281–290 of 805 posts
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.
How diabolical! 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 see…
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 multinatio…
Some corporate entity is not.
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Notes:
1. As the saying goes, politicians rule at the pleasure of the votors, tyrants rule at the pleasure of the assassins.
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…
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.
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’…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
"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 f…
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.
Are there legal grounds here for a court decision against Uber based on this? I suppose the answer depends on the nation or state in which this tactic was deployed. This behavior doesn't surprise me based on their strategy of negotiation regarding regulation.
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.
"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...
If you give me location access permission, it seems reasonable to expect that I'm going to use that location access.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Did you just make the argument that the government enforcing the laws is immoral?
"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 ap…