
Uber used secret spyware to try to crush Australian startup GoCatch - us0r
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-18/uber-used-secret-spyware-to-try-and-crush-australian-start-up/10901120
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ganeshkrishnan
I am absolutely confident that despite Uber being an ultra shady company, this
news is even more nonsensical. The "surfcam" is more of a lead generation
program for Uber and it even did this against Lyft. Infact Uber people would
use the free credits of Lyft to take a ride and then market Uber.

Any driver worth his salt has all the car sharing apps installed and switches
between them.

In this case it's pretty obvious the drivers saw no obvious advantage of being
a gocatch driver and switched to Uber. Also here in Melbourne gocatch were
just advertising as app for taxi service, not like ride sharing that Uber
did.I never used them even if I had free credits from them.

Bad marketing, wrong targeting, crappy advertising but hey they got to blame
someone else for their failure

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jmull3n
What is Surfcam and where can I find out more about it?

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takeda
You can start with the article that is discussed here.

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JimmyAustin
I'd bet good money that this was one engineer with Charles or Burb MITMing
their phone to get details on the GoCatch API, then scraping it with a python
script.

It's the cyber equivalent of walking into a business and writing down the
names on the name tags.

Complaining about stuff like this gives Australian companies a bad name.

