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.
How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
351–360 of 805 posts
Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
#352I 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?
Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
#353It 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’…
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…
That could also be a CC fraud detection algorithm
Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But here your problem is not with government but bad government.
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.
Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 compl…
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.
Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
Right, but the fact that it's debatable at all means that you don't automatically get to automatically classify breaking a law as a moral evil.
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.
Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If I don't like Uber, I can... stop using Uber. 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.
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?
That's what checks and balances are for. Ideally it'd be the judiciary, if it came down to it it would be the people.
Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
1 isn't obvious to me. What makes the location of cars 'material'?
Again IANAL and looking things up online:
"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.
Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Any sufficiently large (or disruptive) company has an impact far beyond its customer base.
Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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).