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Uber employees used the platform to stalk celebrities and their exes

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Re: Uber employees used the platform to stalk celebrities and their exes

#3
This seems like a good place to tell Uber users that the only way of removing your credit card details from your Uber account is to either:

a) plead with Uber's customer service to do so

or

b) add another payment method (like another credit card)

This, of course, is horribly bad practice. I can only imagine that they arrived at this very peculiar arrangement after extensive A/B testing - Uber has hired plenty of FB folks and those people tend to be really into that kind of thing. I haven't seen this kind of outright customer-hostility from a large Internet company.. well, ever, before.

So, no, I'm not surprised that this company is doing other unethical things - it sort of seems interwoven into their DNA.

Re: Uber employees used the platform to stalk celebrities and their exes

#5
I think it's time for the government to give you as many names as you want to give out to companies, and there's no reason for anyone who isn't suing you for it to know which of your aliases go together. Also aliases should be shared, to further conflate things. (nothing should stop my friends and i from sharing an alias and persona - companies should be legally forced to bend over backwards and enable this, for everyone. For example Google should be legally forced to allow you to create a new gmail inbox with a new name in a single click and not have it tied on any way to the old name.) Also credit card companies should be forced to give you as many cards in whatever names that you ask for. Nobody who isn't suing you should have a right to know your true name. They shouldn't even have it on record. If they wanna know something about you, they should ask you.

It works for writers, celebrities, etc - why not the rest of us.

EDIT to clarify: this is a serious comment, you can read it literally.

Re: Uber employees used the platform to stalk celebrities and their exes

#6
A few days ago (on the discussion of the Uber app tracking users' movements after the end of their ride) an Uber employee commented on their data handling: [0]

> Individual users' data is very closely guarded internally. It's immensely difficult to look at user data without specific access. Overwhelmingly, this data is queried in aggregate and fed into machine learning systems. The risk of abuse is exceptionally low.

Obviously this doesn't add up. What gives?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085775

Re: Uber employees used the platform to stalk celebrities and their exes

#7

I think it's time for the government to give you as many names as you want to give out to companies, and there's no reason for anyone who isn't suing you for it to know which of your aliases go together. Also aliases should be shared, to further conflate things. (nothing should stop my friends and i from sharing an alias and persona - companies should be legally forced to bend over backwards and enable this, for ever…

I'm not sure I follow.

Re: Uber employees used the platform to stalk celebrities and their exes

#8
post #7

I think it's time for the government to give you as many names as you want to give out to companies, and there's no reason for anyone who isn't suing you for it to know which of your aliases go together. Also aliases should be shared, to further conflate things. (nothing should stop my friends and i from sharing an alias and persona - companies should be legally forced to bend over backwards and enable this, for ever…

I'm not sure I follow.

? I thought I was explicit? Can you write how you interpret what I wrote (you can try to interpret my meaning) then I'll clarify if it's not what I meant...

EDIT: to eon - ah, okay. No it was serious, as my other replies here show. I'll add a serious tag.

Re: Uber employees used the platform to stalk celebrities and their exes

#9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I follow.

? I thought I was explicit? Can you write how you interpret what I wrote (you can try to interpret my meaning) then I'll clarify if it's not what I meant... EDIT: to eon - ah, okay. No it was serious, as my other replies here show. I'll add a serious tag.

For the record: I think you were being quite clear.

Re: Uber employees used the platform to stalk celebrities and their exes

#10
post #6

A few days ago (on the discussion of the Uber app tracking users' movements after the end of their ride) an Uber employee commented on their data handling: [0] > Individual users' data is very closely guarded internally. It's immensely difficult to look at user data without specific access. Overwhelmingly, this data is queried in aggregate and fed into machine learning systems. The risk of abuse is exceptionally low.…

"Uber continues to increase our security investments and many of these efforts, like our multi-factor authentication checks and bug bounty program, have been widely reported"

That has absolutely nothing to do with preventing insider access. Where there's smoke screen, there's fire.

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