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How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

nytimes.com

661–670 of 805 posts

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#661

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 anythin…

EDIT: After re-reading your statement, it doesn't appear you meant customers. Leaving my statement below anyway. > 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. Or because I don't really have an option. Cabs are still terrible and require me to carry cash which I don't, and lyft doesn't work on my phone.

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.

Uber is bigger than SV ethics and grandstanding.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#662

Earlier 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…

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 t…

You need to grow up from calling people you disagree with teenagers.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#663

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…

> I'm now reinstalling Uber.

Most people admit the service is needed, and well executed. But the company is shit. So use lyft

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious. Where else is conversation worth reading daily?

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 o…

My World has many periscopes. HN is a unique one. I like to find more.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly.

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.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#666
post #288
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just make the argument that the government enforcing the laws is immoral?

The government enforcing laws is immoral at times. It is the law in Saudi Arabia to stone homosexuals to death.

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.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#667
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber was always too shady to be justifiably plucky

Uber was justifiably shady. They had to get around outdated laws that protects an outdated medium of transportation.

There are a lot of reasons people think Uber is shady beyond just their lawbreaking.

Their CEO, their abusive and toxic mysoginist work culture, etc.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of corporations have done similar or eqivalent actions.

OK. No corporation has nuked two cities full of civilians.

Four comments.

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.

I've written on this previously: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/xwjjk1bh7yki6ja4lrg7ka

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.

But as you were saying.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#669
post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

well, corporations can't change laws. They can only lobby. And laws are passed by the majority to benefit a majority, that's how a democracy works.

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.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#670
post #39

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 go…

> 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 peo…

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.

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