and never really connecting the dots that the whole point is to evade law enforcement.
It reminds me of the VW emissions cheating case:
"Hey, have it detect whether the test cycle is running and emit a signal if true."
'Um... why would the system need to know that?'
"Uh, because we don't want the car to freak out when the wheels are turning but it's not moving."
'Oh ... seems legit.'
"And you -- have it minimize NO2 when it gets this signal. But don't talk to him."
In the Uber case, employees might have been told, "oh we want to offer a special discount to law enforcement" ... though even that seems seedy.
But (per my original comment) I don't see how they can keep the circle small. What do they tell support employees to say when someone reports not being able to get a ride despite all the fake cars around?
The system has extremely obvious use cases in abuse mitigation - it's basically HN shadow banning for car service. Only a few needed to know about the spot-the-officials aspect, and the rest is legitimate. And support don't need to know anything - if someone is reporting fake cars, they're an undesirable customer anyway so from Uber's standpoint, it's fine if support get confused and do a bad job.
From my read of the article, abuse mitigation seems to have been an early motivation for some components of this feature - in markets where, for example, competitors would threaten Uber drivers with damage against person or vehicle. And then someone got the bright idea of who else they could shadowban...
caught is a bit hyperbolic. Government agencies have every right to work with industry partners to promote, understand, and enforce regulation. This happens all day everyday in industries around the world. Uber isn't somehow exempt from that.
Uber's support is pretty worthless - every interaction is with a different person, and none of them read the conversation history. I'd expect the person would get a runaround and just wind up going in circles.
I doubt it. Reputable news sources require at least two independent sources before they'll print a story. If NYT didn't have multiple current or former employees telling them about this then you wouldn't be reading this story.
It's concerning to see this narrative already working, considering a Carlos Slim "billion dollar investment" in the NYT is, itself, a lie. The good news for you is that a transaction that large would be public record, so I look forward to being proven wrong with a citation. (I suggest you look up the market capitalization of The New York Times Company.)
On the order of 1bn, but my memory of exact figures from a decade ago needed refreshing. In fact only $350 million of corrupt foreign monopolist cash is enough to buy the editorial position of America's premier source of fake news.
He increased his investment by $100ish million in 2015, which more than doubled his stake. This is easily found via Google, and is on the order of an order of magnitude below a billion dollars. You can't just make things up while decrying fake news. The trend line on these goalposts moving will eventually lead to an investment I can afford.
This is even beyond my position on the paper. You're just typing complete falsehoods and expecting to get away with it now, which is sad.
I would imagine there are people who don't view it as a breach of ethics. And those types are probably more inclined to be working at Uber on the first place.
I mean if you really believe the various transportations administrations are corrupt and that the way to solve it is to temporarily disregard the law, then Uber is probably the place to be
Obstruction of justice is a crime. So are lying to an FBI agent, destroying evidence, resisting arrest, evading arrest, falsifying business records, destruction of documents with intent to impede an investigation, and of course perjury.
I don't know that any of these apply here, but yes, actively avoiding accountability is often a crime on its own. And correctly so, I'd say. Creating fake accounting records as a hobby would be odd but not immoral. But keeping two sets of books in a real business has no purpose beyond enabling illegal activity.
Oh, and if you're wondering about the moral case, I think it's pretty clear. When we the people set out to do something together, deciding to evade our joint decisions and mechanisms for self-regulation is an antisocial, antidemocratic act.
The government hasn't represented "we, the people" since forever, so all your arguments are void. It cannot be morally unlawful to resist a government that doesn't represent you.
You are welcome to your own opinions, but I disagree. I imagine most Americans would.
Regardless, if you have decided that the government doesn't represent the people, it makes your task harder. Unless you're just saying that you can do what you want (which doesn't strike me as much of a moral position) then you have to work to divine what the collective will of your fellow citizens is and honor that.
When big money monopolists corrupt our local governments to obtain taxi monopolies at the expense of working families, the environment, and vulnerable racial minorities that can't hail taxis but can get an Uber, then it's the system that's antisocial and antidemocratic.
Uber is a social reform movement organized as a profit-seeking business. Of course the forces of corruption and reaction are going to try to stop it under cover of law.
But if they're a social reform movement, they'd very well disguised. They threaten journalists, exploit workers, engage in a variety of skulduggery, and create such a toxic working environment that they need a former Attorney General to investigate.
I think the more likely case is that they are what they appear to be: greedy, amoral people disguising an attempt to gain a monopoly using the guise of social reform.
Certainly it depends on which one of many jurisdictions Uber operates in.
For a start, in the U.K. it's illegal to use radar detectors [Edit: this first is apparently false; they publically stated that they were going to, but never changed the law. Other countries apparently do ban them, according to wikipedia.], and people have been given criminal convictions for "Flashing their lights" in order to warn incoming motorists of a speed trap.
Apologies - apparently I'm mistaken with the first - apparently several years ago there were public discussions about it and they claimed they were going to, but never followed through. Probably some more secondary sources confirmed it for me that I never double checked. (Also, wikipedia claims that although the UK doesn't ban, plenty of other countries do - and in the US it seems only Virginia explicitly bans them)
True, but there's a big difference between turning away anyone who looks like a cop (as biker bars might do, and is on firm legal ground), versus lying specifically to those people you believe to be cops.
So, saying the bar's closed would be ethically unacceptable but just saying you're not allowed in isn't? I'm afraid I don't agree with this being a clear ethical distinction.
> I don't see how any entity (including Uber) has an obligation to make it easy for the law to ticket them.
Corporate citizens have an obligation to obey the laws of the jurisdictions in which they operate. If they find the laws unacceptable, they should lobby to have them changed.
You'll find that the same argument gets thrown entirely out the window conveniently depending on a person's specific beliefs on any given issue. It's barely even built on sand as a premise.
See: racism and discrimination broadly, segregation, refugees, illegal immigration, unions / union strikes, marijuana, political corruption, cartels, government protected monopolies and so on. There are a vast number of topics that cause people at businesses to be willing to disregard the laws of a given jurisdiction at various points in time (regardless of whether one views the position as being on the moral side or not). It'd be hard to claim that it never makes sense to disobey the law for a business, given just the last century of history in just the developed world, with the plentiful display of wildly irrational or immoral laws that have existed.
We are all better off because uber willfully disregarded these laws and regulations. These laws once had a good reason, but are now still on the books only because incumbents have regulators in their pockets.
As for lobbying to have the laws changed, if you expect startups to be able to lobby in every jurisdiction to get the law changed against incumbents when the regulators often come from the industry the startup is disrupting, then I got a bridge to sell you.
> We are all better off because uber willfully disregarded these laws and regulations.
The thing is, we're not. What we've got is a cab company that can offer better and cheaper service than everyone else because it's breaking the law, and it's good at throwing VC money at lawyers to avoid the consequences. What we've got is further damage to the respect for the rule of law and thus to the fabric of civilization, as people see how Uber gets away with illegal activities. Hell, there are many people who are inspired by their antisocial behaviour, and see Uber as an example to follow.
Consider a hypothetical business in a historical era that provides great service by employing colored people to serve white customers. Imagine said business becomes successful, and even pushes some jurisdictions to change their laws against this practice.
I'd argue that this business is great - it's helping consumers and fixing the world.
One might argue that we are not better off because of this:
The thing is, we're not. What we've got is a business that can offer better and cheaper service than everyone else because it's breaking the law, and it's good at throwing money at lawyers to avoid the consequences. What we've got is further damage to the respect for the rule of law and thus to the fabric of civilization, as people see how this company gets away with illegal activities. Hell, there are many people who are inspired by their antisocial behaviour, and see Uber as an example to follow.
Your argument seems to apply equally well to this case - after all, your argument is not dependent on the law being just or unjust. It completely ignores that point.
Are you willing to follow your argument where it leads? Or do you recognize the flaw in it?
It's about the defaults. I believe laws should be obeyed by default, and only opposed in special circumstances. The burden of proving that the circumstances warrant disobedience should be on the disobedient party. And most importantly, breaking the law should be expensive, so that it never becomes a viable business strategy.
I'd even cut Uber some slack if they weren't so smug about what they're doing. This is just as much about breaking arbitrary laws as it is about how they keep showing that they don't give a shit about society.
> your argument is not dependent on the law being just or unjust. It completely ignores that point.
It does, because in real world, regulations are not uniformly distributed throughout the possibility space. In any working society you can - and should - assume that most laws are there for a reason, and that this reason is just. When that assumption doesn't hold, your country pretty much disintegrates. Hence, going against the law is a special case.
The way I see it, none of Uber's "innovations" actually required illegal actions. They simply don't care, because this way is faster and brings in more money.
As a proof of that I want to point out that many places in Europe managed to implement all those Uber "innovations" some time ago, and it didn't require breaking laws in the way Uber does. Sure, old cab companies were pissed, but things got settled in courts and regulations were updated - just like it should happen in any civilized society.
Ultimately, if Americans want to run their society this way, it's none of my business. I would be happy though, if they stopped exporting their "innovative" methods to countries with working regulatory frameworks.
I think Uber has proven that their disobedience is beneficial. In the US and India they have made the transit sector vastly better than it was before. Even ignoring the benefits of the app over hailing a cab, the drastic reduction in racial discrimination is an amazing improvement.
Note that India also had apps/SMS driven taxi hails - autowale.in started in Pune (my city). But Uber fixed transport and the political situation, whereas autowale.in is just a footnote in history.
In any working society you can - and should - assume that most laws are there for a reason, and that this reason is just. When that assumption doesn't hold, your country pretty much disintegrates. Hence, going against the law is a special case.
Then by your standard, the US and India are not working societies.
Then again, by your standard, it's pretty clear that not all of Europe is working. For example, witness how often French unions and others engage in violent and illegal actions (both assaulting Uber drivers/passengers and others) on a regular basis.
In any case, you seem to be backing away from your original claim and accepting that some laws are unjust and breaking them is ok. Do you argue that American or Indian taxi protectionism laws are just?
You are arbitrarily assigning Uber's disruption a positive social outcome, which appears to be the lynchpin of your argument. Your argument could be applied to many outcomes that would appear on the surface to be negative. A few (admittedly exaggerated) examples:
"ArmzDealR is providing a great service by eliminating government bureaucracy and providing access to arms that citizens should have. It's good that they help people avoid those onerous registration requirements."
"TraffiKR makes it easy to find cheap labor. There's no paperwork and the workers never complain!"
Are you willing to follow your argument where it leads? Should businesses be allowed to push against any rule at all? Are all laws 'unjust' or are there some laws that are in place to protect public good?
I'm simply pointing out that Temporal's argument that breaking the law is always wrong is simply incorrect.
I'm not saying all laws should be broken. I'm saying one must decide whether or not the law is just, and support those who break unjust laws. I see no one even attempting to make the argument that taxi protectionism laws are just. Do you have an argument that they are?
I haven't researched the rationales behind taxi protectionism laws, so I can only offer conjecture. Two two reasons I can imagine we have such laws are traffic congestion control and accident liability.
On the surface congestion control seems far easier to implement (especially in a pre-mobile phone context) via restriction of medallions. I don't have arguments one way or the other as to the necessity of congestion control because I've only rarely experienced large cities (NYC, Chicago, London). I believe they are popular for various reasons, but I am not familiar with the arguments for or against.
Determination of liability seems like another obvious reason for a medallion monopoly. Presumably taxis are a higher risk pool for insurance claims, due to the presence of multiple parties. It's unclear to me where the liability falls if an Uber driver is in an accident that mortally wounds a passenger; will their standard insurance (that presumes a certain risk profile) cover the claim? I'm simply not familiar enough to definitely comment, unfortunately.
The latter argument holds more weight with me, but I'm sympathetic to arguments against it.
You do see the problem with encouraging the erosion of mutual social trust? If "following the law" collapses as a percieved social expectation it would impoverish everyone.
That being said, it is clear that abusive and overwraught law and regulation invites this impovrishment.
Breaking the law always erodes the fabric of society. Normalizing it is worse.
Certainly, there can be laws that are worth breaking. You should be extremely careful before assuming that's the case in any given scenario, and I don't think taxi rules are it, no matter how dysfunctional the USA might be.
Really though we are. Even if Uber goes out of business, taxi companies are going to get wise that customers want the Uber experience and all of a sudden they'll all have to get apps to compete.
Uber broke a status quo in the state of the transportation industry and we should all be grateful for that. They also became a champion for a certain type of activism that I think a lot of us would like to see more of.
Think carefully before you deny Uber the activist label. Using ethically shady methods to push through social agendas is precisely what activism is. Not everyone falls on the same side of the line, but you can't not call it activism. Labor strikes were considered extremely problematic to many.
I have a perspective of an European. Here on the Old Continent, we've already had that "Uber experience", and it didn't require companies to blatantly ignore the law and burn money to keep regulators at bay (not to say there weren't regulatory tensions, but they quickly got resolved in courts and regulations were updated; that's how a civilized society is supposed to work). So excuse me if I don't see Uber as innovative.
As for their activism, this is the flavour we know from dystopian movies about evil corporations disregarding the laws to eke out some profits. In a way, I can't wait for an Uber in biotech sector - maybe a small engineered pandemic is what people need to understand that regulations should not be ignored on a whim by companies seeking profits.
We're all better off? That's an incredibly broad statement.
The laws on the books still exist for a good reason. Even if you feel that Uber is somehow exempt/makes good choices with the people it chooses to employ via the platform, does that apply to any other "uber-esque" groups with more lax enforcement?
"The laws on the books still exist for a good reason."
That's... optimistic. Many laws were put in place to benefit other (incumbent) businesses, or in reaction to conditions that no longer hold, or due to ideas proven false or at least no longer fashionable.
That's not necessarily good reason to break the law (though sometimes it is), but anyone shold feel free to lobby for removal or change of a law.
Let's also acknowledge that it's not just Uber the company skirting the law, it's also the millions of people who use their service. The people have spoken with their dollars instead of their votes.
lets also acknowledge that there are billions of people who are using their dollars to vote against uber by taking taxis, use lyft, take public transportation, purchae cars, walk, or ride their bike.
in other words, thats a terrible argument in support of uber.
> Corporate citizens have an obligation to obey the laws of the jurisdictions in which they operate.
To some extent. If the fine is $50 for each infraction, and you have $10bn in the bank, you really don't have to obey the law.
You can lobby to have the law changed and not obey the law (if you are willing to pay any and all fines, while you are lobbying). Uber's use case didn't exist 10+ years ago, and as such, most laws weren't made for that not set up to account for that.
I personally find that to be a valid example of where it's acceptable not to follow the law.
Do regular citizens, such as Rosa Parks, not have the same obligation?
Personally I consider civil disobedience of unjust laws to be acceptable, for either a single person or for an organized group of people (such as Uber).
Civil disobedience implies actions in the open and being willing to suffer the consequences of your actions. If Uber had made a public statement that they were instituting a policy to refuse service to city and law enforcement officials and were willing to take their lumps, you might have a point.
And uber does things in the open. They openly violate the law and reveal to citizens how much corrupt politicians are hurting them by taking away their transportation choices.
This works only if it happens on a massive scale. If Uber didn't use this program, it's likely that their civil disobedience would end before it's large enough to get their message out.
It appears that other ridesharing apps have managed to "get the message out" without devising nefarious plots to confuse law enforcement. And for that matter despite various covert Uber-run attempts to sabotage their business and take away the public's transportation choices.
The idea that Uber is some civil liberties campaign for improved transportation options rather than a corporation with an unusually aggressive disregard for anyone that gets in their way is rather exploded by the most cursory examination of their actions.
Which other ridesharing apps have fixed broken political systems? From what I can see, most of them wait for Uber to fix politics and then just swoop in after the fact to make money.
I don't think any ridesharing apps have "fixed broken political systems", least of all Uber. But there are many ridesharing apps which operated in local territories before Uber, and many of them managed to do it without writing software to deceive law enforcement, coordinating personal attacks on journalists who criticised them or trying to kill startup competitors with fake bookings.
Before Uber, SF, NYC and Mumbai and many other political systems prevented competitors from providing better service than yellow cabs. Uber's political activism has fixed this.
coordinating personal attacks on journalists who criticised them
This was an ethical hypothetical, not a thing that actually happened.
Uber made real bookings and then gave the driver a sales pitch during the ride. All they did was pay their competitors for the right to offer drivers a better deal.
Kind of the opposite of Google/Apple/etc colluding NOT to offer each other's employees a better deal.
To be honest, the fact that an executive is prepared to publicly advocate harassment of journalists as an "ethical hypothetical" thing is a pretty good indication of what they actually are prepared to do in private. Sorry but the "I'm a good friend who overheard part of the conversation and don't think he said the things he's already apologised for saying" defence isn't the most convincing, especially given the company's well-publicised use of comparable tactics in other areas, including hiring private investigators to go after employees that had reported sexual harassment. Your insistence that Uber made real bookings (and just happened to cancel most of them) is a lie, period.
You don't have to think taxi medallion laws are particularly rational to find Uber's behaviour in many, many areas indefensible.
Yeah, Rosa Parks civil disobedience was a for profit operation! Please stop insulting her. Uber is the embodiment of corporate evil, these people think they are above the law.
I didn't say she made a profit. I said she broke a law she felt was unjust, same as Uber, and that according to ForHackernews' reasoning she should not have done this. My point is that his reasoning is wrong, and merely a post-hoc rationalization for general dislike of Uber.
I did not make the comparison you seem to be arguing against, namely that Rosa Parks and Uber are equivalent in all possible ways.
They're making the important point that what people really mean is "laws I agree or don't agree with" not "laws". Hopefully not only on HN do people have reflective capacity to see this.
I disagree that they should lobby to change it. I understand that realistically that is what they will do, but I don't think it's the ethically correct thing.
Laws are in place to benefit all of society, they shouldn't be changed on behalf of specific corporations, regardless of how much money the "donate".
Laws are in place to benefit those in power not "all of society," as anyone who does not benefit from them can attest to. And I agree, corporations cannot be allowed to change the laws to suit them.
Laws are passed by a tiny percentage of the population, alleged (not necessarily de facto) representatives of the interests of majority. So not confuse republic with a direct democracy.
No but I am for Google and Apple investors holding the management to their fiduciary duty to turn a profit. Lobbying for gay rights seems very loosely connected to that goal.
Edit: There is not a fiduciary duty to turn a profit, but there is a fiduciary duty to put the corporation's interests above your personal interests.
You are right - thanks for the correction. However, there is certainly a fiduciary duty to put the interests of the corporation above your personal interests as a high-level manager.
Yes, I'm against corporate lobbying in all cases, even when they're lobbying for causes that I believe in like LGBT rights and net neutrality. I would be quite a hypocrite if I only supported corporate lobbying when it was for causes that I agreed with. Ideally corporations would have no place in politics.
And please don't conflate "doesn't support lobbying for XXX" with "doesn't support XXX". They're really orthogonal concepts.
Or like non-Jews hiding Jews from the Nazi police.
Obviously that's a dramatic example, but so is the drug dealer example.
If Uber believes that the taxi industry is wrongfully colluding with the government to try to stop Uber from operating, then it's not necessarily wrong for Uber to do whatever it can to continue operating.
If Uber believes the taxi industry and the government are wrongfully colluding, it has the means to legally make that case as well as in the court of public opinion.
That is obviously not true for the extreme example you cited of genocide under fascism, so, I don't think it makes sense to compare the two.
Uber didn't have to have Greyball in the first place. Every driver that got intimidated/assaulted should go to the police. Every time a competitor pulled some shenanigans against Uber, they should sue. And so on and so forth.
This is just smokescreen. It's obvious what the intent was.
Laws take years, even decades to change. We'd never have any progress if every technological advancement had to wait for the law to catch up and regulate it.
We do have quite a lot of advancement which comes without violating the law. Also breaking the social canvas to correct something you feel is unfairly repressed/enforced is not something to do lightly.
Let me give you an example here. I think Uber is a bad thing, but there's nothing I can do to oppose them, legally, that is. Should I carry out my own justice, illegally ? You can see that this pattern of thought quickly falls down, because making compromises is actually an important part of living in society.
It does - you just need a certain amount of karma (500?) to get it. That's why some answers are grayed out; get enough downvotes, and your writing will blend in more and more with the background.
I know. HIPAA and SEC regulations are the reason why tech can't quite seem to disrupt the medical and financial industry. I wish a company like Uber will just go in and break every rule until enforcement finally realizes medical and financial regulation is a silly idea.
Tax avoidance and laundering of criminal money is a genuine value-add to many an individual's portfolio I don't know why governments around the world want to prevent banks from doing it.
I get what you're going for. Where's the line beyond which avoiding detection / policing is wrong. Like for example, if I'm a terrorist, then if I'm plotting an attack and avoiding surveillance and policing, would I still be wrong if I've not executed the plot yet?
Obstruction of justice and interfering with police duties are crimes in plenty of jurisdictions. I'm not sure Waze is a good comparison - your behavior around knowing where a police car was sighted is to comply better with the law, so it'd be hard to argue it's obstruction of justice.
> your behavior around knowing where a police car was sighted is to comply better with the law
It may be...it may also be to avoid the area, for illegitimate (I'm a criminal police are looking for) or legitimate (the local PD is notoriously racist against people of my race, and I want to avoid being hassled) reasons.
I think that Waze is a great comparison. There's an app which is explicitly used to find and avoid police in order to flaut the law.
The main difference in my view is that Waze is individual people doing this, which we approve of, conversely Uber is a corporation many dislike. In situations like this it's important to acknowledge bias and try to abstract to the general case and reason about that.
Waze users are following the law when they get near Police officers. Uber users are continuing illegal behavior but obstructing police visibility. Uber's behavior is more like radar jamming or putting up a barrier in front of police.
Exactly, if -for example- a police officer tries to pull me over for a traffic infraction, my speeding off and attempts to make it more difficult to ticket me is only a natural and decent personal impulse!
You have a legal obligation not to flee an officer. However, even if you sell drugs or sex, you have no obligation to approach a known police officer and offer to sell them drugs/sex.
You make a distinction between staying passive and not helping an investigation (the drugs example) - and actively deterring the investigation (the flight example).
That's a valid distinction to make, however given how much development effort companies like Uber and VW invested in their tools, I think those are clear cases of active deferring.
I'm not a lawyer, but I think you are making the wrong distinction. Fleeing a police officer is explicitly illegal, I believe the crime is resisting arrest or something equivalent.
Actively telling all your hooker friends to stay home because the cops are out is not illegal. Nor is it illegal to say "oh hi there officer" before your hooker friend propositions a cop. That's basically what Uber did.
Not only will you find examples of things like courts finding liability if "a newspaper publishes the name of a witness to a crime, thus making it
easier for the criminal to intimidate or kill the witness" (with no intent on the part of the newspaper) [18] or "a Web site or a newspaper article names a Web site that contains
copyright-infringing material, or describes it in enough detail that readers could quickly find it using a search engine" [26], there are also examples more directly relevant to this situation. I think references [19, 37, 38, 39, 40] are most relevant.
[19]: "publish[ing] . . .the residence address or telephone number" of various law enforcement employees "with the intent to obstruct justice" is illegal in many states, including California.
[37] My reading of United States v. Lane, 514 F.2d 22 (9th Cir. 1975) is that advising people not to sell drugs to a person because you heard something interesting on a police scanner is aiding and abetting a conspiracy. The court said the defendant "could not seriously contend that he was discouraging, rather than aiding and abetting, the commission of the crime" in response to his assertion that "he actually advised against it".
[38]: My reading of United States v. Bucher, 375 F.3d 929 (9th Cir. 2004) is that it is walking down a trail to warn a person whom park rangers intend to arrest is interfering with both the rangers and their official duties (and thus illegal).
Uber isn't looking after its hooker "friends" though, it's attempting to thwart investigations into its own business model which is profiting from contractors operating in a legally grey area in many jurisdictions.
Seems more akin to developing a system to screen guests at your hotel - which you insist isn't an illegal brothel and is making good faith attempts to uphold the law - to ensure you're only earning "enhanced room service" commissions from people that aren't investigating whether they might be illegal.
Even if that isn't an offence in itself, it still looks like hard evidence against any claims they might make of intent to comply with the law in various other cases being brought against them.
It's closer to them saying, "Yes, sure...I'm happy to take money for sex...wait right here for a while", and then hiding.
Which could be obstruction.
If the app told them they were banned, it would be closer to your analogy. But, it shows fake cars circling about that never pick you up. It's actively deceiving law enforcement
Ah, but is it deceiving law enforcement with the knowledge that that person is right now trying to arrest you, or is it just refusing service to law enforcement because they don't like them? The latter is covered by the TOS where it says they can refuse service to anyone for whatever reason.
there are a number of holes in your thought process.
first, and most important to this discussion, is that it is definitely deceptive especially when you are going to such extremes as documenting burner mobile phones and preventing their use on the pretense of hiding from regulators.
second, and less important for this discussion, but a business has he right to refuse service to any ONE person for whatever legal reason they choose (whether they specify hat reason or not is a different topic). this should not be confused with deniying service to a GROUP of people for whatever reason they want which is discrimination, and is illegal, whether outline in a TOS or not.
I don't know how this is handled in US law, but in many law systems there is the question of intent. If you say "hi officer" with the intent of warning your partner that might in theory already be illegal. (obstruction of justice)
While in that case, intent would be be very difficult to prove, it's rather obvious if you spend planning time and resources building a software tool with the express purpose to warn you of officers.
1. They have no obligation to law enforcement to make it easy to catch them. They're making it so that it's harder for LE to use their own service against them. Good investigators wouldn't investigate under their real name, or with their police-union-linked credit card, so it only seems fair.
2. Taxi and municipal transport are easy pandering-demographics for local government, creating monopolies. This isn't Uber vs. competitors, or vs. average citizens, this is Uber vs. the cartels. Everyone, in the long-run, benefits.
It's easy to imagine engineers working on small parts of the system, and never really connecting the dots that the whole point is to evade law enforcement.
I would volunteer to work on that project because its whole point is to evade law enforcement. A lot of us (hackers/technologists) take a pretty dim view of arbitrary State regulations and "laws" and are quite happy to work to evade them. Most people who fit the techno-libertarian or cypherpunk mentality would probably feel the same way.
And here I thought that's just teenagers "who fit the techno-libertarian or cypherpunk mentality", and only until they finally grow up.
The mindset you're describing is pretty self-centered and ignorant of how societies work. The law is there to reconcile conflicting interest so that people don't start using violence to pursue their goals. Techno-libertarian teenagers should imagine what would happen if some people they disagree with contracted that libertarian spirit.
ETA:
Announcing two new startups - Uber Biotech and Uber Medicare. Because what could possibly go wrong from arbitrarily avoiding regulations for the sake of profits.
Uber is... Anarchy? Like in the movie Thunderdome? Sure.
Their opposition wasn't arbitrary; they knew they could provide a better service outside the monopolistic constraints that were already in place. So they fought those battles and because of those battles, everyone gets to experience a much better ride service than the antiquated taxi system.
Come on. They didn't fought for your better taxi experience. They fought for your money!
While your point could stand in theory, could work with a different company, it's Uber we're talking about! Those guys who keep showing, since day one, that they don't give a flying fuck about people beyond the money they get for them! The company painted itself a pretty consistent image over the years, and it's the image of a smart asshole with too much money to spend.
Not uber in particular; the anarchism is in the mentality that "you want me to circumvent the law and avoid law enforcement? in principle, I'm in!" Which seemed to be the position mindcrime was taking.
Everyone gets to experience fancy VC subsidized rides, in any case. I don't see any clear argument that uber is actually more economically efficient than a standard cab...
My time is worth something; standing on a corner at 3pm, checking the time, calling the main office - "oh yeah, he's five minutes away", 45 minutes still waiting, call again..
With Uber/Lyft, I can see when they'll arrive. I can plan to do something with that time if the wait is long enough. I can quickly redirect them to where I am if there's a misunderstanding.
There are plenty taxi of companies worldwide that utilize mobile applications without also showing a disregard for law. The two things don't have to go together. From outside-US perspective, Uber is much less innovative than you'd think. They look simply like assholes with lot of VC money to burn on lawyers.
While you're congratulating the world, I'm in Lincoln, NE still waiting on a cab at 4pm.
I'm an adult; if I want to enter into an agreement to pay someone else to give me a ride and I'm not harming anyone else, then I will. Fuck their stupid arbitrary laws.
While subjective, there is a difference between breaking laws / fighting authority for moral reasons, and breaking laws for financial gain. Yeah, maybe you as an engineer would feel morally righteous for "fighting the man", but Uber doesn't care about that -- it just wants $$$.
Uber is fighting the man, in effort to capture $$$/market. That's their market. A business makes money?
As much as you wouldn't like to admit, they've broken through a market that was once monopolized and the cities had zero interest in doing anything about it.
You now have superior car ride services in part for the work they've done in the market. They have raised the bar.
Exactly the point: the law has ceased to serve the people and has become irrelevant. It's on the government to change it in order for society to progress, not hold us back.
Remember, people are using Uber. Citizens. Voters. They are voting with their dollar for the superior product. The government's role has become obsolete in the transaction.
Yeah, Rosa Parks civil disobedience was a for profit operation! Please stop insulting her. Uber is the embodiment of corporate evil, these people think they are above the law.
It's strange how I need to copy and paste my arguments on this thread, like you know Uber was itself astro-turfing HN right now.
Are you also going to take the same generous view towards people evading State regulations and laws that you don't like? Because if you are only okay with people evading laws that you don't like, but they should obey the ones you do like, then you are setting yourself above the law. That way lies authoritarianism.
Not sure how civil disobedience leads to authoritarianism rather than the opposite. Also, by your reasoning, civil disobedience is never justified. And does Trump being President change your reasoning at all?
Civil disobedience is breaking the law one perceives as unjust (or refusing to follow it) to make a point about the legal system. It includes accepting the consequences of one's actions. What Uber does is garden variety illegal business practice. No societal benefit in mind, just money to be made.
Disobedience would be refusing to take part in such scummy schemes, and making a huge stink over it.
> Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws
PROFESSED. To twist that on this on its head, and use another sociopath to excuse it is hilarious. But since you ask: no, that's even MORE reason to not accept this bullshit.
So then is the country clerk that refused to sign marriage certificates for gays a hero too? She was just practicing civil disobedience.
Or perhaps she should just move very slowly when it comes to same sex couples, just never can get the work done. She isn't refusing it just never gets done.
Again, civil disobedience accepts the legal consequences of its actions and is part of a vocal, public effort to change the laws the person or group deems unjust. The entire premise is to create better laws for everyone to abide by.
Uber uses deception to shield itself from the consequences of its criminal actions and consolidate wealth for itself. I'm assuming you're not trolling, so think long and hard about your own understanding of society the next time you want to compare MLK to an anarcho-capitalist megacorp.
Consider further; how did the narrative of Uber needing to break the law to disrupt (read: try to overthrow) the existing taxi industry morph into excusing their practices as affecting positive social change? Remember, the context of the boycotts during the American civil rights movement was never to "disrupt" southern businesses.
Again, there are plenty of cities where Uber have been successful where they didn't break any laws. Likewise there are many cities that have banned Uber where they don't operate. The number of cities where they operate in a grey area of regulation are often few and often for short periods of time.
Uber are more interested in operating in a regulated environment, hence all their lobbying and hence why their first hires in new cities are usually government liaison people.
Uber is equally successful in cities where it was initially thought illegal, in cities where it was always legal and in cities where it became legal.
Many other companies have ridden the coattails of the regulatory work that Uber has done.
If they were an "anarcho-capitalistic" business then they simply wouldn't care for the laws anywhere. They'd be operating in Nevada, Austin and in all of these other cities that have since banned them. They would be signing up drivers with no license or background checks. They wouldn't need any government liaison people. They'd do no lobbying, etc. and as bad as they are - they aren't that company (although many want them to be)
"Ridden the coattails of the regulatory work that Uber has done"? I think the problem is that you have a very poor grasp of how the branches of US government (legislative in particular) interact with businesses, and thus don't really know how to distinguish among any agent that effects legislative change.
First learn about, and then read some commentaries on the functions and history of the three branches of US government. Then learn about how lobbying works, then read about the various rights movements that've occurred in the US.
I don't see how they aren't "creating better laws for everyone to abide by".
They're not a monopoly on ridesharing and because of their efforts converting the hearts and minds of consumers and politicians others can do it too like Juno, Tesla, Lyft, etc.
Assertion: medallion regulations are currently onerous and against the financial interests of cities and citizens.
Uber's public and explicit proposal to change the medallion system: " "
Your statement applies to literally every company that has lobbyists. You need way more than that to present evidence for your claim.
Again, civil disobedience's core mechanism for gaining the support needed to enact the change it publicly and explicitly advocates for is to accept the consequences of breaking the unjust laws.
How far does your scofflaw streak go? Is this different from adding law enforcement blocking controls to any illegal tech product? Should everyone get to decide what laws to follow?
I think you are describing anarcho-capitalism, not libertarianism.
But here's the thing: What we have now is anarchy. It's just that the powerful make the laws, and con the masses. Some places it looks like capitalism, other places more like kleptocracy. But just about everywhere, the game is rigged.
The civil rights movement was in no way about the abolition of the rule of law. Hitler's promise of greatness actually did seduce a ton of the economically and socially devastated German population. Hitler was a known outlaw. Even if you can't yet think your premise through to the end, at least consider the consistency and truth of your own words.
But wouldn't it bother those same people to think they're working for a Megacorp instead? Maybe I have a dim view of law enforcement, but wouldn't I also not want to work for Ares Macrotechnology?
Some of them, yes. Depends on the Megacorp, I think. I mean, I work for a Megacorp now, while working on bootstrapping a startup on the side. But I don't think I'd work for Uber (not because of this though).
But you know that upfront. You can take appropriate precautions up front. If this is actually illegal, the poor engineers could be looking at conspiracy charges at least.
You know the danger and you're doing it with your eyes open. They probably didn't know, and i'd bet Uber sacrifices a few engineers just like VW did.
Assuming you're against -arbitrary- people and entities operating above the law, how do you square that with the opinion in your comment?
A broader point is that its 2017; we have a decent grasp of chaos theory. We know that self regulation in chaotic systems takes the form of hard to predict cycles of extreme variation. We know that stabilizing these systems requires external adjustments to parameters; some dampening here, a little increase there, etc. Personally, I've grown to quite enjoy being a part of an economy that has some measure of stability introduced to it.
The problem is once your professional ethics makes this ok, you start to slip further into the rabbit hole.
That's how it becomes OK for a company to facilitate engineering managers to exert pressure where women either agree to have sex with them or suffer career consequences, using corporate institutions to do so.
Hopefully most people around you don't feel that way -- your immaturity will ultimate catch up to you.
Grow up. You're defending destroying society so you can get what YOU think is right (based on how much it increases your net worth?). Did you similarly fight for the end of copyright? Did you join the pirate party? What about racial equality or gender equality ? Did you fight for those with the same fervor you propose to fight tor Ubers profits? For a company to replace a million others? that's all that's happening btw - one million small businesses are being replaced by one huge one, with a price advantage only because it erodes or destroyers worker protections.
Get a grip. Under any reasonable government Uber would be destroyed tomorrow under the same argument as pirate bay or a torrent tracker - it's conductive to illegality.
> It's easy to imagine engineers working on small parts of the system, and never really connecting the dots that the whole point is to evade law enforcement.
If you worked at Uber, would you work on a feature meant to prevent lyft employee from using the app to poach data about car locations and hailing rides to recruit new lyft drivers? That was supposedly the original reason for this.
Plenty of people do work to keep corporate secrets safe.
It's definitely highly intelligent but just as definitely something that implies a sort of double-or-nothing attitude.
IE, Anything is on the table here, it seems (an attitude that can foster creativity certainly). For example, in the end game would Uber's enemies fair badly if they caught a ride in Uber's automatic cars? Indeed, the cars might even be seeking out people for "accidents".
There's reason even the most innovative Mafiosos often don't make it to old age.
Note also:
"Perverting the course of justice is an offence committed when a person prevents justice from being served on him/herself or on another party. In England and Wales it is a common law offence, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment."
"Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsified, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under Title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both"
And we're talk systematically evading regulators world-wide. ianola but my legal-fantasy mind could compose for people facing a millennium in prison. I assume the reality would be a slap on wrist if they company's influence falls.
I'm not sure of what my opinion of the morality is, but I (as a non-lawyer) don't see this as obstruction of justice.
If I am a prostitute working the streets, and a police officer approaches me to offer me money for sex. But I notice he has police officer boots on, and suspect he is a cop. I then tell him I am not looking to offer any services for money. Is that obstruction of justice?
Perhaps the credit card lookups (or other methods) violated privacy laws, but I don't see how refusing service should count as obstruction of justice.
IANAL either, but there's a difference between not falling into a trap and deceiving the authorities. To continue the analogy, it would be more akin to telling the officer that you're willing to offer services if he meets you at a different street corner with the intention of fleeing later.
>It's easy to imagine engineers working on small parts of the system, and never really connecting the dots that the whole point is to evade law enforcement.
Actually I find this harder to believe than the engineers knowing full well what the system does and doing it anyway. Personally I would never want to work on a system without knowing the value it provides and how it fits into the larger picture.
Does it say something bad about me that I'd be the one jumping up and down to work on this?
It seems really interesting from an analytical perspective and the malicious side of it would leave me very satisfied if it worked. Morality be damned it'd be satisfying.
Given the examples of transit authority collusion and cartel competitors wielding bats, accosting drivers and making customers feel like Baghdad is safer by comparison; I was thinking genius like Ragnar Danneskjöld.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ragnar typifies law enforcement as it ought to be (in Rand's view)--engaging those who claim authority but resort to violence instead of productivity as a means of controlling wealth.
Yeah... I guess I am too picky. My uncle was even better at engineering school than me and he also ended up as a derelict / janitor so maybe it is genetic. We both seem to be content with a rather low standard of living + powerful imaginations so that we can enjoy that almost as much as we would a much higher standard of living although we wouldn't really enjoy either all that much due to depression or whatever.
I agree. The article seems to point to Greyball as proof that Uber is being shady.
Greyball is just the tool they used to keep from getting caught.
The shady part is that they operate in cities were they aren't welcome (by city officials at least, customers and drivers seemed to welcome them with open arms). If Uber operating in Portland is a night burglar, Greyball is his dark clothes and mask.
No, because it's not the tool alone it's the shady act without the tool vs. the shady act with the tool.
(And it mostly only applies to acts that, while perceived as shady, wouldn't be perceived as outright evil on their own -- no one thinks that something that is unquestionably murder on its own is more evil because you tried to conceal it [0], but if you are taking your co-workers' food out of the fridge, the idea that it wasn't intentional wrongdoing is harder to maintain when you're also caught stashing the wrappers in someone else's trash.)
[0] "No one" is a dramatic exaggeration, of course, and this assumes that the acts done in concealment aren't evil on their own, etc., etc.
First, there's a huge difference to blocking access to everyone, and perhaps just allowing access to selected few vs allowing access for everyone and blocking access to few that could penalize you for doing it.
Second, privacy has nothing to do with it, this is not an information we talking about, but a service. A bit like dealing weed/prostitution/etc and actively looking if there isn't any cop around.
I think developing infrastructure with the express goal of evading law enforcement* _is_ very shady, and then proof that they did just that is indeed proof that Uber is shady. I agree that there are other reasons beyond their dedicated law-avoidance infrastructure to consider Uber a shady company, but this leak alone is certainly enough _proof_ to label them as shady.
* even if it is simply by adapting pre existing infrastructure created for a benign purpose
Dark clothes and a mask have other purposes. And they're passive. This is more like active radar jamming: it sends deliberately false information to government officials, on purpose. Radar jamming is illegal in most states.
Correct, First siz digits are the BIN. This is how you identify a CC and how carders can guess your limits. e.g. some cards are only allowed to customers with certain credit card profiles.
Anyone who has a California State and Federal Employees Credit Union debit card is probably a good indicator.
I saw an Illinois State Police Federal Credit Union branch recently and really thought to myself... that might be giving away a little more information than I'd be comfortable with if I were a cop. I mean, anyone going to that credit union is pretty likely to be, you know, a police officer. So if a criminal was trying to track down a police officer they had beef with, where would they look? Seems pretty obvious. Seems pretty dangerous.
"blocks them from the service" doesn't quite capture it right. It doesn't tell them they are blocked. It displays fake cars circling that never show up.
Good point. They would be on firmer ground if they just said "you're banned from our service because [vague reason]", even if the real (unstated) reason was "we don't want cops on this".
But presenting deliberately fake information to hinder law enforcement sounds like it's going to be illegal somehow.
My accounts at home keep getting shadow-banned... was wondering why suddenly everyone stopped responding. Tried registering a new one but it didn't let me.
Wonder if this one will show up after I log in from home...
Well they actually weren't able to do this so accurately without disrupting service it seems.
At least I think in my case, and it's part of the reason why I don't use Uber today: I had an Uber account for a couple months prior to this incident but never used it. One night, it was about 3a.m. and I had a bit to drink.
A friend gave me a promo code to use, so I could get a discount on my ride home. I put in the code a couple times, but it kept getting rejected. I think I tried this about 3 times, and finally got a message saying my account was blocked or disabled. I gave up and called a cab. I tried to get my account re-instated the next morning, by sending an email from the address I used to create the account in the first place, but got a response from an Uber rep. asking for a copy of my ID! I didn't feel comfortable sending over my ID, especially since it was not required to create the account in the first place and informed the rep as such. The response was: "I completely understand why you are concerned about providing this information. To reactivate your account I do need to verify your identity. If you can cover all but your name, the last four digits and expiration date on your new card, as well as any sensitive information on your ID, that should minimize any security issues".
I'm not sure why it was such a big deal to have that information, but I'm guessing that they wanted to ascertain if I was a hostile or not, but I had a car and wasn't dependent on Uber for survival so... no thanks.
Interesting! But don't the CC agreements require them to only use CC numbers for the absolute minimum purposes necessary to process the transaction? (They can't store the numbers themselves except the last four digits IIRC.)
So (based on the site) they could presumably use that number as part of fraud prevention but not to "identify possible narcs" -- I imagine the CC companies will be livid at this usage.
> They can't store the numbers themselves except the last four digits IIRC
Companies can store the whole number. That's how on-file payments and automatic subscription renewal payments work.
What you are probably recalling is a PCI rule that requires keeping the credit card number protected, such as storing it encrypted and only letting things that are sending transactions to the credit card network have access to the plaintext. That rule has an exception for the last 4 digits and the first 6 digits.
For example, when your customer support people look up the history of a customer they are helping, if your account info viewing tool shows a list of prior transaction details, it could not show the credit card number used for each transaction, but it could show the first 6 and the last 4 digits.
CC processing agreements don't normally have any such restriction - the only information that absolutely can't be stored is the CVV/CVC number.
If you handle CC information, you are subject to security standards auditing (called PCI compliance - like encryption at rest, etc.), but the BIN number and last 4 digits are not considered privileged information.
I'm also not aware of any restrictions on how you want to use the BIN information - for example, merchants often use the BIN number to block prepaid card usage.
Another good use for BIN information is justifying tax decisions. A little while back the VAT rules in the EU changed for online merchants. Before, you collected VAT based on your location. After, you collected VAT based on the buyer's location.
Each country implemented a thing called VAT MOSS, and you can register with a country's tax authority to use their VAT MOSS system. You only have to do this in one country. Once a quarter you submit a VAT MOSS form that lists your sales in each EU country and how much VAT you collected. You pay that to the tax authority of the country whose VAT MOSS system you use, and they distribute the appropriate amount to each country.
They don't want it to be trivial for online buyers in high VAT counties to claim they are in some low VAT country, so merchants are not allowed to simply collect the VAT for whatever country the customer picks on the "country" drop down during check out. The merchant is required to have two pieces of non-contradictory evidence to justify their choice of which country's VAT to collect. One can be the country selected by the customer.
What we normally use where I work is the customer's selected country and the country that MaxMind's ip to country database says they are ordering from. If those two agree that's two pieces of non-contradictory evidence and we're done.
That's good enough most of the time but sometimes it fails. In that case I'll lookup the bank that issued their credit card from the BIN. Almost every time that bank turns out to be a bank from the country that the customer claimed to be from, giving two pieces of non-contradictory evidence for that country. Maybe once or twice the bank from the BIN did not match the claimed country but did match the IP country, so I went with that instead.
There have only been a handful of times when that was not good enough, and I had to dive into their past orders, support tickets, and logs of their software contacting our update servers to play detective and try to get enough evidence to justify picking a country.
These are my guesses. Not sure how educated they are.
I'd expect it to depend on the nature of the post-Brexit relationship between the UK and the EU. They will have some sort of treaty or agreement on trade, and that will probably include something about handling taxes.
In the best case they cooperate fully and keep the VAT MOSS system working like it does now. That will result in no change from a VAT reporting and collection point of view.
In the worst case they do not cooperate. The consequences of that depend on where the seller is located.
If the seller is not in the UK and not in the EU, then the result is to approximately double the quarterly paperwork. Instead of reporting to the VAT MOSS system of one country and having it distribute the tax to all the others, they will have to report to one EU country VAT MOSS to deal with all of the EU, and to the UK tax authorities to deal with VAT for UK customers. My guess is that those currently using UK VAT MOSS will most likely switch to Ireland VAT MOSS for their EU VAT, to stick with an English speaking country.
If the seller is in the UK, and not in the EU, then the "do not cooperate" case is not as big an impact. That's because the UK VAT MOSS system cannot be used by UK merchants to report UK VAT. They can only use it to report non-UK VAT. They have to file separate paperwork with the UK tax authorities for UK VAT. So worst case for these sellers is that UK VAT MOSS goes away and they have to register with some EU country's VAT MOSS to deal with EU VAT. After that, they are essentially in the same position they are now: they are still reporting to both the UK tax authority and to a VAT MOSS. All that changes is that they might have to use a different VAT MOSS.
My guess would be that it is because each country has its own rules about how VAT works for for things sold to buyers in their country. Each country would like to fully apply its rules to all purchases by its residents, but they recognize that it would be unwieldy and expensive for sellers to have to deal with minutia of the VAT rules of a couple dozen different countries.
VAT MOSS is a compromise that simplifies the rules, so that a seller selling into several foreign EU countries only has to deal with one unified set of rules through the VAT system. Instead of having to know details of the tax law of several countries, the seller only need to know the VAT rate for each. That's much easier to deal with.
I'd guess that they don't apply VAT MOSS to sales by domestic sellers to domestic buyers because they consider their own tax rules superior to the rules under VAT MOSS.
>> They can't store the numbers themselves except the last four digits IIRC.)
That's not actually true. Vendors usually have to store the entire number (but not the CVV/CVN).
Most of them show you the last 4 numbers to prevent shoulder surfing and accidentally disclosing the number to someone who's taken over your accounts.
They also record the last 4 digits. I guess they could use some sort of algorithm to determine the probability it is an official, especially if they combine it with other data.
You can see the "greyball" tag fields in Exhibit A in this lawsuit filing. It looks like they did some rudimentary device and payment method correlation as well as whitelisting at the database level:
The first part of a credit card number is called the BIN, which stands for Bank Identification Number. With that, you can tell which bank issued the card (aka the issuer).
Additional to what you don't need further comments about: you can ask for billing address at payment time and then validate it with a fraud checking company like ReD to prevent them just making it up, so that a card registered to an organization will have to out itself. Or if it's registered to a "front" that's designed to look residential, flag that address as dirty after having been caught in a sting and then propagate the dirty flag to other cards that also point there.
I'd like to see them subpoenaed to explain what they were doing. They were deliberately violating the law, and trying to avoid detection just makes things much, much worse.
>At least 50 to 60 people inside Uber knew about Greyball, and some had qualms about whether it was ethical or legal. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team, headed by Salle Yoo, the general counsel.
I (though not a lawyer) assume their reasoning was: "It's legal to use public sources to identify possible law enforcement agents, it's legal to deny services to them. Seems legit."
Well, that's a bold legal strategy if true -- I wonder why Microsoft simply didn't put it in the Windows license agreement that government users couldn't sue them for antitrust violations!
(Uber's real argument seems to be "it violates our terms of service for a government official to try to figure out if we're following the law")
a) exempting themselves from specific laws by EULA generally doesn't work,
b) you can block specific people from a service and even police have to leave when told (barring further e.g. probable cause), but police are under no obligation to honor a general "no police" policy.
It's legal, though, to kick someone off a service because you think they're a cop. (e.g. biker bars that kick people out on that basis)
It doesn't seem that different from Cloudflare et al throwing up CAPTCHAs and blocks when I browse through Tor. Uber was trying to prevent abuse. Until someone identifies themselves as a city official or Uber is put on notice that it is under investigation, I think they are well within their rights to do this.
I don't get the analogy... Cloudflare is trying to protect websites from hacking attempts and similar, most of which is illegal. Their treatment of Tor also wasn't a deliberate decision but the result of empirical data they collected.
A government official (or anyone, actually) trying to check for compliance with the law isn't doing anything illegal.
Uber may be within their rights because companies usually have wide latitude to refuse doing business with someone, although that will ultimately depend on what kind of violations they were trying to hide, how invasive their stalking of customers was etc.
Morally, though, this is just more of the shady shit that's been coming out day after day. How any investor would be willing to trust them with their money is beyond me. Considering how intransparent their financials are, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends in an Enron-style meltdown.
> Cloudflare is trying to protect websites from hacking attempts and similar, most of which is illegal
I don't think we can say "most" Tor traffic "is illegal" [1]. At the very least, we agree that some of it is legal. That means Cloudflare, a private company, is treating users differently based on its interests and its interpretation of the law.
> A government official (or anyone, actually) trying to check for compliance with the law isn't doing anything illegal
They probably aren't. Neither is Uber. They're just treating their users differently based on their interests and interpretation of the law.
Law enforcement has tough-as-nails methods at its disposal. It could subpoena, audit, intercept, sue, et cetera. The downside is those methods come with oversight and transparency requirements.
Night and day. Volkswagen was falsifying data provided to the government at an identified testing facility. Uber is fuzzing data and refusing to provide services to certain customers who have not identified themselves as police, though may be*.
A city official cannot demand entry to private property without a warrant. Furthermore, one can eject someone from your place of business--again, provided they don't have a warrant. To get a warrant, investigators need probable cause. There are good reasons we limit the power of those seeking probable cause.
You're confusing the crime with the cover-up. Nobody knows what Uber was trying to hide. The point was simply that such attempts to hide corporate wrongdoing are aggravating factors or can even have legal consequences on their own.
They also presumably did this not just in the US. Other countries have different interpretations of the extend of sovereignty over property, and maybe if an Uber is considered "private". I know, for example, that the police in Germany can demand entry to night clubs during public events without cause or warrant.
> such attempts to hide corporate wrongdoing are aggravating factors
Usually. But I don't believe that is the case here. Uber was public about the fact that they were breaking Portland's taxi rules--they blogged to that extent. Prosecutors had enough evidence to get a subpoena and demand what they wanted. But the cops didn't do that. They chose to collect $5,000 fines from the drivers. That's their prerogative, but that upside comes with a cost.
> Other countries have different interpretations
That might be the case. I am only commenting with reference to American laws and customs.
There's a legal requirement to comply to emissions laws.
Is there a legal requirement to make it easy for cops to use your service? Are they a protected class?
If I didn't want to sell donuts to the cops, I sure wouldn't tell them it's because they are cops. I would just be mysteriously out of donuts every time they come in.
I think you misinterpreted what matt4077 said. Most "hacking attempts and similar" are illegal. Tor is often (nobody said always) used in attacks, so the IPs of most exit nodes show up during attacks, which requires future users coming from those same exit nodes to solve the captcha. Cloudflare makes these decisions based on data, not on interpreting the law.
> Cloudflare makes these decisions based on data, not on interpreting the law
As they are entitled to do. Uber saw damaging activity coming from burner phones. They blocked and/or modified the related services.
If the investigators had identified themselves to Uber and then Uber did this, that might be different (though law enforcement is not, for good reasons, a protected class). The investigators chose a quieter path and Uber reacted accordingly.
Sure, but is not entrapment. Firstly, Uber was definitely offering the service, so it's not like they tricked them into committing a crime. And the government hailing an Uber ride doesn't meet the objective test that forces a normal, law-abiding citizen to commit a crime.
Perhaps this is the reason they want to collect your location when you're not using the app. Need to be sure that city employees are going to city hall, after all.
Drivers can and should prefer passengers with a higher probability of being "good" customers.
Greyball seems to be a clever tool which attempts to predict the good-ness of potential passengers.
The unethical piece comes in to play with the heuristics injected in to greyball. (kinda makes you wonder if "grey" moniker refers to the ambiguity which comes with the territory of rating people)
>>Other techniques included looking at the user’s credit card information and whether that card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union.
>I couldn't find a good source, but it doesn't seem like that's something a CC merchant would have access to. Do they really get to see that?
First 6 digits of any CC# is the Issuer/Bank Identification Number (BIN/IIN), and anyone can get access to that information.
In a world where privacy has been traded away for convenience, it's poetic justice where a startup uses data mining techniques to subvert the government. This is the same government that would have no issues to use the same techniques to spy on its own people for its own motives.
I'm neither on Uber nor the government's side in this case, just simply making an observation. The lack of data privacy seems to be a double-edged sword for users and government/law enforcement alike.
My perspective is the opposite. In a world where large multinationals have the power to evade the law in a deliberate and systematic way like this, it's easy for governments to claim they need the same kind of power. Things like this are exactly what bureaucrats point to when they make their arguments for a surveillance state.
I don't like the US government much, but I like it a lot better than the average multinational. When it comes down to it, we don't have more than our choice of devils.
I don't like the US government much, but I like it a lot better than the average multinational. When it comes down to it, we don't have more than our choice of devils.
If I don't like Uber, I can... stop using Uber. What can I do if I don't like the service a state provides - can I opt out and stop paying? No, my only option is to flee - which the state will often try and prevent you doing anyway.
The state is a huge corporation, that will use force to change you for its services, whether they are good or not, or whether you use them or not. Your only option to avoid this involuntary charge s to flee - and the state reserves the right to employ violence to stop you doing even that.
It seems pretty clear to me which is more immoral.
You can vote, run for office, petition, volunteer, protest,etc to the local, state, and federal government to have policies that reflect your values. The only thing you can do with Uber is use it or not. Maybe you could write Uber a letter.
You have a say in government - that is its stated goal and purpose. Of the people for the people.
The 'say' you have in government is much smaller than the 'say' you have in using Uber. I can choose not to use Uber any time I please. I can not choose not to be pulled over for speeding, or opt out of murder laws temporarily.
The fact that you don't have a say in Uber's corporate decisions is irrelevant, because you can simply stop using it. You don't need a say. The fact that you can't opt out of government is why you're given a say, and what makes it infinitely more dangerous.
You can choose not to use Uber and effectively ignore them but that does not stop them from having an influence on you, your community, and your country.
It is true that being part of a government system is not a choice but without that community you would be dead or at least not an educated human with internet access.
You cannot reap the rewards of government, community, and progress and then turn around and want to abolish the systems that made those things possible just because you cannot speed and murder people.
> You cannot reap the rewards of government, community, and progress and then turn around and want to abolish the systems that made those things possible just because you cannot speed and murder people.
What systems are those, exactly? Protectionist laws for taxi drivers?
Sure, if we stick with Uber and transportation topic. Labor laws, minimum wage, vehicle inspections, registration. systems and rules that were put in place as a response to what citizens felt were "wrongs" that needed to be addressed.
When a organization ignores those laws then they are going against the will of the people.
What is the will of the people? How is it expressed? Through representative elections? What about Arrow's impossibility theorem?
The 'will of the people' on the issue of Uber is abundantly clear. Everyone wants it, except taxi drivers and the companies and structures that benefit from them. This gets blocked sometimes due to the fact that taxi drivers represent a concentrated interest against a diffuse benefit. We all benefit a little from Uber, but taxi drivers benefit a lot from killing Uber. So they raise their voices against it, and nobody speaks up for the rest of us. It is the classic problem of representative democracy. The representatives are beholden to the concentrated interests of the few against the collective interests of the many.
I wonder how many Uber drivers and riders vote? ~160k drivers in USA (according to their twitter posts). How many users?
Where is the pro Uber Lobby? Don't have one? Start one! You are clearly in favor of this type of program. If you truly believe that it is the right thing then be part of the solution that makes it happen.
They raised their voices against it.. You have to speak up for "the rest of us". Be the change that we need in the world.
Like I said, concentrated interests, diffuse benefits. The benefits are too small to me to be worth my time to go out and organize for it. That is why this problem exists. It is the reason why hairdressers require licenses, it is the reason why teachers can't be fired, and it is the reason why we don't have a carbon tax.
If you're arguing that all those things are good and consistent with the will of the people, then sure. I suppose that's a consistent position, even if absurd in its consequences. But I don't think for a second that you believe all three of those things are good simultaneously.
When given a choice, drivers stampeded from yellow cabs to Uber. Riders stampeded from yellow cabs to Uber. It's clear which one most parties prefer. And that suggests that all those government "services" around the provision of taxi service are valued at or below 0 by most people.
You are speaking in broad terms and are making an assessment based on them. "drivers stampeded" "riders stampeded" "most parties" and you round all that off by saying that the value of the services offered were below 0.
I cannot speak to the motivation of those that chose Uber as a customer or employer. Perhaps customers chose them because of the cost and convenient app. Perhaps employees chose them because of the low barrier to entry and flexible hours.
Just because something different came along and grabbed everyone's attention does not mean that the gov services are valued at zero. There was a time when those yellow cabs had little to no rules or oversight. And that changed for a good reason - or at least a reason that people thought were good at a time.
The rules for Uber are going to change too - there will be laws and rules designed to correct wrongs (either real or perceived).
If the rules need to be different then people need to stand up and try to make the rules what they think they should be. My argument is that Uber should not decide on its own not to respect the will of the people.
It's not an argument. Getting people to "stampede" to you is trivial - just drop the prices well below market average, and the herd will quickly follow, regardless of whether or not your service is actually better. Doing that is difficult (that's the point of competition), but becomes much easier if you can blatantly break the law and get away with it.
Come on, there's no way you can say taxis are superior to a frickin button that you press to instantly get a car. Even if the prices were the same, I'm pretty sure most people would still choose Uber.
Actually I stick with taxis. It's more expensive but I don't have to hand over all my contacts and my location at all times from my cell phone for frankly no damn good business purpose except for one's the company won't reveal to me and will vaguely reference in its ToS. Deceivers. Sadly Lyft app permissions don't seem to be much better.
Reduction of congestion, especially in airports. It'd probably be a nightmare if artificial scarcity wasn't enforced at a popular spot for hired rides.
> The 'say' you have in government is much smaller than the 'say' you have in using Uber. I can choose not to use Uber any time I please. I can not choose not to be pulled over for speeding, or opt out of murder laws temporarily.
Sure you can. Just leave their jurisdiction. I've heard Somalia is nice.
Please enlighten me on the quality of life in Somalia while it had a central government, vs before it had one. Statistics are slow and unreliable coming out of there, so feel free to limit you answer to the Barre Administration, as well as those areas that during the Civil war were under control of the Islamic Courts Union and the Transitional Goverments.
I look forward to being amazed by the breadth of your knowledge about the history and conditions of Somalia and how it pertains to libertarianism.
Guess why you have no choice in ISP or power company? Because the government deliberately regulates those markets to reduce competition, often to the monopoly level. But they don't give you any compensation for that, such as a say in how the companies are run.
This is the root cause of many problems in other markets too. High pharmaceutical prices? The government granted monopolies (patents) to those companies. Forced to use Windows? Microsoft has a government-granted monopoly (copyright) on Windows. Strange that limiting or revoking these state-granted monopoly rights is never considered as an option for remedying these problems.
More relevant to this article, the government has historically put drastic limits on the number of taxis that can operate in a city, to the point where the permits required to operate one were once worth over a million dollars apiece. The need to disrupt that system is why Uber developed a culture of law-breaking to begin with.
That's quite different. ISPs are regulated in a special way because they are monopolies. Monopolies occupy a middle ground between government and company. A business monopoly is like a mild/weak form of government.
It is frustrating, I agree. But those days can be had again if we get people to pay attention, focus on facts, and become engaged in the process.
The reason gerrymandering, (I will not include voter fraud), access restrictions, etc etc is still a problem inspite of being identified as a problem is the collective will of the people to demand that these wrongs be correct.
Imagine what the 2016 campaign and election would look like if everyone cared enough to learn and vote. Imagine what your town or state would look like if we could get 80% voting rates... [eyes twinkle as I stare off into the distance thinking of what could be]
Western government is a democracy in name only. The US was designed to be so large that no individual can expect to cause a change in its function, even if they organize large protests, or send torrents of mail. You could run for office, but you wouldn't get in, especially not off a platform of "forget national security, let's protect privacy!". Even if you did get in, you still need to organize hundreds of others who also got in to agree with and work towards your goal. Even if the legislative branch implemented your plan, you then need to wait as the executive branch caught up. Note that the NSA/FBI doesn't always work within the law - they are perfectly willing to break a few laws to make their jobs easier. You would have to infiltrate these organization, and instill a new culture that followed your value system. This would entail firing hosts of the leadership, and probably a large quantity of their subordinates, who would still be used to the old mode. This process would, if you took the time to do it correctly, take many more years than you would have to do it.
The system is not only not designed to allow change easily, it is explicitly designed to make it as difficult as possible. The idea is that change shouldn't happen just because someone somewhere said they wanted something, and not enough people disagreed to stop it. Change should only happen when the vast majority of people have thought about it and agreed with it. This system is designed to prevent genocide or other forms of purposeful mass inequality. It is, however, extremely poor at giving an individual rights and freedoms. The assumption is that the individual should already have rights and freedoms, and all the government need do is not remove them. Barring some injunction with the state, an individual can then do whatever they choose.
Capitalism can, when implemented properly (inb4 no true scotsman), act as a true democracy. It can allow each individual person the choice to do what that person chooses, independent of other peoples disagreement - even if the vast majority thinks the decision idiotic. Under our governments form of "democracy", what should an individual do if the majority of people don't want privacy, if those people are against privacy? There is nothing they can do! Whereas, even if everyone else in the world was a hardline supporter of a company like Uber, any individual could make the choice not to use them.
I think I understand your point. Trying to compare a persons influence in government, a system designed to encourage citizen participation, to that of a corporation, a system designed to make as much money as possible and answer to share holders, is not great.
"In order to form a more perfect union" VS "the pursuit of shareholder wealth."
Even if the system is not working exactly the way we want - it never will - we are still endowed with the rights to participate. The same cannot be said for corporations.
If 49% of people stop using Uber, Uber loses almost half its revenue and will probably be forced to change its practices or go out of business. What happens if 49% of people don't vote for a US presidential candidate?
I would've thought that the difference between "vote" and "vote as a shareholder" would have been obvious enough, but just to make it clear: I don't consider it a good thing if the only people with a say in things are the ones who have money. This is the difference between a democracy and a corporation.
I find it really unsettling how many people on HN seem to need this distinction explained.
I doubt Uber is going to hire you if your goal is to change its business policies. Voting as a shareholder is also not the same as voting as a citizen. Everyone has the right to vote as a citizen, only the right h shareholders in Uber have the right to vote as a shareholder.
Additionally, the problems like gerrymandering still appear in different forms in corporate structures. Often times founders have majority control of the company in the form of different shares. While this is good for the founders, this is bad for anyone else who doesn't like the direction of the company.
Why would you need write Uber a letter? Don't like it, don't use it.
You don't have a say in government like you do with a private company. If I don't like the government, I have to hope that millions of other people agree with me. If I don't like a company, I alone can choose not to associate with it. My relationship with or without Uber is entirely up to me. I'm forced to endure the government whether I like it or not -- I could petition and protest until I'm blue and it won't make a difference to my life unless millions agree. With Uber, etc. I can simply stop buying their product and poof! They're out of my life.
Also, corporations - as a rule - don't have huge armies made up of many people with guns, tanks, jet fighters, nuclear bombs, etc., which they can use to impose their will on you.
It's a lot easier to divest yourself of a bad relationship with a company, than a nation-state.
(And no, "move" isn't a reasonable response to this, so don't waste your digital breath with any Somalia references).
Sorry, services like Uber have externalities and do not only impact their consumers.
Your only option to avoid this involuntary charge s to flee
Bollocks. People organize for and achieve their political goals by modifying government on a regular basis. Governmental institutions suffer from numerous flaws, but your argument is that government is fundamentally totalitarian which is nonsense.
No. Notice the word "voluntary". From libertarian point of view, Socialism is ok if you voluntary opt-in. Voluntary/Consent is central point in libertarianism.
Yes both are problems but libertarianism claims to solve only one of those. For the other one, if you are unable, follow/place-your-trust-on someone else. There is no need to solve one problem by creating bigger problem.
Consent is not the same as informed consent. Libertarian utopia is ripe for getting people tricked and robbed while technically fulfilling contracts to the letter.
Consider what would happen in, say, medicine without the informed part.
And saying you can switch... Typically not due to availability, lack of information and monopolies.
The other question is who enforces these contracts and who prevents these people from abusing their means.
Keep in mind, this is only possible as long as there's an actual alternative to Uber. Once they, or any other multinational for that matter, manage to establish a monopoly you will be flat out of other options. Even worse: Once they are well aware of their monopoly they will abuse it in every imaginable way. Don't be evil.. at least until you are big enough.
>It seems pretty clear to me which is more immoral.
No, it's not. If you dislike "government" so much you are always free to move to a place where there's less or even none of it. Case in point: Somalia has barely any government to speak of, pretty much no regulations and very high rates of firearms ownership, it's basically "libertarian utopia". Strangely enough, barely any libertarians would want to live there?
No, it's not. If you dislike "government" so much you are always free to move to a place where there's less or even none of it. Case in point: Somalia has barely any government to speak of, pretty much no regulations and very high rates of firearms ownership, it's basically "libertarian utopia". Strangely enough, barely any libertarians would want to live there?
Oh, a Somalia expert. I was wondering when one of these people would pop up in this discussion. I'm sure I can learn a lot from you actually - I don't know much about the place at all.
Can I ask you why you think Somalia doesn't have any government to speak of? Somalia has had a central government since 2007 - but I'm sure you already knew that.
I'm also curious about your opinion of the Barre Administration and the (presumably) high standard of living the government provided during that time.
I never claimed to be an "expert" on Somalia, I merely pointed out that it's among those countries that have what supposedly makes a good "libertarian utopia": Barely any regulations, due to the government being ineffective at actually enforcing them, and high rates of firearms ownership.
>Somalia has had a central government since 2007 - but I'm sure you already knew that.
They have some government going that is barely able to project itself across the country.
>I'm also curious about your opinion of the Barre Administration and the (presumably) high standard of living the government provided during that time.
That's a non-sequitur, just because some governments failed/had been ineffective at what they're supposed to do, does not mean that all of them are failing/are ineffective at what they are trying to do.
I'm calling you out for your incredibly cheap tactic of bringing up Somalia. I'd bet money on the fact that you know nothing about it and would struggle to locate it on an un-labelled map of Africa. If you aren't able to tell me anything interesting on the quality of life when the country had a central government vs when it didn't, you should probably keep your mouth shut on the subject.
I might as well ask someone advocating for social democracy to move to North Korea, because "it's among those countries that have what supposedly makes a good 'socialist utopia'". I would rightly be panned for this. Doubly so if I had not the faintest idea of North Koreas history or situation.
Even ignoring the fact that Uber might become a monopoly, this ignores extrenalities caused by corporations.
You don't have to purchase chemicals from a chemical factory to be impacted by them dumping toxic chemicals into the water supply because it is cheaper.
Can you describe the steps that would lead to Uber becoming a monopoly? I can't imagine that happening without government help, can you? And if it requires that kind of help, is the problem with Uber or government?
If they continue to evade law enforcement and ignore the laws that taxi companies follow they will have an unfair advantage over taxi companies. Taxi companies have and will continue to go out of business. If you follow this reasoning to its logical extreme you have an Uber monopoly.
That might be bad for taxi companies, but what happens to Lyft in that scenario? Won't other ride sharing companies start up?
Uber only becomes a monopoly if they can keep all competition out, not just taxi companies. Taxi companies succeeded in doing that for decades by colluding with politicians to limit competition. Uber would have to adopt a similar strategy to get anything close to a monopoly.
If Uber ever reaches a saturation so high that much of congestion is made up of ubers, they will literally be blocking access to potential customers. An uber will always be near, but an "unter" won't make it to pickup in time, because of all the congesting ubers.
Driving as a service always operates on public infrastructure and medallion systems are there to protect those commons from excessive use. If uber does not like the rules of road use, they are free to purchase their own right of ways. It's America, nobody will stop them if they show up with enough cash. Also, no more speeding tickets for uber drivers!
I don't see anybody saying that corporations shouldn't be held liable for doing things which cause specific, identifiable harm. Like, for example, dumping toxic chemicals in the water.
But who holds the State accountable when they do the same thing?
Did you just make the argument that the government enforcing the laws is immoral?
When most of the laws are immoral, then I would say that it is. And an immoral law is - IMO - any time the State is doing anything other than acting, as Bastiat[1] put it, "as the collective extension to our individual right to self defense".
Saudi Arabia is a monarchy and theocratic dictatorship. The law of this country is not made by the people for the people unlike any decent democracy. Picking up the worst example on the planet to try to make your argument look good discredits you.
Ok, so how about slavery. Or eugenics laws in the 1930s. Or Jim Crow. Or anti-sodomy laws in the US. Or women not being allowed to vote. Or like, any, of the literally thousands of horribly immoral laws that have been on the books in literally every country on the planet.
Like other drugs many people experiment with in high school, a little won't hurt you but prolonged exposure to Rand can lead to cognitive deficits and antisocial behavior.
I experimented with socialism in High School. I was actually reading authors much more banal than Ayn Rand could ever hope to be - like Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. Really glad I grew out of that stage.
Gave up half way through Atlas shrugged I'm afraid. I did enjoy how accurately it depicted socialists and social democrats though - as I was reading it I could help but laugh as I've come across people talking like that so often.
OP was arguing that because they don't like the law it's immoral to enforce. Whether or not OP likes the law really has nothing to do with whether the law is immoral.
Not sure I read it that way, but okay. But that reading requires you to ask "why", and sometimes it feels very much like the government lost the consent of the governed a looooong time ago..
If the government had lost the consent of the governed it wouldn't have been elected / it won't be elected again. That's basically what all this is about. Sure, democracy, elections, all this things may not be the best system, but it is very effective at damage control. You don't govern well? You're out after four or five years. All other system known have far worse damage control.
Alternative view: The government has lost the consent of the governed, but people are so engrossed in other stuff that they don't do anything about it due to how painful the upheaval would be.
In other words, it's tolerated rather than accepted.
Every revolution in history is proof that this doesn't really work. If the government really looses the approval of the governed and not just of a small minority revolution will follow.
But now is the first time in history with simultaneously our standard of living, access to information, and most relevantly access to distraction.
I'd wager (but don't have the chops to prove) that if you could plot displeasure with government on a graph, and and draw a line where overthrow historically results, the height of that line would roughly correlate with the increase in leisure time, access to entertainment, and decrease in GDP per worker.
You can't really stop unlicensed autonomous vehicles from running red lights in your home town though. Just because you don't pay them, doesn't mean they don't affect you.
I'm not going to change your mind on statism, and don't really want to, but a key component of statism is the massive power advantage they have over you. A multinational does not have a state level power advantage, but they're still much more powerful than you. If they choose to act in an immoral way, there's not much you can do about it.
You can, but if that decision is not sufficiently common in your area, and you don't have sufficient resources to relocate before the problem becomes acute, you may find your practical choices constrained in such a way that you are left with no realistic choice for necessary functions but to use Uber.
> What can I do if I don't like the service a state provides - can I opt out and stop paying?
You can (and history has lots of examples of people doing just that), but if that decision is not sufficiently popular in your area... well, the same as for Uber, above. The particular manner in which the lack of options, may, depending on the particular state and the particular service involved, be more dramatic than the case with most corporate goods or services. OTOH, depending on the particular state and service, you may have a lot more direct input into the decision making behind providing the service and how the state reacts to opting out, in the first place.
Uber isn't a monopoly. For all the scummy things that Uber has done, they have avoided the most scummy thing they could do to become a monopoly: driver lock-in, making their drivers commit to only drive for them and not for Lyft.
Susan Fowler's post has me pretty fed up with Uber, but for some reason greyballing doesn't bother me at all.
> they have avoided the most scummy thing they could do to become a monopoly: driver lock-in, making their drivers commit to only drive for them and not for Lyft.
Arguably the only reason why is because it would mean they'd have to classify the drivers as employees rather than contractors.
Look up "uber driver incentives". They are clearly working on it, just without going all "second commandment" to protect their "not an employer" status.
This is a super naive view of how markets work (and I'm very surprised to see this out of someone who calls the state a "corporation").
I don't really mind Uber as a service; they get me where I need to go. I hate Uber as a market participant. They change the economics of taxis, of existing black car services, of public transit, etc., i.e., of every single thing I'm using because I'm not using Uber.
I haven't used Uber in years, but I want it out of the markets that I try to buy transit service in, because it affects those markets.
Because that's the primary way that governments aren't just corporations: if the rulers (the majority, in a democracy) believe that Uber needs to go out, or at least needs to stop participating in the market in certain ways, the government can enforce that via its monopoly on violence.
This has historically worked pretty well for human society; for instance, if someone gets the clever idea to participate in a market by impersonating an existing, trusted market participant, or offering counterfeit goods, or using slave labor to plant cotton, or whatever other bad idea that is short-term profitable, the government can step in and say that this isn't long-term good for society.
Whether Portland is correct to stop Uber is a legitimate matter of debate, but that Portland legitimately has the ability to choose to stop Uber is, I'd hope, uncontroversial.
Not "a majority," "the government". It happens to be the case that the government in the US is (in theory, and usually in practice) majority rule, but in a monarchy, the ruler has the unilateral right to decide who gets to participate in the market or not.
If you don't think this is legitimate, two questions:
1. Is it legitimate for the government to restrict foreign participation in markets, or to place rules like tariffs on their participation?
2. Was it inappropriate for the greater military force in the US in the 1860s to decide that Southern plantation owners could not participate in the cotton market if they continued to use slave labor?
For what it's worth, the US government requires income tax to be paid on foreign earnings, even while living and working overseas. To avoid that, you'd have to also renounce citizenships, which is expensive and at the government's discretion.
To sum up, there was a $450 renunciation fee as well as a $450 fee for relinquishment, but both were jacked up from $450 to $2,350. This does not include exit taxes and the like, but while $4700 might seem trivial to the well-heeled, it's a far cry from free (and unilateral).
You're right, I was wrong. I forgot to check because the fees are set by federal rule but then billed in local currencies at different consular offices around the world, and the fee schedule is (oddly) not centralized at state.gov.
No problem. I was fully prepared for the possibility that something had changed with the administration. I tend to follow politics pretty closely, but not all factually true statements maintain their truthiness over time.
> [the US] requires income tax to be paid on foreign earnings
Which is a common reason to wish to renounce US citizenship. But there is a trap which prevents renunciation because you don't like to be unfairly taxed:
"If the Department of Homeland Security determines that the renunciation is motivated by tax avoidance purposes, the individual will be found inadmissible to the United States under Section 212(a)(10)(E) of the Immigration and Nationality Act"
That doesn't prevent renunciation to avoid taxes, it just prevents you from coming back.and enjoying the benefits Americans taxes pay for after you decide you don't want to be an American because that means paying taxes.
What wear and tear of the road am I contributing to?
Or to the aging of the infrastructure?
When I go on holiday, am I obligated to leave my water turned on? My power? My cable service? Or can I turn it off, and come back?
Fun fact, for many immigration classes, a US citizen is required to sign a security document saying that even though you are paying SS and other taxes, that the government, for ten years, may come after them for every dollar of benefits you may claim.
So an eighteen year old who has yet to pay taxes can claim these benefits, but a thirty year old immigrant has to pay taxes without access to services for ten years (well, with access but with the government reserving a right of recovery for any use).
> If I don't like Uber, I can... stop using Uber. What can I do if I don't like the service a state provides - can I opt out and stop paying? No, my only option is to flee - which the state will often try and prevent you doing anyway.
Flee? So states are a prison? Last time I checked it was pretty easy to leave a state which equals 'stop using Uber'. Fleeing implies you aren't allowed to go, that's wrong. The only problem is no other state (or country or whatever) is forced to accept you as a new customer.
And who would want a customer that doesn't want to pay for the products ..
Actually even if you "flee," the US has FATCA and taxation on world wide income. If you want to renounce, there's a $2300 fee, plus you have to show 5 years of tax compliance. If you have enough money, there's even an exit tax.
> If I don't like Uber, I can... stop using Uber. What can I do if I don't like the service a state provides - can I opt out and stop paying? No, my only option is to flee - which the state will often try and prevent you doing anyway.
You can't evade a service like Uber either which does have an impact on the commons just like a Government does. You can avoid giving Uber your money but that isn't quite the same thing.
The state is an entity designed to benefit all at the cost of the few, but thanks to the corruption of uneven power, the state ends up benefitting those in power at the cost of those not in power.
I would argue that when you give a subset of a population an institutionalized monopoly on the user of force, you're always going to get bad government eventually. That's why the State should never have the power to do anything that an individual could not justly do.
>I would argue that when you give a subset of a population an institutionalized monopoly on the user of force, you're always going to get bad government eventually.
Um. A state is a place that happens to constitute the jurisdiction of its government. A corporation, huge or not, is a legal entity chartered (in the U.S.) by the government of a state (q.v. supra).
I have far, far, far, far, far more avenues to influence the US government than I have to influence a large company which is acting in a harmful manner. If a company is spewing pollution into the air, my not using them isn't going to do jack shit to stop them from polluting the air.
In a world where multinationals have the power to evade the law in a deliberate and systematic way, AND the government uses the same techniques to spy on its own people for its own motives, it's easy for individuals to claim that neither group of entities need this kind of coercive power over others.
I agree with your statements at large, but considering Uber was not aware of any active investigations, they're under no obligation to assist police in enacting a sting.
I'm not suggesting that it is, as there are semantically many problems with it, but an argument could be made that this is more of an extension of one's fifth amendment rights to remain silent than it is evading the law. Starting a company to drive people around is (depending on one's interpretation) either presumptively legal or presumptively illegal. Let's assume that many people view it as the former. Is it silly to assume that Uber might have anticipated the Portland government's assumption that it was the latter?
What if it were considered legal in every municipality worldwide except for Portland? That doesn't make Portland wrong or right, but at the same time, it doesn't make Uber wrong for the assumption that someone might find it to be presumptively unlawful.
I think that there are plenty of valid reasons to hate Uber, but anticipating a law enforcement response to something Uber deemed presumptively lawful seems like a pretty rational set of actions.
The difference between the government and the corporation is the government can confiscate your property, take your liberty, and end your life. A corporation can do none of those things.
A bad government is far, far, far more dangerous than a bad corporation.
The law did grant them powers to run pieces of this scheme that a judge decided they took way too far. And they got to run it for years before a judge stopped it.
And AFAIK no one running Macy's went to jail, so the penalty isn't the same as I'd get if I, say, imprisoned my neighbors and stole their credit cards to get payment for packages I think they stole from the porch.
They exceeded what they could legally do, and were stopped.
Contrast that with, say, civil forfeiture. Cops can stop you for little reason, and if they find cash in your car, they can take it. It's all perfectly legal. This is not theoretical, it happens all the time and enormous amounts of money are installed.
First: if you're involved in an online discussion, and your interest is in arriving at a greater truth rather than promoting some previously established premise, you might care to consider the principle of charity, that is: reading your interlocutor's comments in the most charitable way possible. http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html
In part:
The principle of charity is a methodological principle—ideas can be critiqued after an adequate understanding is achieved. The original presumption of setting aside our own beliefs and assuming the new ideas are true is only a provisional presumption.
Secondly, you're committing whataboutism, or more formerly, tu quoque. The behaviour of governments, of themselves, has little bearing on the behaviour of corporations.
More significantly, power and aggression are not limited to any one form, they exist independently, and are innate in any number of institutions (or no institutions at all).
You may be familiar with the concept, and perhaps hold it against governments, that they claim a monopoly on the use of force. If you'll trace the origins of that comment, it comes from Max Weber, who ascribes to government a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That is: it is only governments who can claim that legitimacy, and the concept doesn't mean an indiscriminate use of force.
If you don't grant the monopoly on legitimacy to governments, then you are allowing legitimacy to other institutions, possibly any institutions. Force and abuse of power are innate. They don't exist only in government, they exist independent of government.
What government is, is a structure, a mechanism, for channelling and controlling political power, and attempting to use it, accountably to some vault of power itself (the people in a democratic or republican government, other sources in others), for the improvement of society as a whole.
As with all machines, they sometimes malfuntion. As with many machines, they have a tendency to not function properly. The incidental failures are not of themselves an indictment of the concept as a whole.
And, if you remove government, or worse, align it, without accountability to the people as a whole, in the interests of business or pecuniary interests alone, you end up with the worst of abuses. You may or may not be familar with some of these:
The settlement of the Americas, through what might be considered a public-private partnership on the part of several nations (Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Russia, largely), resulted in the genocide of a native population once numbering perhaps 40 - 50 millions. What this lacks in the intensity of nuclear annihilation, it greatly exceeds in magnitude.
The public-private partnership of Belgium in the Congo saw untold atrocities, including the unhanding of hundreds of thousands or millions of Congo natives. See Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.
Or of England, the East India Company, its private government and army within India, and the Opium Wars against China -- chemical, biolical, and conventional war against two entire cultures.
Labour unionisation, a concept and principle defended by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and other classical economists, say violent opposition by factory and mine owners particularly in the UK and United States. U.S. Steel, the West Virginia Mountain Wars, the Wobblies, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and more.
Industrial accidents have killed or destroyed many tens or hundreds of thousands: the Halifax, Galveston, Port Chicago, and West, Texas, explosions -- some entirely private, some public-private partnerships. Mining accidents claimed an average of greater than 2,000 lives/year for much of the first half of the 20th century, statistics tabulated by the US Department of Labour, and available online. That's on the order of 100,000 souls over the century, virtually all of their deaths preventable. The Union Carbide Bhopol disaster. Dam failures, including Johnstown, in the United States (this was the instigation of the Red Cross as a disaster releif organisation, and of significant concepts expanding liability law). For public-private parternships, the Vajont dam disaster, claiming 2500 lives. And showing that poor management, planning, engineering, and response aren't solely the remit of nominally capitalist societies, the Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975, in China, in which some 170,000 souls perished, on par with your nuclear bombing example, though it was but 25 thousands who died immediately from drowning, the others were lost due to starvation and disease in the following weeks -- as I said, exceedingly poor planning and response.
For raw corporate aggression, I'd suggest the Johnson County War:
On April 5, 1892, 52 armed men rode a private, secret train north from Cheyenne. Just outside Casper, Wyo., they switched to horseback and continued north toward Buffalo, Wyo., the Johnson County seat. Their mission was to shoot or hang 70 men named on a list carried by Frank Canton, one of the leaders of this invading force.
There is the insidious poisoning of millions through lead, asbestos, tobacco, mercury, and dioxins, both generally and across specific sites, all whilst paid corporate shills actively and deliberately sowed confusion on the matter, knowing full well that their position was false. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have covered much of this history excellently in Merchants of Doubt.
And there's the little matter of carbon dioxide emissions and their effects on global tempeatures and ocean chemistry, known since the 1880s, and recognised as a major threat since the 1950s, but still actively denied by numerous interests more concerned over their trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth and power than over the fate of the planet they live on and the souls they share it with.
What Rothbard's "non-aggression principle" (a very late add to the Libertarian theology) does is to preemptively disarm those who would seek to employ wealth and power without limitation. It is an exceedingly bad principle for the citizenry.
The next step is the tech becomes available to everyone; unfortunately that won't happen anytime soon when it's so lucrative to create tools that can only be used large teams and megacorps/multinationals.
i agree with your point about multinationals but this case is more interesting than that. Uber isn't Coca Cola. They essentially used tactics like this to go from plucky underdog to multinational.
No, they simply went around laws that governed their market in order to outcompete other providers, and they are pretty smug about it. They never discriminated between laws that are obviously obsolete and laws that are still important.
Insurance laws and employee laws, for starters. And even medallion laws in some places, because they offset the costs cabs incur for being a part of city transportation infrastructure - costs like adapting cars to service elderly and disabled.
I totally agree with this. One thing that should be noted is that in this case the government was acting in the corrupt interest of the incumbent taxi industry. Once the system has been corrupted, tactics like Grayball become the only way for any company to disrupt the industry.
My guess is that Grayball was used most in jurisdictions with the most corruption and regulatory capture inflicted by the taxi/livery industry.
Yeah, while I'm outraged that Uber would go to such lengths to deceive the government, and by extension the people, there's certainly a bit of schadenfreude here.
Deceiving the government does not necessarily extend to deceiving the people. It depends on whether the government represents people's interest in the case. In the Portland's case in particularly, it's absolutely certain the the government was not siding with the interest of the majority of the people.
Similarly, if someone is protesting drone strike, it does not mean he is protesting against the US people.
While the majority of people would surely like to have a cheaper, faster, easier taxi service available, that doesn't mean that Uber should be allowed to operate regardless of the municipality's laws.
A city is a democracy, and Uber could certainly lead a campaign to convince citizens to get their political leaders to allow Uber to operate. There are plenty of ways to affect change that aren't just flouting the law.
The article describes deliberate behavior by Uber to circumvent the law of the land. You might not like the law, but if you believe in the principle of rule of law, then, you should not be OK with this. Otherwise, there's no reason for other companies to, say, pollute the water supply, dump smog into the air, deliver dangerously unsafe foodstuffs or products to consumers, i.e., break the law.
This is a dichotomy I reject. Laws should be evaluated on an individual basis, not as a body, otherwise you're logically obligated to be as bothered at people going 51 in a 50 as rape and murder.
On top of that, many laws are bogus, pointless, useless, more are actively harmful. Hell, Uber got a start by flaunting a law that had little actual use in the real world save for protecting monopolists with very flimsy pretenses. You probably flaunt the speed limit on a daily basis commuting to work because the alternative is less safe and less efficient for all concerned.
Let's not pretend that ignoring useless laws is a slight against some broader philosophical concept.
"Uber got a start by flaunting a law"
"You probably flaunt the speed limit"
Probably not what you intended to say.
More substantially, I think the licensing regulations for taxis (that's what you have in mind, no?) are far from obviously of "little actual use". This would vary greatly by region; I understand that London and Tokyo, for example, require taxi drivers to prove familiarity with their city's layout before being allowed to take passengers. Maybe this is to enforce a monopoly, or maybe it's for the benefit of the public. It's at least debatable.
Oh, I agree. But I would consider a business moving into an area and gaining a competitive advantage by violating local laws that constrain their competitors to be some kind of breach of the social contract, and just not cricket. If that's in fact what Uber has done - I'm not really conversant with all the details. I don't think I have an inordinate respect for the law, but I also don't think that "but the law is stupid" is a convincing defense here.
The "social contract" theory is pretty hard to defend. Lots of people have tried, few have succeeded.
I'm just about to finish up _The Problem of Political Authority_ [0] and the author (Prof at Colorado University - Boulder) gives the social contract an _excellent_ rundown.
TL;DR: There is no social contract. It's a politically useful idea not rooted in moral law.
I disagree that this is a great thing. I want to see reasonable behavior. I don't appreciate when businesses are basically out there to cheat me by any means they can conceive (offering me a different price than that guy beside me because they captured the mac address on my phone when I went into a fancy store, say).
This is an absurd false equivalency. The NSA isn't tracking down drivers, this is local law enforcement. They could be investigating a crime related to an Uber driver, but not specifically about the legality of the service.
What if you were just robbed or assaulted by a driver and Uber sends fake data about nearby cars when a cop is trying to use the app to track them down?
>What if you were just robbed or assaulted by a driver and Uber sends fake data about nearby cars when a cop is trying to use the app to track them down?
Then I'd say "wow, why is this cop using an inaccurate and highly-likely-to-be-thrown-out-in-court method when the LEA has a stingray that allows them to track the driver directly and accurately?"
>this is local law enforcement
Yes, the poor, good, moral, ethical local law enforcement with their cheap and useless cellphone MiTM.
The point being made is that a cop is not ever going to need to use Uber, that they shouldn't use Uber, and that (if for some reason they get all the way to court having used Uber as the basis for their evidence) they should have known that they shouldn't use Uber. Further, if they did need Uber, it would be by way of tracking the app's use from the suspect's phone directly.
Enough with the derailment tactics already, this doesn't make for a civil discussion. Bringing in new arguments like referring to stingrays (as itf they were owned or used universally) is BS and just a way to avoid responding to the legitimate question that was presented by the gp.
Any place using such a novel technique as tracking someone on Uber is almost universally likely to have access to a stingray. A stingray is arguably a more accurate and legally enforceable device.
And to add (edit): It's not a derailment, it's the logical conclusion that any area that has enough economic activity to be target by Uber definitely has enough resources to supply LEA with a stingray.
> What if you were just robbed or assaulted by a driver and Uber sends fake data about nearby cars when a cop is trying to use the app to track them down?
You can't use the app to track anyone down. Driver reviews of passengers and passenger reviews of drivers are annoynomous for this reason. If a cop is trying to track an uber driver they would be much better off getting the license plate from the passenger and running that through their system. Trying to randomly hail rides through the app in hopes that the abusive driver would happens to respond sounds like a waste of time when there are better alternatives.
Yeah, but you could also use it to see where cars are in the area and track them down from there? Except if you're a cop they flagged and they send you bullshit noise on purpose. I guess that's fine, right?
Yes, it is fine. Uber is a private company and its data is private. It's an interesting thought experiment but I just can't get behind the idea that a private company has a moral or ethical responsibility to ensure that data they're providing to the public via their own app doesn't mislead law enforcement. If there was a court order for the data and it was inaccurate or false that's one thing but this is completely different.
I'm totally on Uber side here. Both Uber users and drivers use the service voluntarily. It may discriminate, be unsafe, whatever, but I just ride a bus and don't care.
When government tries to interfere with voluntary exchange, it is OK to circumvent it.
See what HN says when government tries to prevent you from using certain websites or services (Signal messenger, just for example). We call it censorship, use VPNs and circumvent government regulations all the ways possible. Service providers hide behind CDNs and use domain fronting to increase collateral damage, move to liberal countries and things like that. It is the same case here.
I personally couldn't imagine ever doing something like this...but on the other hand Uber has clearly demonstrated demand for their service that's been fought at every corner with entrenched interests that have government connections, alluded to in the article.
I'm not endorsing it...but I can understand what would drive them to do it. Uber's playing dirty ball that's all about winning at all costs. The problem is that their opposition, for the most part...is ALSO playing dirty ball.
Of course not. If we got rid of all these laws the corporations would simply enforce terms of service on us, containing whatever they want. And then would argue that we freely entered into those terms of our own free will by being born where we were and when we were!
Except the government's "TOS" are constrained by the Constitution. No such constraint on corporate TOS, particularly in the thought experiment where all laws are gone.
If we got rid of all laws that occasionally inconvenience corporations, they would certainly do have the power.
You think of Microsoft's former ability to push nonstandard browser features, I think of the East India Company's former ability to subjugate entire societies.
This is incredibly awful, but not particularly surprising.
One of Paul Graham's most read essays is about the qualities that YC looks for in founders (http://paulgraham.com/founders.html). In that essay, he specifically discusses 'Naughtiness' as a positive quality, and how it's one of the most important features of potential founders.
The problem is that being clever and hacking around a system for curiosity is governed by a very different set of incentives than being clever and hacking for profit. Feynmann's safecracking at Los Alomos was done to complain about an absurd system and to play pranks on his colleagues, not to enrich himself.
Being willing to break dumb rules to show how pointless they are is an excellent public service. Breaking rules that stand in the way of your profit is completely different, and it's important to call it out.
> Being willing to break dumb rules to show how pointless they are is an excellent public service. Breaking rules that stand in the way of your profit is completely different, and it's important to call it out.
Depends on whether you view this particular detail as part of providing a service people want (and thus want to pay for), or whether you view it as exclusively in the service of profit (whether it benefits people or not). Ignoring regulations so you can make money by hurting people would be evil. Ignoring regulations so you can help people by providing a service they want (whether you make money doing so or not) is entirely different, and far more reasonable. (It's still a dangerous road to go down, but not universally wrong.)
I've seen what the attempts at "local", "authorized" alternatives look like; they're almost all terrible, and even the ones that work half as well as Lyft or Uber suffer from being non-universal (you need a different service for each location). Look at the various places actually fixing their broken taxi regulations; would they have even considered doing so if the far better alternatives had asked nicely before developing a huge base of interested customers who see how much better the alternative works?
As you said, "break dumb rules to show how pointless they are" can serve as the first step in fixing them.
(For the sake of clarity: Uber has done some truly and unambiguously awful things. This particular story just doesn't seem like one of them.)
There's a system set up to determine what rules are necessary, and some VC-funded bro isn't in a position to second-guess them (beyond his power at the polling booth).
Your standard seems to be that a service should be legal if two or more people agree on a contract("providing a service people want and thus want to pay for").
But by that standard, there isn't a single regulation that is necessary. Sell a car without seatbelts? Sure – all fine if you can find people to buy it. Migraine treatment with low-dose cyanide? Some people will try it.
Regulations are attempts to (a) protect third parties from externalities or (b) to allow people to survive without doing an incredible amount of research into everything they consume. It's easy to dismiss them because we have no idea of all the things that aren't happening. But the fact that your money has been safe at banks for the last 70 years, or that deaths from fire, food-born illness or traffic accidents has been reduced dramatically – all that traces back primarily to government regulation.
> There's a system set up to determine what rules are necessary
See "regulatory capture", and all the other ways that system can be broken or exploited. Also see the long history of how regulations written for yesterday's technologies work badly on today's and completely prevent tomorrow's from being created.
I'm extremely skeptical that this particular issue could have been effectively fixed another way, because I've seen what the proposed "solutions" looked like that "played by the rules".
> Your standard seems to be that a service should be legal if two or more people agree on a contract("providing a service people want and thus want to pay for").
No, that's not the completely general standard I'd advocate, though that would still come a lot closer to reasonable. A general standard would also internalize any externalities (and any parties affected by them) before evaluating that metric. (Though keep in mind that "reduces the demand for a competing service" is not an externality.) Overall, though, a world in which individual consent always wins would be better.
(We'd be better off still with a world where one of the providers of those services wasn't also, unrelatedly, engaged in various unethical behaviors such as discrimination.)
In any case, I'm not interested in turning this into a general evaluation of structures and approaches to regulation and government, not least of which because that would retread well-trodden conversational territory with little new to cover.
I think it's worth focusing on the specific case of "is the world better or worse off" here, and then asking how, if you see the specific path taken as a problem, the same goal could have been achieved in another way.
> to allow people to survive without doing an incredible amount of research into everything they consume
You shouldn't have to do 100% of the research yourself, but I think you should have a choice of who you delegate that responsibility and trust to.
From what I've read, it appears that Uber operates largely within a zero-sum space. I. e. they're not build around some innovative technology that improves everyone's life, but have simply ignored a few rules, allowing them to reward one class of people with $1 for every $1 they take from another class of people.
The statistic that's going around is that they're subsidising each trip at a rate of 50% – i. e. taking from the VC investor and giving it to the customer. At the same time, they're undercutting the income and benefits currently enjoyed by taxi drivers. The net effect is both the lower and upper class paying to the mostly middle-class customers. The contribution from investors isn't going to continue forever, so lets assume they somehow find the economies of scale, or market power to raise prices, to break even –although I'm somewhat sceptical because I don't know how a trip in LA gets cheaper if there are also drivers in Barcelona.
So now the customers get rides that are cheaper by anywhere from 50% to 0%, the latter if Uber manages to establish some sort of market dominance. And taxi drivers earning $40,000 are replaced by Uber drivers earning $30,000 and having no health insurance.
Is that worth it? That probably depends on your politics. There's the economic fundamentalist perspective that markets are always fair and if that means you have to work in a coal mine where the air smells funny and by the way Johnny didn't make it out today, then you should have better paid attention in school.
Personally, I think more equitable societies are more fun to life in, and kicking possibly hundreds of thousands of people a step down the economic ladder will, in the long term, hurt almost everyone – the trickle-up effect seems to have much more empirical support than the opposite
Regarding the actual service provided: it's a better service in a way that has nothing to do with cost, and it would remain a better service even at a higher cost than a taxi. (And due to efficiency improvements, it could also theoretically provide better rates than a taxi while paying drivers the same, or pay better while charging riders the same.) The entire experience of requesting a ride and getting one represents a massive improvement over taxis.
I don't know anyone who uses such services because they cost less, rather than because they work better.
"Ignoring regulations so you can help people by providing a service they want (whether you make money doing so or not) is entirely different, and far more reasonable. "thats what Pablo Escobar probably thought at some point too -:)
This is one of the very important ways in which dumb rules get fixed. Like, the prohibition on cannabis wouldn't have the support it does if we were really good at enforcing it - people need the experience with not-X to decide on supporting that policy.
When it comes to providing a service that people "want (and thus want to pay for)", all sorts of things could be sold to people that fit that criteria. There's no moral or legal exemption for "meeting demand" that suddenly makes it "far more reasonable" than the base instinct of "making money".
By this criteria, Theranos was merely "meeting demand" for finger pricks over needles, FDA and their "regulations" be damned. Despite the millions spent trying to convince people that regulations are merely tools of regulatory capture, most regulations exist for a reason. Operating from the default point of view that regulations are evil is why we're seeing the EPA and Clean Water Acts gutted. Heck, even NOAA got slapped around today as a result of this attitude, and they merely provide information.
Uber's actions were all about "making money" under the thin veneer of giving the people what they wanted. You can find that same rationalization in many organized crime movies.
Do you remember how hard it used to be to hail a cab in SF? There was an entrenched system that was bad for drivers, bad for passengers and great for the 1% that owned the taxi medallions. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I'm sure the system made sense but it had been abused by entrenched interests to enrich themselves. Look at NYC, medallions used to go for $1M+ and are becoming worthless.
If your entire industry crumbles when you face competition, you're not the "good guys."
Uber's disregard for local laws and regulations is well known, so I find it hard to be shocked by this.
But the chutzpah to implement something so blatantly designed to aide in breaking the law is still surprising. It reminds me of Zenefits in a way.
It also seems similar to VW's Diesel engine "Defeat Device". The future of technology will probably include ever more shady uses of programming to mislead regulators and the like.
That struck me too. A normal company might do this, but they'd at least pretend it was meant to deter criminals or catch abusers or whatever. Instead their statement says:
"This program denies ride requests to users who are violating our terms of service — whether that’s people aiming to physically harm drivers, competitors looking to disrupt our operations, or opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers."
It's rather blatant. I assume they think that last part makes them look good and "officials" look bad, but to me it just says "we built this to avoid getting caught breaking the law."
To me those seem like very different things. I'd bet Jefferson was talking about laws that severely impact people's lives (slavery, torture, things we would consider human rights breaches) and not pretty innocuous things like taxi regulations.
And the word 'entrap' is disingenuous. Entrapment is used to describe situations where law enforcement induces someone to break a law they would have been otherwise unlikely to commit.
In this case, the drivers were already breaking the law (opinions on the righteousness of the law notwithstanding), and law enforcement was seeking to apprehend, not entrap.
Maybe not. That might tie their hands in court. It might leave "have the court declare the law invalid" as their only way to win. Limiting your options that way tends to be bad legal strategy (whether or not it would be the moral high ground).
It seems to me that saying "we did this so we can violate the law without getting caught" is already an extremely bad legal strategy. If their statement was aimed at limiting their legal exposure it wouldn't have included that part at all. If it was aimed at showing that they're morally in the right, they would have said that the laws were bad. I can't see anything that justifies what they said, aside from thinking everyone sees the law the same way they do so it goes without saying.
> It also seems similar to VW's Diesel engine "Defeat Device". The future of technology will probably include ever more shady uses of programming to mislead regulators and the like.
As a FOSS enthusiast, I hope this becomes a good push to require those types of software to become FOSS.
So I ask this mostly out of horrified curiosity -- is there any negative press or revelation that could actually sink Uber at this point? What would it take for the company to fail?
We've seen:
* Systematic flouting of laws in public
* Even further hidden avoiding of laws
* Sexism complaints across the board
* What appears to be a pervasive toxic culture, inspired (if not explicitly encouraged) straight from the CEO's behavior
They're trying to become too big to fail, but aren't quite there yet.
Essentially they're undercutting all competitors by artificially keeping fares very low and subsidizing drivers. Subsidies were the primary source of their enormous financial losses in 2016.
Once the competition is completely gone (local cabs, and Lyft in some areas), then they can stop subsidizing themselves and basically hold a monopoly. It's their entire strategy.
I simply don't see how Uber can be a monopoly. You need a critical mass of drivers, but nothing stops drivers from being on multiple networks. This isn't Microsoft doing per-CPU licensing.
> I simply don't see how Uber can be a monopoly. You need a critical mass of drivers, but nothing stops drivers from being on multiple networks. This isn't Microsoft doing per-CPU licensing.
They could force drivers to only work for Uber. "If you go to the competition, you can't work for us", they could try to lobby so that other networks can't legally operate, just like Taxi companies did... They just want to replace Taxi companies, that's why people who think they are the "hero of the libertarians" are misguided.
They could keep track of people as best they can, and shadowban them from all transportation using Greyball so the people couldn't function in society. It'd be kind of like getting blackballed for life from credit card issuers. Effective to the extent they can make a monopoly, probably more effective when it's a shadowban rather than explicit rules stating the person is barred from using the service forever.
It would be rather profitable to be able to hold the world hostage, single out whoever you want and make them hoof it. Particularly if they'd got used to using Uber to get to work or something. Long game would be making private vehicle ownership illegal, but that's very long term indeed. I'm just saying, you can keep going and every step of the way is increasingly profitable. Wall Street would love it.
While I agree with your first statement, the per-CPU analogy may not be right. The CPU (or car) is the resource being leveraged by the OS (or ride hailing service). Also, I may be wrong here but I think it's per motherboard.
For Uber to really become a monopoly would be hard, at best they could split the field with Lyft or others by making an under the table anti-"employee"-sharing agreement similar to the Apple-Google thing last year.
That and about 98% of the USA hasn't heard about any of these bad news stories nor do they care. If their rides start to take 30 minutes to arrive then people will start to care which is what matters. I think much of the rest is Silicon Valley echo chamber stuff.
More or less Redbox' strategy too, from what I can tell. Prices have been creeping up ever since the major competition (Blockbuster et al) dropped out of the market. And I suspect it's not because the costs to run machines has been increasing...
I imagine a great deal of it is the studios increasing their take. This has been a perennial problem for Spotify and other licensees of other media content. Netflix rolls their own now.
Really, it's hard to imagine a future for Redbox in ten years. Even the convenience of a vending machine movie store is nothing next to me not even getting off the couch.
With the prices at $2, which becomes $4 if I don't remember to return it on time... I often opt to pay the $5 to rent using a digital platform. Only time I pick up from Redbox is if I am at the store anyway.
I read a relevant thesis about the timing, structure of presidential scandals. Written by Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers fame? (Sorry, can't refind it quickly.)
The gist is that scandalous behavior doesn't matter until it does. All the negative stuff everyone already knows about a protagonist is discounted, for a time. And then a switch is flipped and everyone piles on.
One example given was Clinton's sexual indiscretions. It was an open secret. It only became a "scandal" when opinion shifted. (For whatever reason.) Then it's unshakeable.
Not even close. If Uber disappeared tomorrow it would have literally zero impact. You'd get the same driver in the same car via another app and one ride later you'd have forgotten Uber ever existed.
They will succeed or fail based upon their ability to attract customers and sell a product at a profit. I suspect most customers don't care about any of your bullet points. They care if Uber can get them where they want to go faster and/or cheaper than other options.
What I have noticed is that even people that have concerns about their culture and unethical acts, will often use the service because it's convenient and (for now) cheaper than other alternatives.
As long as Uber is fighting cities (instead of state/federal governments) and continues to have deep pockets... They will be around.
Seems like they haven't considered the fact that they would then be in the same situation their current competitors find themselves in, ripe for "disruption."
I think this probably counts as an iceberg-scale problem. It's like taxes; avoiding them by gaming the system in every way you can find is unethical but not illegal. Actively deceiving people (with fake updates to the app) and collecting and acting upon PII to screen out public officials is getting into criminal conspiracy territory.
I'm extremely surprised their lawyers signed off on it. Maybe they're libertarians though, I've heard some really odd arguments that turned out to be predicated on various 'natural law' theories.
I'm not excusing Uber at all because what they've done is extremely bad in multiple cases but find it strange all these hit pieces are coming out of the wood works. There is a large section of society that hates Uber and will spring at any chance to bring it down. Which is partially what I think happened with the whole #boycottUber thing and the new video of kalanick yelling at the driver.
However, the sexism and dysfunction in the company is extremely disturbing. It almost starts to undermine the case against them when there are all these hit jobs coming out and it starts to seem that the media is biased or relishing their fall.
I think it's a mistake to interpret the wave of stories about Uber's misbehavior as indicative of a "hit job" or "media bias" against Uber. Courage is contagious, and as people have started to speak out publicly against Uber's abuses, it appears current and former employees are becoming emboldened to share their experiences as well. I hope that this wave of public backlash will demonstrate to Uber, and the tech industry as a whole, that the market is not blind to unethical behavior, and cutthroat competition at the expense of your employees and the law is not necessarily a winning strategy.
There's a similar phenomenon with sexual assault allegations - often they cluster in time, because a single accuser is more likely to be taken seriously when there are others making similar accusations.
This is, BTW, the motivation behind an app I've heard of where you can file a sealed sexual assault report against someone, with verified date of filing, to be unsealed only if some number of people make an accusation against the same person.
There's definitely some piling on by former employees and reporters. It seems to be a bit of a human trait, and I remember some of this happening to Amazon in the wake of the NY Times piece a couple years ago (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...).
That said, the dirt coming from Uber seems to be a lot worse and a lot more widespread for a company that is 1/30th the size of what Amazon was 2 years ago.
> That said, the dirt coming from Uber seems to be a lot worse and a lot more widespread for a company that is 1/30th the size of what Amazon was 2 years ago.
I assume this is ignoring drivers? Surely if you include the contractors the size difference isn't so stark. I would actually expect Uber to be larger, but I don't know.
I don't think NYTimes need empowerment or to wait for someone to call out Uber to publish this story. I can only guess of a negative PR campaign from an apparent competitor, it's very obvious if you see anonymous medium posts(minus the susan flower's) and the hyperbole created about Travis's video and now this.
Like everyone, I want them to pay for the culture they created at their company which resulted in employee abuse, but this is not fair to feed the hate campaign against a company which basically revolutionized the transport system.
> I don't think NYTimes need empowerment or to wait for someone to call out Uber to publish this story.
The "people" in question being empowered are not the NYT reporters, they're the other employees that feel free to come forward, respond to requests from proactive reporters, or contact reporters themselves. The idea presented is that after there starts to be negative press, more people come forward, thus more news.
There are many reasons this might be true. A very simple one is that most people may think their concerns are isolated, and not mention it to others enough to learn how endemic they really are. In this case, the employees that have info about this program might not have been happy about it, but might have thought the company was just doing what it had to and were willing to overlook it. Other negative news may change their opinion of the company just enough to put them over the threshold of thinking it should be brought to light. Then again, some employees may have been perfectly fine with this program, but know the public will react negatively, and are using it to punish the company for other misdeeds (such as the reported sexism).
There are many explanations for why people with knowledge of misdeeds may come forward once it's reported. This happens with victims as well (e.g. Bill Cosby). It's easy to think you're the only one when there's no evidence to the contrary.
It's quite common for revolutionaries to get carried away and end up on the guillotine themselves. I was extremely supportive of Uber when it was getting off the ground because I loathed the taxi monopoly, but since Uber has a) shown little regard for anything beyond its own profitability and b) is hellbent on becoming a monopoly of its own, I feel no sympathy for their current woes.
> It almost starts to undermine the case against them when there are all these hit jobs coming out and it starts to seem that the media is biased or relishing their fall.
Think of what this means: The more a business (or anyone) does wrong, then the more news stories there are about them doing wrong ... then more likely it is that the news stories are 'hit jobs'. You can see how that doesn't work.
Everyone subject to criticism by the news media calls it a 'hit job', reporter bias, or something similar. I see nothing in this story that suggests such a thing; this seems like a serious problem and the allegations are seem well-supported.
Most of the Uber employees I've interacted with have taken a quite cynical "who gives a fuck - IPO" stance or will rationalize away their behavior to an absurd degree. With this series of leaks from current and former Uber employees, I'm glad to see that there are more ethical people at Uber than I had previously thought.
I don't think it is that strange, you often see this type of snowball effect of leaks and insider info after an organization or person hits a certain tipping point of negative press. See also the many reports of sexual abuse that came out around Trump pre-election when things like the access hollywood video came out.
Comments like this confuse me. Are you accusing the author of fabricating facts? Do you contest the facts or testimonies in the article? What is the justification for calling this a "hit piece"? Did you actually read it?
Why is it surprising that a company under the spotlight... winds up with more journalistic investigations?
When I was in high school, a teacher I had for a video journalism course emphatically hammered home the point that there was no such thing as unbiased media: the stories you choose to cover or not cover, the use of pretty much any adjective, the phrasing of the headline, placement, abundance of quotes, frequency of consulting expert opinions, use of statistics of varying quality, etc. create an inescapable subjectivity.
For quite some time I scoffed at this as social marxist nonsense useful to launch any kind of conspiracy theory, but there might be a point to it in smaller scales, especially if the editors are beholden to the almighty gods of clicks and page views from an audience hungry for a narrative.
Bias always exists to some extent but not all media are equally biased or biased in the same way. Citing this as a reason to dismiss any media content that makes you uncomfortable is itself an example of subjective bias. You can aim for a kind of objectivity by attempting to maximize the predictive power of the information that you convey to as wide an audience as possible.
Do you not think the boycottUber thing was a little overblown? What about releasing the video of Kalanick being illegally recorded and framing it as him "exploding" when he was relatively calm? All I'm saying is that focuses on silly stuff like that undermines the larger disturbing cases of law breaking and sexism.
Why not assume people are being genuine? Uber has done tons of things to piss people off. I think people in the HN bubble forget that the majority of the country has never been in a ride share. Talk to some blue collar people. Talk to some taxi drivers. Talk to drivers who left Uber. You might find that they aren't as sympathetic to Kalanick as people on HN are. HN in general has more sympathy for corporations and billionaires than I've seen anywhere else on the internet.
I'm not sure I have good recommendations, I spend most of my time reading things on here since I quit reddit. My last sentence is tangential to the main point of my post, which is that Uber has earned all of it's scandals through their actions. This Greyball project is astounding, and it's no wonder that someone eventually leaked to the press about it.
The point I was making about internet comments is that comments on HN are particularly sympathetic to start ups, entrepreneurs and corporations (obviously).
That story is legitimate and was released in July. My only gripe was that it seems some were holding onto stories like that, or sometimes even trivial stories and are now releasing them to essentialy dogpile.
Don't you think that maybe there's just so much shady crap at Uber that it's flying all over? When Theranos got picked apart, I don't think anybody was sitting on stories, I think they were gleefully publishing them as soon as they got a tip. Perhaps seeing Susan Fowler come forward with her name attached has emboldened other Uber employees who felt like what they were doing was wrong.
My running hypothesis is that many journalists have found "dirt" on various companies or individuals, and have written it up as ready-to-release hit pieces... and then let it sit, because it currently goes against the sociopolitical zeitgeist. The moment anyone or anything becomes disliked, all these pre-written stories get published.
I'm fairly certain that the Google lawsuit, the video of them running the red light, and the yelling video were timed. How long did they have them? They just happened to get them the week Uber was plastered all over?
Well, yes. Dan O'Sullivan (who spawned #DeleteUber) is a socialist and not shy about it. Of course he hates Uber for many reasons, all of which are entirely legitimate if you share his values.
Always more enlightening to talk earnestly about differing values than suspecting some kind of hidden agenda or irrational bias.
Values can be nuanced. Yes to free market but guess what, it occasionally needs checks and balances because while it works for a particular company it might bring society as a whole down.
Infrastructure like roads and electricity should not be controlled by a company because it's supposed to benefit everyone.
Let's talk about Uber. Say they survive this situation and thrive as a business, taking over the global cab market. Imagine they also perfect self-driving cars and next month they fire all the drivers.
Suddenly you have a company of ~10,000 people getting all the money from all rides around the world. And most of the money goes to the executives and a few thousand shareholders.
You now have a group of millions of people unable to make a living, and support their families. Apply this to all jobs that require mostly drivers (trucking, busses etc) and we just destroyed ~10 million jobs (including supporting infrastructure) in the US alone.
These people need to make a living - if Uber ends up paying super low tax (compared to what it displaces) we have a huge number of people making no money and a few getting all of it.
Civil unrest follows naturally (in one form or another) and you end up with either
1. Segmented civilization with a few people defending their wealth with hired guns
2. Social reform - guaranteed basic income for a while, but long term?
3. Revolution where the mob takes over and the outcome is anyone's guess - an extreme form of socialism?
It's not just about values, a lot of it is about long-term thinking.
Which of the three outcomes is better may be a question of values - is it better that a few people do super well and everyone else suffers, or most do pretty well?
Without some social stability and wellness companies cannot function - people need money to pay with, and without jobs there's not much money to go around.
This an example of what I consider the fatal (probably for us) defect of the neoliberal ideology. As implemented you end up with societal organizations being unable to engage in coherent policy and action.
While I don't like the company either, I wouldn't be surprised if competing companies had some PR peeps trying to stoke the flames. Why would they pass it up?
Not only am I done with Uber, I'm starting to wonder about associates and partners (investors, advisors, marketing partners, etc.)
If you're still doing business with Uber in 2017, it's because you don't want to know or you don't care who you're dealing with. Neither reflects well on you. It tells me you have your own very low bar -- your own version of "well we're not as awful as taxis shrug" -- above which anything goes ethically and professionally.
Which is your choice. It is also my choice to be concerned about doing business with you and steer clear.
So, do you feel this same way with every product/investor/advisor/partner/etc. that works with evil companies such as Wal-Mart? Or most banks. Or most internet providers. Etc.
It seems like you're very quick to jump on the "hate" bandwagon with Uber, but unless you are applying this logic to every company that's (more than likely) worse than Uber, it's pretty hypocritical. And I highly doubt that is the actual case that you do apply this same logic to many other evil corporations.
Just like shitty companies like Comcast, some people choose Uber because while it's not the best option you WANT to use, it's more than likely still the best option in a very tiny pool you have to choose from.
I think you think I said something different than what I think I said. :) I'm not talking about "evil" or "hate". I do understand needing to pick the least-worst option. And I'm not judging anyone else's situation/choices, as a customer.
Curious, what phone are you using where Uber works and Lyft doesn't?
I actually agree with the OPs statement as it applies to customers (at least when there's a reasonable alternative). I live in NYC so it was pretty easy for me - I deleted the app and switched to using Lyft.
I currently use android, and lyft won't work without permanent access to my location and contacts, which I consider unacceptable. I'm supposed to get the ubuntu phone in about a week, and afaik, there's no lyft client for that. There is an uber webpage, m.uber.com or something that should work with it though.
This is all untested on my new phone, so I may be incorrect.
what about the millions that make a living driving for Uber?
the real impact of automation / globalization perhaps has been put off my companies like Uber, employing people who have been left behind, by no fault of their own.
This reminded me of a quote by Snowden, "Right and wrong has a very different standard from what is legal and illegal.... Every act of progression in nation's history has involved tensions with law..."
I'm glad Uber did the things they did to circumvent the law. There are countless number of times where my friends and I had the option to 'uber' to a party or bar instead of driving ourselves. Ive met many Uber drivers who loves the opportunity to work and provide a valuable service.
Despite the many flaws, Uber was able to bring social value and it has improved the quality of my life significantly. Had I waited for the law to 'do things properly'... I can't even imagine.
This is one of the things Uber did right and it made me realize the efforts Uber went through to provide me a viable alternative to public transportation and gave me the freedom to travel around the city reliably 24 hours a day. I'm now reinstalling Uber.
You've got to admit Uber has brought the BigCorp stereotype of the 80s to life. I am amazed at the (US?)-culture that makes people enact so poisonous policies. In my corporation, literally the first line of our risk appetite says that we uphold the law and common norms and morality. Seems trivial, but still gives guidance to everyday actions. Could you explain it to your mom? Whole layers of management and lawyers flaunting common norms... I couldn't work there. How's VC-ing this different from bankrolling Al Capone?
I would say a government interfering in such a simple transaction is immoral and violates common norms. Traditional taxi cabs and the gov't regulations that propped them up is a textbook example of rent-seeking.
The government almost certainly creates and maintains the rights-of-way on which B will take you.
Revert to horses in countryside settings:
A to B: "I need a ride"
B to A: "I will take you on horseback for a penny!"
B to C: "I need to cross your field/forest/stream"
C to B: "That will be a quarter of a penny, and no refund if you cannot negotiate for permission to enter and cross the next property along the way"
[repeat]
In the history encompassing the legal tradition of where Uber's HQ is based, governments have been interfering with this (by road, trackway and holloway construction and maintenance) since before the Romans invaded Britain.
Indeed, formal regulation of taxi services appeared in England in 1635, with the Hackney Carriage Act setting up a legal framework, with further statutory and regulatory tools (including licensing, which imposed training and safety requirements on drivers and carriage owners, and which granted broad protections against rent-seeking by road owners, including public bodies) before the 1670s.
So the "interference" in the market you pine for has been going on for many centuries.
If taxi regulation is rent-seeking, then Uber and Lyft, bypassing those regulations, should have much lower costs because no rent to pay. So how come they can't profitably offer a cheaper service, or a much better service at the same price?
That's actually pretty impressive. I mean, it morally questionable maybe. Is there a law that says Uber is required to send a cab to city officials? The official gave Uber access to his personal details. If Uber doesn't want to fulfill the request it seems reasonable that ultimately it's Uber's decision. I'm not sure what to think about this one.
What if local law enforcement officer was posing undercover as an Uber customer as part of a sexual assault investigation or trying to track down all drivers in relation to a recent crime?
This is framed as getting around restrictions on taxi services, but any time you proactively thwart law enforcement, you're inviting a lot of dangerous unintended consequences. None of which I'm sure Uber is concerned about.
> any time you proactively thwart law enforcement, you're inviting a lot of dangerous unintended consequences.
I'm curious, what do you think about Google's "State-sponsored attackers are trying to compromise your account" warning? [1] Maybe it's police officers trying to break into the Gmail account of a pedophile or a terrorist, and Google is thwarting these efforts by warning the suspect.
That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that set of circumstances. It would take me more time/length than a message board comment to work through the ethics of that, but point well taken.
> What if local law enforcement officer was posing undercover as an Uber customer as part of a sexual assault investigation or trying to track down all drivers in relation to a recent crime?
If they were, then I suspect that Uber would go out of their way to cooperate, using the detailed information they have on ride histories. Get a warrant, serve it to Uber, and get the data needed for the investigation.
This ignores the question of whether Uber should gather and keep that much information, but given that they do, using it seems far more useful than anything this mechanism would have thwarted.
They're pre-emptively choosing to obstruct enforcement of whatever laws they deem unacceptable. So that's quite a rosy expectation about their willingness to cooperate.
I don't think you could consider this obstruction. It's their service, it's private, they can serve data to users the way they wish. There is a method and a system in place if law enforcement can prove they need unfettered access – a warrant issued by a judge.
Taking this further, it could be a useful way for larger criminal organizations to identify potential undercover officers that have infiltrated them. I'm sure now that this information is public it will make it easier for drug cartels and the like to isolate and "remove" certain individuals.
Facebook is already better, with number of mutual friends. It does require having a social circle that's relatively immune from law enforcement coercion.
Problem with 'being naughty' is there is constant pressure to 'be a little more naughty than before'. Rinse lather repeat till the grand jury issues a criminal indictment.
In jurisdictions where Uber is illegal, Uber's graywall activities are organized crime; there's no other way to put it. How is it any different than, say, an app that advises drug couriers where there are (possibly undercover) enforcement agents. This is serious stuff, and in no way does the desire to provide better taxi service justify it.
In 20 seconds of googling I didn't find pg urging entrepreneurs to be naughty. I did find YC's ethics policy[1], and the only mention the of the law that I see is related to sales tactics, "Not using misleading, illegal or dishonest sales tactics." This needs revision.
There are lots of laws that are challenging and problematic, even impractical to follow exactly, e.g., the tax code. It's one thing to interpret the tax code in your favor; it's another thing to write a program to distort your business information to avoid taxes.
EDIT: Found the naughtiness link. Reading now....
EDIT 2: I'm completely opposed to drug laws. Drugs laws are sickening and immoral, and our society and countless individuals have paid a terrible price as a result of these laws, but that doesn't make it ok for me to sell drugs on the street.
I read What We Look for in Founders[1], and I think the section on Naughtiness conveys the wrong message, unless pg actually intends to suggest that, for example, the graywall tactics that Uber has used are desireable. Is Portland's law against services like Uber's a law "that matters?"
pg makes a more specific case for disobedience in The Word "Hacker"[2], and maybe he really does look for people who will flout the law when they see fit.
I don't see an easy way to rephrase what pg is saying in a way I'd prefer to see it, except to say that the there is a distinction between civil disobedience for the purpose of insisting on human rights and mere criminal behavior. Surely YCombinator does not want to invest in criminal enterprises, no matter how clever or hackish.
OK, one more thing. This "I can flout the law in my new business" attitude is a great example of white privilege, and this is why this attitude really grates on my nerves.
I thought of the same thing when I read this. I have to admit, this was really smart and "naughty" on their part.
I'm not happy to hear what kind of company Uber is, internally. However, they seem to operate how VCs want companies to act and "disrupt" markets. (Minus the harassment stuff.)
"But unknown to Mr. England and other authorities, some of the digital cars they saw in the app did not represent actual vehicles. And the Uber drivers they were able to hail also quickly canceled. That was because Uber had tagged Mr. England and his colleagues — essentially Greyballing them as city officials — based on data collected from the app and in other ways. The company then served up a fake version of the app populated with ghost cars, to evade capture."
Holy shit that's actually impressive in how deceitful it is.
It's actually pretty common if you cast this as an abuse detection tool, which it sounds like this may have started out as. Think of it like shadowbanning - when you catch someone, your measures are more effective if the person doesn't realize you've done it. You want to hide the mechanism by which they got caught, and then you want to delay their ability to take countermeasures. This basically checks those boxes.
I suspect that the counterpart in the Lyft app is not actually faked. I've often had a driver accept a ride and appear on the map almost exactly where a car had been previously in the "animated cars" UI.
> Uber then served up a fake version of its app that was populated with ghost cars, to evade capture.
> To date, Greyballing has been effective. In Portland that day in late 2014, Mr. England, the enforcement officer, did not catch an Uber, according to local reports.
> To circumvent that tactic, Uber employees went to that city’s local electronics stores to look up device numbers of the cheapest mobile phones on sale, which were often the ones bought by city officials, whose budgets were not sizable.
Holy moley. That is so slimy and sneaky.
Well heck this opens a new startup opportunity -- build a device or service to create phone and accounts to evade Greyball and sell its usage to local law enforcement. The price would be low enough if it is sold or provided per hour for example. They could afford that.
I'm confused by what laws were broken by Greyball. It's certainly deceptive, but is that illegal?
In these cases I'm sympathetic to Uber -
Let's call it "don't delay the pie to get your slice". One of the types of circumstances described is where a municipality doesn't know how to handle ride-shares, so Uber does questionable things to get ride-shares going while the legal situation is figured out. This seems reasonable (within bounds) - because: should the municipality be able to delay the pie while they figure out how to get their slice? Not exactly incentivized to do it in a timely manner; while, if the pie is out there happening, they're incentivized to get their slice in a timely fashion.
"I'm confused by what laws were broken by Greyball. It's certainly deceptive, but is that illegal?
"
Depending on circumstances/jurisdiction, and done for the explicit purpose of preventing law enforcement or other officials from being able to catch criminals (again, the uber drivers breaking the law by driving when it's banned), yes, it's absolutely illegal.
(whether it should be is a different question, but it definitely is)
Obstruction of justice comes to mind. There's a concept of "misleading conduct" typically in obstruction laws.
Not sure, though, if it applies to tort type infractions...which is usually where Uber plays, or only in cases where the obstruction is hindering investigation of criminal activity.
It says uber legal approved this, but uber legal is mostly corporate and ip counsel.
I strongly doubt they had anyone with significant criminal experience look at this, because i have trouble seeing someone not immediately saying "you're joking,right? Are you stupid?"
Maybe Greyball was approved by Uber legal when it was envisioned as a system for excluding bad users (rival companies etc) and then without additional legal review they started using it to exclude suspected law enforcement?
My guess is that the approved tool the company allows to merely build a profile of the additional details necessary to provide additional 'white glove' style service to VIPs to ensure positive word of mouth occurs. Then they realized that they were seeing data that indicated that they were being watched a little closer by the .gov, and 'adjusted' the software to reject or process those people's Uber experiences differently.
I wonder what rate of false negatives is, in terms of assigning Greyball status to someone who is not in fact a local official conducting a sting operation.
Picture a 19-year-old woman in college whose dad convinced her to put Uber on her phone so she'd have a way to get home safely at night -- and linked her account up to his credit card so she wouldn't worry about having to afford the ride.
Now picture her leaving a house party drunk at 2am. The party happens to be close to city government offices, and her dad's a cop and his credit card tracks back to a police credit union. She opens the app and tries to get a car, but there are no cars. Or there are lots of cars, but none will give her a ride.
A low-probability edge case, to be sure, but I wonder if Uber considered the possibility?
I get that it would be stupid, but wouldn't it also be pretty realistic for a college student to use Uber for the first time when she knows it's too late and she's too drunk for the walk home to be a good idea? Especially if she's a responsible individual who doesn't want to rack up charges on Mom and Dad's credit card, and therefore this is the first time she's pulled the trigger?
At first, I considered it more clever than anything. Using data to reduce ticketable-offenses for their drivers (in an undeniably unethical way). However, my view quickly soured when I read:
> If those clues were not enough to confirm a user’s identity, Uber employees would search social media profiles and other available information online.
For some reason, I make a mental distinction between some automated system blocking access and having employees research potential customers online for a ride-share app. The bad PR week for Uber continues.
"we need to permanently track your location on the app to better serve you. unless you are a possible government official, in which case we will track your location to block you from the service"
yes definitely not scary at all that they're tracking open/close of the app by location...
Where users open the app is just as legitimate a marketing tool as traffic counts or parking lot counts in retail, or musicians knowing where Spotify users are streaming their songs to inform concert tour plans, etc.
If you give me location access permission, it seems reasonable to expect that I'm going to use that location access.
i understand uber needs to use my location for their service. i don't expect them to use it to determine whether or not i should be allowed on their service.
and also i don't expect them to continue using my location once i leave the app in the name of "user safety" _especially_ given the above info.
As mentioned above, there are plenty of jurisdictions where, if uber was illegal, this would be textbook obstruction of justice on the part of uber (because uber is deliberately obstructing the investigation of the drivers, who are committing a crime)
Some of the tactics could fall afoul of anti-discrimination laws - particularly, grabbing device numbers of cheap pre-paid phones could have an adverse impact on minorities.
Thinking about it a bit more, the next-level approach is to make sting activity look like african-american activity, then grab members of the african american community who now cannot hail an uber and sue under anti-discrimination measures.
Unfortunately, this is standard risk and antifraud, not even just Greyball; many many services I know of outright blacklist/block prepaid carriers, prepaid or reloadable debit cards, etc.
Several places I know of also outright block specific banks and BINs for abuse.
Not providing information to officials is one thing. Actively deceiving them with a map full of fake cars is a few steps further. I imagine quite a few countries' definitions of obstruction of justice could be met here
Speculating: possibly they may be safe if their TOS prohibits using the service to ticket drivers, which is not the intended purpose of the service. Courts have generally been kind to private company's TOS.
I think Uber needed such tool because they tried to barge their way in a hostile market. I think people blaming Uber for being unethical should ask question what led them to do such behavior (because of ancient government laws)
I'm not defending Uber but I think if they didn't enter market people would have never know what is it.
I second this feeling. Uber may be a terrible company led by terrible people, but they opened the floodgates for a better framework of cab transportation. I hope that sticks (the model, idc about the company)
It sounds like Greyball started out as a fairly legitimate tool to protect their drivers and customers from violence and abuse. And, then, of course it's use started broadening to the current status...
I am trying to come up with an analogy to comprehend this.
Imagine a city government has a rule against palm oil and no restaurants are supposed to use palm oil. A restaurant think that rule is nuts and decides to protest it publicly by using it. At the same time, they rip off the label from the palm oil. The city was having trouble finding the palm oil in the restaurant.
You can claim that the restaurant has broken the city rule - which is not a secret. But I don't think ripping off the label or making the regulators life more challenging is a crime by itself.
Imagine murder is illegal. But some guy thinks it isn't and does it anyway.
He puts bodies in acid, hides them in concrete, and so on.
Now this kind of behaviour is likely to mean the authorities will take a lot longer to find murderers. Murderers will get away with it from time to time. And a lot of resource needs to be spent just to find the criminals.
We do tend to be more forgiving with crimes where the criminal confesses, and rightly so.
Equating outdated city-level taxi regulations to universal law punishing murder is disingenuous, to say the least.
FTC did a report [1] in 1984 about taxi regulations and pointed out why cities were not well-equipped nor incentivized to regulate for the purpose of market efficiency:
> There are, in fact, reasons to doubt that existing regulations are efficient. One problem is
that the analytical and informatiqnal problems involved in determining the efficient levels of the relevant policy variables are great. It is doubtful that regulatory authorities generally have the necessary expertise or information to determine these levels. Also, taxi ordinances and the government agencies that issue taxi regulations may not be motivated primarily by concern
for market failure and achievement of an efficient resource allocation. It appears that taxi regulations have often been designed to protect public transit systems and existing taxi firms from competition.
In my town, they were picking up drivers, then immediately fining them $1200 for being a taxi, without the taxi insurance and a special license/permit. I could see uber wanting to avoid that.
Magically your Uber cars never arrive and the system LIES to you about it. At the very least shouldn't this qualify as false advertising?
How does this not disturb people here greatly? Are you really so sure that you will never magically be in a group that is considered "undesirable"?
If you want to defend Uber on the axis that they are a "proper" taxi replacement who is "just" sweeping away old, stupid regulations, this just lost you the argument.
In addition, lying to people is how you get MORE regulation piled on you, not less.
You might want to be careful. If Uber employees can associate your identity with the fact you say things like 'the Uber system lies to you', they already have a shadowban system set up and might be motivated to punish you for your cruel, meanie opinions. Perhaps never being able to get transportation would be a suitable punishment. Who are you going to complain to, the cops? They aren't running the system ;)
People seem to be defending Uber by saying they're disrupting taxi cab monopolies. But Uber themselves is positioning themselves to become a monopoly. It's naive to think that once they're there they are going to have the people's interests at heart.
It is very interested how Uber is seen as extremely evil and the government chaps & taxi drivers are the good.
I'd say that what they are doing is "Rent Seeking"[1], which has extremely detrimental effects on the economy and that if some of the conversations between them were made public, they would end up in an even bigger mess.
My impressions come from the halting of the Uber service in Sofia, where the link between local authorities ans taxi companies was even more obvious than in Paris, Berlin and other cases.
What are your thoughs on that? It seems to me that Uber is in a lesser moral violation and hence the lesser evil.
Are there any mainstream medias which represent neo-libertarian or whatever it is called views and or at least try to be objective?
Well, the final call for Uber in Taiwan is this, the government let anyone to report the driver and can receive reward in money if successfully doing so. Soon enough, Uber stopped operating.
Obvious-to-me countermeasure: spam the government with fabricated false positives. If most Taiwanese citizens opposed the government on this, it'd work.
spam the government with fabricated false positives
Right. So you say people should lie to their government???!
Martha Stewart thought that she was so smart that she could lie to the FBI when they came to talk to her. Unfortunately for her, it turns out that making false statements to government investigators is a federal crime. Martha wound up doing time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Stewart#Sentence
I have to believe that the USA is not the only country where it is a crime to lie to investigators. You have a right to remain silent, not a right to lie.
The company I work for builds software platforms for cities, tldr: we have a pretty basic sub/pub idea for city data, and give them a little abstraction tool that allows folks who work in cities but don't know what an API is a way to create and publish one so they can then hold the vendor to account (From IoT to the Ubers and Lyfts of the world) -
I spent a lot of time in cities talking to them and the way uber has lobbied and created special interests is absolutely mind blowing. Sometimes a CIO in city using our tool will go to the Mayor and show them how uber, lyft, airbnb etc could integrate to give the city more insight, and without fail the Mayor is scared to push the companies.
Off topic, I just checked out your site. Cool stuff. I work for a labor market data company of whom EDO/WIBs are a large portion of our client base. I'm curious to what kind of data you have at the zip level.
Hmm, so it seems we have a relatively small corporation duking it out with many sovereign governments and standing a good chance of winning the fight. Governments have ultimate authority in their territorial regions (Westphalian Peace), but that idea may no longer be valid these days. My small survey of the zeitgeist says that it is likely to continue this way. So then, what is the next step. We have some sort of corporate-governmental feudalism right now, where either of them 'farms' the people and you elect to be a serf of Google or FB or Uber or many at once, just as you were a Huguenot and a Frenchman and a Gascon all at once. What is the next step here?
I'm a bit torn by this. On the one hand Uber is a terrible company exploiting people desperate enough to sell themselves in the "gig economy" and breaking all manner of laws in the process.
On the other hand I remember my friends and neighbors being abused by police and our "justice" system on a near daily basis as I grew up so it's hard for me to muster much sympathy when their efforts are thwarted.
To me this looks like two powerful entities engaged in a game of slap-fight that ultimately disregards folks of lesser social and economic means.
This is clear cut conspiracy [1]. It's 5 years of federal time (no parole). I am sure once a federal agent arrives at the uber office for a few questions people will be pointing fingers & divulging information without lawyers. Brutal. Hilariously, the people that turned over the docs to the nytimes didn't realize they will also be indicted.
Of all the things Uber is accused of this week, I'm pretty sure this one is the least concerning. It seems to involve the ethical dilemma of a radar detector.
Speed limits are about public safety, too, but speed traps are usually about money. Ride-sharing regulations might be about safety, but Uber 'stings' seem to be about hurting drivers (not Uber) and preserving the value of taxi medallions.
If the police want information, subpoena Uber; don't play spy vs spy with folks trying to eke out a few bucks.
It seems to involve the ethical dilemma of a radar detector.
It is similar, but I think an important difference is that Uber, as an organization, was deliberately flouting the law and also building tools to avoid suffering the consequences of that behavior.
I'd say it is similar to the difference between an individual using a radar detector for personal travel vs. a trucking/shipping company equipping all of their vehicles with radar detectors and making it a company policy to violate the speed limit.
The question is, did they really have to engage in these tactics to "win"? This just makes Uber sound another notch less moral and legal to everyone further making it look like the evil corp. It's like their motto is the opposite of Google's 'Do no Evil'.
And I guess the other question here is: does this matter for people (i.e. consumers)? I would argue that given two equivalent choices, one would vote for the one with better reputation, so yes, it matters
How things like this remain secrets for so long is astounding to me. By definition of what the day to day of driving strangers around Uber has hundreds of drivers who hate their job yet it took this long for these stories to start finding their way into the press.
With Volkswagon cheating the system it was a small group of engineers and covert approval from the top that explained how they could get away with it for so long.
There was a time when Lyft employees would call Uber cars, wait 2 minutes, then cancel the ride. This left riders driving around to pick up phantom rides, unable to make any money servicing legit customers.
If you're questioning whether this system should exist, it seems totally reasonable to build. The question is how aggressively do you use it to protect the company, and from which threats.
If anything, I find this very clever. While there are many valid reasons that justify anger against Uber (workplace harassment and predatory pricing), I don't think this is one. Instead of outlawing Uber, cities and governments should take a step back and reflect on these laws which Uber has proven servers no one.
That is pretty interesting, although 'greyballing' as a analog for 'blackballing' as an analog of creating a list of people you won't serve is taking it a bit deep. I wonder if a counter hack would be to make it illegal to discriminate against people based on whether or not they were a public employee.
I think it is completely reasonable to have a 'reputation' system where drivers can rate passengers as well as passengers rating drivers, and then sharing that rating so that drivers wouldn't pick up people known to be combative drunks. Having your app display a bunch of 'ghost cars' always out of reach has a certain poetic justice.
But parts of this are really mind blowing, going into shops and recording the IMEI's of burner phones for later correlation? I think that's a service right there.
This is certainly a hardball approach, but I see nothing especially wrong with it. When you install Uber, you authorize it to send location data. If you happen to work at a transportation enforcement office, that is going to be immediately apparent to them unless you take countermeasures, such as using a GPS spoofing app.
If I declare myself to be an enemy of a given entity, I fully expect them to use every resource at their disposal to attempt to defeat me - especially when that entity has billions of dollars at stake. That they are using tactics like this shouldn't be surprising. It should be expected.
I kind of have a newfound respect for Uber's ingenuity after reading this. It's probably one of hundreds of examples of the reasons that they have risen so fast.
It isn't necessarily about breaking laws. There are many legitimate reasons to deny service to undercover law enforcement personnel who are often simply looking for ways to boost their agency's revenue through specious allegations. Uber has no legal obligation to do anything for people that do not declare themselves to be law enforcement personnel with special rights.
Not that it will ever stop them, but I often build a clause into the TOS of my websites that law enforcement personnel may not use the site without prior authorization. I have no idea if this will ever stand up in court, but perhaps this clause will, for example, be useful in defeating a search warrant for user information since the suspicion upon which the warrant is based would necessarily have been obtained without authorization unless the government asked for permission to access the site in advance. A healthy disdain for government agents makes for a healthy, free society.
> If I declare myself to be an enemy of a given entity, I fully expect them to use every resource at their disposal to attempt to defeat me
For dealing with individuals, I don't agree that it's ok to use every resource at their disposal. For example, getting the person fired or slandering them is not acceptable.
But this is dealing with government. Avoiding the law and law enforcement is wrong and often illegal.
This program was cleared by what I assume to be a highly paid, competent legal department. So I'm going to guess that you are wrong about the "illegal" part. They are a private business that can refuse service to anyone. Even businesses that aren't even close to breaking the law may have perfectly legitimate reasons to avoid serving people in law enforcement, whose job it often is to cause problems and increase expenses for the businesses they visit.
It would be illegal to refuse to allow them to do their job if they properly identified themselves as officers, and those officers had some kind of court order authorizing them to seize a car for example. But these are undercover agents posing as legitimate customers - a completely different scenario.
>For dealing with individuals, I don't agree that it's ok to use every resource at their disposal. For example, getting the person fired or slandering them is not acceptable.
I agree with this, but your government doesn't. Imagine you are falsely accused of a crime. You are quite likely to be fired, you will certainly be publicly slandered, and you may lose family and friends over it. It will take years and substantial amounts of money to clear your name, and when you do, most of the damage will have already been done anyway. In the end, you won't even receive as much as an apology.
The government doesn't offer you the same kind of mercy that you believe you should afford to others. So there's no reason to afford the government or anyone employed by it any courtesy beyond the bare minimum to which they are legally entitled. In the case of an unannounced undercover agent, they are nothing more than fellow humans with absolutely no special rights.
Just because a lawyer has said something is "OK" doesn't make it legal. Lawyers (even expensive ones) give bad advice all the time for lots of various reasons, or advice that isn't bad at the time, but bad going forward.
Did the lawyer understand this was being used to circumvent the law? Or did they understand it was to prevent violations of their terms of service? Is it possible the company either changed the plan after the lawyer saw it, or didn't fully explain the capacities to the lawyer?
Accused of a crime? Likely not to many of the scenarios you mentioned. Indicted on criminal charges? Likely yes, but that's why we have criminal indictments. It makes it much harder for the government to falsely accuse you of a crime.
Kind of weird IMO to think of a company as deserving or not deserving something. It's a group of people with a with array of opinions and behavior, many of whom probably like having a place to work
It's much more constructive to want the organization to get better than to cheer on some kind of punishment we think it's owed
> Kind of weird IMO to think of a company as deserving or not deserving something.
Companies have patterns of behavior just like any other entity. As much as the idea of 'deserving' applies at all, it can apply to companies.
> It's much more constructive to want the organization to get better than to cheer on some kind of punishment we think it's owed
It's a strange implication that this is different from how we should treat individuals. We should be more focused on rehabilitation when it's an individual.
Glad to see the government being handed back some of it's own techniques. They seriously think they can spy on American citizens? Just wait until the the large tech companies start spying on them.
Even if the law says that Uber must admit taxi inspectors, it's hard to say Uber's breaking the law if the inspectors don't "show their badge" or otherwise identify themselves as officials.
Of course if they do show their badge, there's a great incentive for Uber to say "Sorry, no drivers are available in your area" even if this is not really true.
So you have this curious cat-and-mouse game where the taxi inspector pretends to be somebody else, and Uber tries to penetrate the facade.
That would make sense if they didn't go out of there way to identify potential investigators and law enforcement. I don't see how they could create a system to target law enforcement and then say they didn't know they were.
Where I'm from a taxi driver gets a fine if they refuse service to someone. Seems that Uber has that built in. Seems like it could easily abused for discrimination.
> Where I'm from a taxi driver gets a fine if they refuse service to someone.
Discrimination problem is solved by competition, not regulation. You can't regulate against discrimination.
See how it works with jobs. When employer doesn't want to employ someone for whatever reason, he will simply state that candidate didn't pass the interview or whatever, and you can't prove it otherwise.
In this case, I think regulation serves as competition - either you get the money from the fare, or take a double financial hit from missing the fare and owing a fine.
Edit: Also I disagree that discrimination can be solved by competition. Competition can result in mutually exclusive sets of discrimination eg. extreme nationalism.
I used to work at Uber, and there would always be bad press. Negative spins on just about everything we did.
It didn't deter me at the time simply because 90% was totally bogus and completely blown out of proportion. Just like this article is.
I left the company because it grew too big and the culture began to suffer for it, but all these doom and gloom stories about Uber breaking the law are just silly. Existing taxi regulations are terrible, and none of it makes any sense. None of it even benefits taxi drivers. They are designed to benefit companies who hold medallions, companies who are deep in bed with local governments.
Cities would never have had the incentive to get with the times if it wasn't for Uber, Period.
Setting aside the rather questionable ethics for a moment, this program is quite badass when looking at it from a purely logistical point of view.
In fact, it's so machiavellian that it feels like I'm reading an article disclosing an NSA program and not a private transportation company's activities.
If only they had the same fervor for say, combating sexual harassment in the workplace.
And what if the tool doesn't actually track police officers ? Tracking bad customers by credit card, and making it difficult for them to inconvenience other drivers after doing it a few times would seem to be a quite normal thing for any credit card payment receiver to do.
I mean this thing would probably be looking for jokers (think ordering pizza to your neighbour's house), people with invalid credit cards, people who abuse drivers, and so on and so forth.
So what happened is probably more like this: officers order cars, have the Uber drivers drive up to them, cancel the ride and ticket the driver. The Uber app then proceeds to ask the drivers to "rate the passenger". Needless to say, the police accounts get very bad scores. After doing this 2 or 3 times, the app still shows the police officers the normal interface, but doesn't actually calls cars, knowing the rides will be canceled. The tool now has 2 or 3 separate pieces of information indicating these are not good-faith customers and stops acting in good faith towards them. So it don't tell the bad users it's ignoring them, because they'll just get a new account and start harassing more drivers again. And there you have it: "greyballing".
So it could very well be this isn't designed to catch law enforcement. It just happens to.
Uber leadership provides yet another reason to be happy with deleting their app. A weak apology that didn't even mention their most egregious behaviors??! Travis, you should do the right thing and step down as CEO. You will never be thought of as trustable or honorable again (if you ever were...)
This seems like one of the first major illicit uses of data science. There should be more regulation and oversight over the data owned by corporations.
I don't see why this is so bad. They're a private business, and they're allowed to do business with whom they will. It doesn't really change anything w.r.t the fact that they're skirting regulation, especially if the given origin story is true. Pretty tame compared to the other stuff we've been seeing from Uber, lately.
"Q: What sorts of acts may constitute obstruction of justice?
A: Obstruction may consist of any attempt to hinder the discovery, apprehension, conviction or punishment of anyone who has committed a crime.
Q: Does obstruction of justice always involve bribery or physical force?
A: No. One particularly murky category of obstruction is the use of "misleading conduct" toward another person for the purpose of obstructing justice. "Misleading conduct" may consist of deliberate lies or "material omissions" (leaving out facts which are crucial to a case). It may also include knowingly submitting or inviting a judge or jury to rely on false or misleading physical evidence, such as documents, maps, photographs or other objects. Any other "trick, scheme, or device with intent to mislead" may constitute a "misleading conduct" form of obstruction.
"
If the city has made it actually illegal to drive uber vehicles, this is pretty much textbook obstruction on the part of uber, ....
Isn't obstruction of justice something that happens after a crime has been committed? If I'm a thief and I do my thieving in the middle of the night when no one is around that's an attempt to hinder discovery but it's not obstruction of justice (I don't think?).
Similarly if Uber is operating illegally in a city and they use software to avoid picking up a city official in a sting operation that doesn't sound like obstruction.
IAAL (but i've only done small amount of criminal work).
A crime has been committed, even if they don't pick up the officials.
If uber is operating illegally, the drivers that have picked anyone up have committed a crime.
Keeping the cars away from the officials trying to ticket and prosecute those drivers is the obstruction.
That is, it's not the "avoiding sting" that causes it to be obstruction, because the crime was committed the second a driver picked someone up. Instead, the obstruction is "helping drivers who have committed crimes not be noticed, ticketed, or prosecuted"
That's definitely obstruction in jurisdictions that have this form of obstruction.
But the city's goal with these sting operations wasn't to catch and prosecute drivers/uber for previous trips. It was to catch them in the act for a single trip and prosecute them for that.
To use another analogy, if I'm a drug dealer and the cops try to buy drugs from me in a sting operation and I somehow figure out that they're cops and walk away before doing a deal is that obstruction of justice? Because I think that's basically what is (was?) happening here.
It might be relevant if the person allegedly committing a crime and the person making the supposed crime harder to discover are the same person. In your case they are, in Uber's case they aren't (AFAIK).
"But the city's goal with these sting operations wasn't to catch and prosecute drivers/uber for previous trips."
Errr, sure it is. Their investigatory mechanism happen to be to try catch them on a trip they could prove originated in the city, giving them probable cause to stop them and ticket them.
This just happens to be easier to do as a sting.
"It was to catch them in the act for a single trip and prosecute them for that."
That is just the method, not the purpose of the investigation.
Your argument is what would be called "a distinction without a difference"
If the FBI is looking for illegal uranium sellers, and they try to buy/bust a low level guy as part of the investigation, it does not make the investigation about the buy/bust, it's still to catch and prosecute illegal uranium sellers.
Here, the investigation's goal was to catch and prosecute uber
drivers driving illegally.
In any case, it doesn't matter.
Remember "Obstruction may consist of any attempt to hinder the discovery, apprehension, conviction or punishment of anyone who has committed a crime. "
Not "the crime you are currently investigating", but any crime.
For example, oneo the the federal statute says:
"(a) Whoever willfully endeavors by means of bribery to obstruct, delay, or prevent the communication of information relating to a violation of any criminal statute of the United States by any person to a criminal investigator shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."
(emph mine)
(Ignore the bribery part, there's a ton of these statutes,i'm just pulling out one)
"To use another analogy, if I'm a drug dealer and the cops try to buy drugs from me in a sting operation and I somehow figure out that they're cops and walk away before doing a deal is that obstruction of justice? Because I think that's basically what is (was?) happening here.
"
This isn't obstruction, but it's not what is happening here.
Imagine if the cops were investigating you for dealing drugs. They already had evidence you deal drugs. They ask your friend where you are, even just to talk to you, to try to get cleaner evidence, and he deliberately lies about where you are to protect you. Congrats, that's obstruction in a lot of jurisdictions. No sting reuired.
Here, the cops are asking the uber app where the drivers are. They know or have probable cause to believe the drivers have committed crimes (again, the sting part is just about having a very clean prosecution, it's not required or necessary here).
Uber deliberately lies about where the drivers are, with the purpose of protecting them from this investigation.
You can ignore the sting they were doing completely. The crime was complete the second a law enforcement officer, trying to investigate the crimes of an uber driver, opened the app in an attempt to find a driver (even just to talk to!) and got fake results.
> Here, the cops are asking the uber app where the drivers are. They know or have probable cause to believe the drivers have committed crimes (again, the sting part is just about having a very clean prosecution, it's not required or necessary here). Uber deliberately lies about where the drivers are, with the purpose of protecting them from this investigation.
You have a point here. Though I don't think they were lying about the locations of actual drivers when inserting ghost cars.
But before you were saying that merely refusing to send drivers to cops is obstruction. Why is that obstruction, but refusing to sell drugs to the cops is not obstruction? Picture an alternate version of the app that wouldn't schedule pickups on those phones, but never lied.
As the lawyer in this conversation I'm gonna assume that you're right. Seems like a pretty broad law though. Seems like it could be an add on to almost any other criminal act as criminals almost always try to avoid getting caught one way or another.
Eh, seems fine to me that you can add on extra punishment for not simply owning up to the crime, it's not like avoiding to be caught is a desired behaviour.
you don't have to say anything (except you should definitely affirmatively invoke your right)
Others often can say "i'm not getting involved" or something not misleading or deliberately intended to help you avoid prosecution[1]
But note: Outside of privileges, others often do not have that right to say nothing, it's just not forced in a lot of cases because it's pointless.
[1] they can also often be forced to get involved as a material witness, blah blah blah, in a lot of cases. You just wouldn't put them on the stand anyway because they're not going to be helpful.
Maybe I'm just blasé about the whole thing. I'm just saying that when you take into account the fact that they were already breaking the law, using this tool to help isn't a big jump. People in this thread are acting shocked, and I don't get it.
I kind of doubt it. It's not like you enter into a contract with Uber just by downloading the app, and I don't think you have a legal right to use their services. Maybe you could drum up some sort of civil rights violation? But I don't think law enforcement is actually a protected class...
> It's not like you enter into a contract with Uber just by downloading the app
Ahh, but Uber themselves say you ARE!
"By accessing or using the Services, you confirm your agreement to be bound by these Terms..."
It'd be incredibly amusing to watch their lawyers try to argue it both ways though. They'd have to either admit that they did have a contract, or they'd have to completely tear up their terms-of-service.
IANAL or even very knowledgeable so I could be way off here. Looking up the legal definition of fraud, I found that it requires:
(1) a false statement of a material fact, (2) knowledge on the part of the defendant that the statement is untrue, (3) intent on the part of the defendant to deceive the alleged victim, (4) justifiable reliance by the alleged victim on the statement, and (5) injury to the alleged victim as a result.
1-4 seem obvious enough, but I'm not sure about #5. Would wasting their time or interfering with their enforcement job be enough to qualify as "injury"? Or, since they're acting on behalf of the local government, would it count as injury against that government due to not being able to prosecute crimes and apply fines that they would have been able to if Uber hadn't lied?
"A material fact is an occurrence, event, or information that is sufficiently significant to influence an individual into acting in a certain way, such as entering into a contract. In formal court procedures, a material fact is anything needed to prove one party's case, or tending to establish a point that is crucial to a person's position."
The location of cars will influence the user's actions, and false cancellations definitely will.
I'm not sure what wouldn't be material in this case, but maybe it would exclude things that are unrelated to Uber? Like if Uber told you that Wal-Mart was selling weed whackers for $5, that wouldn't be fraud because it's not material to your relationship with Uber.
>Uber had tagged Mr. England and his colleagues — essentially Greyballing them as city officials — based on data collected from the app and in other ways. The company then served up a fake version of the app populated with ghost cars, to evade capture.
Wow, that's genius.
Uber has my full support when it's them vs. outdated entrenched state regulations.
It's sad that Uber has to go to such lengths to avoid busybody government officials from interfering in peaceful commercial transactions. The people of Portland should fire these officials. Not only are they wasting taxpayer money, but they are also imposing costs on Uber and their customers.
It's sad that sweatshop owners have to go to such lengths to avoid busybody government officials from interfering in peaceful commercial transactions with children. The people of the United States should fire these officials. Not only are they wasting taxpayer money, but they are also imposing costs on manufacturers and their customers.
Uber has demonstrated a willingness to treat their employees like shit. The fact that local governments haven't interfered more is a testament to the pervasive attractiveness of two-bit libertarian confusion. I don't want to be driven around by a driver on their 14th hour of work. I don't want to be driven around by a driver with a poor driving record. I don't want to be driven around by a worker who is being exploited because they have been wrongly classified as a contractor and willfully mislead about their earning prospects. That's why we have government labor and safety regulators, because the profit motive is constantly in conflict with the rights of individual works or customers.
Don't like e coli? Don't like false advertising? Don't like children smoking cigarettes? Don't like predatory lending? Thank a regulator!
Regulators are not protecting the public when they go after Uber; they are protecting the monopoly profits of the taxi services. Uber, a ride-sharing service, is not a dangerous bacteria; it's not a sweatshop using child laborers; it's not false advertising; it's not children smoking cigarettes; and it's not predatory lending. Associating Uber with these is an attempt to substitute misdirection for honest arguments.
There are laws that protect people from physical harm such as licensing for doctors or to keep people in certain fields from working too many hours (e.g. airline pilots and Emergency Room Doctors).
There are laws that protect patents, copyrights, and other forms of IP so that inventors, writers can get some returns on their work.
Then there are laws put in place by special interest groups to benefit themselves economically creating a market inefficiency (e.g. "rent-seeking") at a cost to others. In NYC, before Uber/Lyft came on the market the was a political restriction ("rent seeking") of 13,000 hailable cabs throughout a city of population exceeding 8 million creating a politically-induced scarcity. At times it was hard to get cabs, the value of a Taxi medallion was $1.2 million.
Then Uber/Lyft/Gett/Via came along and hailable taxis are more readily available at lower costs but the value of the Taxi medallion is now less than $750,000. Naturally the medallion owners fought politically to protect their politically induced scarcity that harmed consumers in both availability and pricing.
Many of the laws that Uber is countering is in the form of "rent-seeking" laws that create a market inefficiency benefiting special interests and that harms consumers in terms of availability and price.
It is wrong that taxpayer money go into enforcing these laws that benefit special interests over consumers. Tax money on law enforcement should be spent fighting violent crime and activities that lead to violence crime, insider trading and other forms of white collar crime, etc.
You call it "rent seeking" but that's just not the case. Almost every law is founded in some sort of public interest. In 1937, NYC passed the Haas Act to clean up the taxi industry which had become so competitive that taxi drivers were not able to make ends meet (sound familiar?) and were turning to less than legal means to supplement their income.
While that law is 80 years old, its original principle was to provide a safer more reliable experience for the average person. And it worked. Should it be re-examined, yes absolutely. But to disregard it as "rent-seeking" and suggest that uber/lyft other tech startups shouldn't be subject to the same rules as everyone else is grossly negligent and demonstrates a true lack of understanding of the problem at hand.
Not to mention, this is entirely off topic from the Greyball tool.
This is a common and bad form of argument: "there is at least one conceivable justification for this law, so it is not rent-seeking".
But no one ever makes their primary public justification "we'd like to screw over the public and make more money". There is always something about some harm that the law will prevent. The question is whether the law is well targeted and proportionate. The restrictions on supply for taxi medallions fail that criterion by a long shot.
Just because the law is problematic (and let's be clear, it's problematic, but 1000 times less so than drug laws, for instance) doesn't give Uber a blanket right to keep cops from hailing their vehicles, unless you really think that there's no scenario where Uber or its drivers could be legitimate targets of investigation.
bash them for the sexism agreed, but not everything. When riding a taxi was ridiculously expensive. Uber made it affordable and bought it to the middle class. Haters will remain haters.
In the US, riding in a taxi has never been ridiculously expensive, and it has not gotten any cheaper on account of Uber.
Moreover, Uber did not create a business to offer affordable rides to the middle class. They created a business to offer the sort of luxury that titans of industry who have private drivers experience, to people willing to pay for that service.
What Uber did do is make the 'car on demand' idea functional and ubiquitous. But A) they didn't do it legally and B) it turns on the 'on demand' part matters more to customers than the 'luxury' part.
So today, because rides are subsidized, you can summon a car and be driven around for what seems like quite a bargain. But subsidies are pretty much the opposite of 'product market fit'.
This news appears to be a clear-cut example of Uber not only breaking the law, but of obstructing justice to protect their illegal operations from enforcement of the law. I think that ought to be looked upon contemptuously.
I'm not supportive of Uber anymore because of the apparently toxic culture, however, I DO side on the free market, especially when it comes to things like taxis, etc. The fact that a grown adult with a car can't engage in a transaction with another consenting grown adult to exchange money for a ride somewhere (or pick your product of choice..) to me, that's anti-liberty.
The argument has always been "we have to protect the public." However, if that's the case, then why wouldn't the government "protect" people from hitchhiking? Apparently hitchhiking is legal. (https://expertvagabond.com/hitchhiking-america/) Getting into cars with strange guys someone meets at a bar is also legal. Going to eat food at someone's unlicensed kitchen in their home is legal -- as long as you don't pay for it. All "dangerous" activities.
In terms of "protecting" the public, why does the public always need protecting? For example, arguments against marijuana, yet alcohol is legal. Drinking 1000 Coca Colas is perfectly legal, but the Szechuan peppercorn was was banned in the US from 1968 until 2005 to "protect" people. Kinder Surprise eggs are illegal. Swimming pools kill over 3,500 people per year in the US -- far more than die (or are even injured) in Ubers. Yet we need to restrict Uber/Lyft/etc. because "protecting the public?"
Regarding "protecting" us from "unsafe" drivers -- that really ought to be up to the individual to decide. If Uber, Lyft, et al were getting into daily fatal accidents, then the public would likely chose another means to get a ride -- meaning, the market (when it's allowed to work,) does achieve an equilibrium. If one service is "dangerous" or "rude" or whatever, a competitor can win business by promoting "safety" or "politeness." Yet, when the taxi mafia controls a town, the market can't respond because there are artificial barriers to entry.
"Don't like Yellow Cab? -- ok, you could try calling Yellow Cab if you want an alternative."
I strongly condemn Uber's apparently toxic culture -- but in terms of the need for "regulation" or other such nonsense, I feel like grown adults ought not need to be continually "protected." There are some notable exceptions; pharmaceuticals for example because there are long-term ill effects from faulty medicines and the general public isn't knowledgable about molecular biology. However there aren't any long-term ill effects from riding in an Uber -- not any more so than riding in any other paid conveyance. Regulating hair stylists? Even exotic dangers have to have a license in many places: a girl actually has to have permission from some city agency to take off her clothes and dance. That's just nonsensical.
Freedom ought to matter, but nowadays it seems as if it's freedom, as long as you fill out a bunch of forms and pay a fee or have political influence (as does the taxi mafia.) Who cares if some dude wants to take people in his car for money. If you don't like it, nobody is forcing you to ride. Cities are pissed at Uber not because citizens are dying in Uber wrecks but because they're missing out on extortionate fees and/or campaign donations from the taxi lobby. Funny how "liberal" Portland and Austin had banned Uber. Not very liberal at all if you ask me -- just old fashioned money-grubbing cronyism. Portland had legal marijuana but illegal Uber. Ridiculous. True liberalism is about freedom -- not the nanny state.
Good for Uber in doing what they can to thwart these "officials" that seem to think their mission in life is to control, subdue and "protect" the population.
Let's be clear here. The laws Uber violated here were bad laws. They were the result of a semi-corrupt relationship between city governments and taxi cab companies. Uber has been the prime mover in killing these laws. That's a good thing.
I like this. Some call it hustle, others call it evading LE because cashflow is king, and nothing shall stop the flow.
I commend this but also frown at it for being so brazen. If such a tool was used for the opposite reasons (spotting crime and reporting it to police), then perhaps the tool might stand a chance, but showcasing it in full view of LEOs is outright brazen and guaranteed to embarrass.
People are campaigning on Twitter to #DeleteUber[0] but fail to recognize the naive nature of the story. I consider Uber nothing more than an ongoing experiment, and any tool they release to increase their revenue should be both commended and also be treated with suspicion.
> I commend this but also frown at it for being so brazen. If such a tool was used for the opposite reasons (spotting crime and reporting it to police), then perhaps the tool might stand a chance
That's like commending a hammer murderer for his swing technique, but frowning on him for practicing on skulls instead of nails.
But there's a lot in the article that doesn't make sense:
>Other techniques included looking at the user’s credit card information and whether that card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union.
I couldn't find a good source, but it doesn't seem like that's something a CC merchant would have access to. Do they really get to see that?[2]
Also, how were they able to do it so accurately without disrupting their service? Most city employees and police aren't going to be involved in sting operations against car services, so their customer support will have to deal with a torrent of very confused government employees [1] who keep getting mysterious rejections when they try to use they app, and which support can't give a truthful answer on.
Plus, this seemed to require significant on-the-ground intel and human intervention:
>If those clues were not enough to confirm a user’s identity, Uber employees would search social media profiles and other available information online. Once a user was identified as law enforcement, Uber Greyballed him or her, tagging the user with a small piece of code that read Greyball followed by a string of numbers.
So, I'm surprised it worked at all.
[1] identified by the fact of that person having more-than-usual activity inside something recognized as a government building
[2] EDIT: Okay, I get it -- you can look up banks from the CC number. Can we not have further comments just to point this out?