Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber CEO Plays with Fire

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 529 posts

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#291

Post by uzoodoo »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #230
pyre wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take out a loan from a loan shark, you should probably know what to expect. That doesn't mean that the loan shark isn't breaking the law when you get roughed up for non-payment.

Also, the thing is this is not really the loan shark situation. People who go to loan shark know exactly what they're getting into--borrowing money. People who signed up for unroll.me signed up because they got sick of all the the spammers and wanted to get away from all that easily. Most people including me, thought they would somehow monetize with ads or something like that, but never thought they would sell our in…

You have to be naive to give a service access to a trove of your private data and expect them to just leave it there...

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#293

Post by _pmf_ »

maxerickson wrote: post #24

It'd be nice if Apple had been less pragmatic and more principled and just yanked any version of the Uber app that broke the rules.

> It'd be nice if Apple had been less pragmatic and more principled and just yanked any version of the Uber app that broke the rules.

Spine implants are hard to get, even for Tim Cook.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#294

Post by clample »

smokeyj wrote: post #221
clample wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that Uber is a service that people need? This sounds like exactly the kind of company that should be held to a high standard.

But how do you judge uber if you can't trust journalistic integrity? The very people you trust to think for you are unqualified - which leads me to believe so is your opinion. This seems to be the problem with Fake News.

You're not addressing what I'm saying. What I said has nothing to do with journalism

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#295

Post by CodeMage »

kristianc wrote: post #234
jlarocco wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The saying isn't meant to be an excuse for companies, it's a reminder to end users to pay attention what they're signing up for. Situations like this one are exactly why the saying became popular.

It's trite, and aside from belonging in the big dustbin of Hacker News cliches like linking to XKCD Standards, 'Just because you can doesn't mean you should' and 'Conflating Causation and Correlation' in this case it obscures more than it illuminates. A product may be free - and you may still be happy to be the product if you think your attention is being sold, or that they plan to upsell you onto a premium plan. 'If…

> 'If you're not a paying user' doesn't immediately lead you to 'They're going to scan my email and sell the data to fucking Uber' and shouldn't require the user to scan the ToS / rack their brains for every nefarious bit of fuckery the company might conceivably use the data for.

I agree with the first half of what you said and disagree with the second. That's precisely the value of the original saying: it's not there to be an excuse for a company, it's there to spread awareness and remind people that they should get informed about just _how_ they're being productized _before_ they have cause to regret using the service.

If more of us scanned the ToS carefully, we might catch the nefarious bits of fuckery on time and pressure the company to change.

Does the privacy policy say your data will be sold to third parties? Great, find out what data, to what third parties and questions like that.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#296

Post by qwert-e »

williamle8300 wrote: post #246

Uber is such a morally bankrupt company. Why is NYT trying to frame it in a good light?

I'm not sure they are. I certainly didn't read it as a puff piece. After enumerating all of Uber's problems, I think the "he had lived to fight another day" conclusion is supposed to be a little wry.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#297

Post by eli »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #129
jakelarkin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wonder why Mike Issac gave that clarification immediately to his twitter-base but didn't put it in the relevant section? could it be because the article intentionally glosses over complex details in order to pump a specific narrative ... hmm. \s

That's a clever media hack. Using provocative headlines and misleading lead to get clicks and shares, but using a separate medium (Twitter) to get away with it. Clever, but it's disappointing that even NYT is turning into this madness.

It's wrong to assume malice.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#298

Post by jgalt212 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #270
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a clever media hack. Using provocative headlines and misleading lead to get clicks and shares, but using a separate medium (Twitter) to get away with it. Clever, but it's disappointing that even NYT is turning into this madness.

They've also updated the article text now: "To halt the activity, Uber engineers assigned a persistent identity to iPhones with a small piece of code, a practice called “fingerprinting.” Uber could then identify an iPhone and prevent itself from being fooled even after the device was erased of its contents." Note that this was at least 4 hours after the outrage on Twitter started. Seems like a very intentional, well-…

> Note that this was at least 4 hours after the outrage on Twitter started. Seems like a very intentional, well-calculated strategy indeed.

That comment seems a bit disingenuous. i.e. it's entirely possible it takes a journo 20 seconds to post a correct to a twitter account he/she controls and 4 hours/days/weeks to get his/her editors to sign off on the same correct and the change pushed to the news website.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#300

Post by morgante »

gdulli wrote: post #277
mathattack wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they sell your receipt data to Uber, who else might they sell it to? An insurance company? A hedge fund? Your bank?

They would never know who "your" bank is. Reading a few paragraphs near the top of the privacy policy could have cleared up the initial misunderstanding about the nature of the service and also any FUD about how the data is used.

Presumably your bank is the one sending you statement emails...
Post reply on HN