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

301–310 of 529 posts

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#301

Post by sgustard »

rosser wrote: post #172
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow I think this unroll.me thing is the real scandal here. I am an unroll.me user, but had no idea they sell user data to companies this way. Their whole value proposition is to help people control their own privacy and now I kind of feel betrayed..

From their own site: "Unroll.Me is a free service ", emphasis added. If it's free for you, you're the product.

>If it's free for you, you're the product.

So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information?

Since the answer is obviously no (and in fact, purchasing behavior is the juiciest stuff to sell, be it Comcast, Target, etc), then this tired trope is meaningless.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#302

Post by lovich »

bogomipz wrote: post #163
pdog wrote: post #36

From the article, explained: At the time, Uber was dealing with widespread account fraud in places like China, where tricksters bought stolen iPhones that were erased of their memory and resold. Some Uber drivers there would then create dozens of fake email addresses to sign up for new Uber rider accounts attached to each phone, and request rides from those phones, which they would then accept. Since Uber was handing…

>" Some Uber drivers there would then create dozens of fake email addresses to sign up for new Uber rider accounts attached to each phone, and request rides from those phones, which they would then accept. Since Uber was handing out incentives to drivers to take more rides, the drivers could earn more money this way." Could someone explain the logic behind how a driver requesting rides benefited them? Did the drivers…

Give a reference code to your other phone. That phone now has a credit for their first uber ride or first 20 dollars, something like that. Then take the ride on your driver phone. You get paid from the second phones credit but dont spend any money yourself

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#304

Post by abritishguy »

sgustard wrote: post #301
rosser wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their own site: "Unroll.Me is a free service ", emphasis added. If it's free for you, you're the product.

>If it's free for you, you're the product. So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information? Since the answer is obviously no (and in fact, purchasing behavior is the juiciest stuff to sell, be it Comcast, Target, etc), then this tired trope is meaningless.

But if you aren't paying then they must be making money elsewhere.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#305

Post by the_watcher »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #152
ErikAugust wrote: post #138

Buried lede here: "They spent much of their energy one-upping rivals like Lyft. Uber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of…

Wow I think this unroll.me thing is the real scandal here. I am an unroll.me user, but had no idea they sell user data to companies this way. Their whole value proposition is to help people control their own privacy and now I kind of feel betrayed..

> Their whole value proposition is to help people control their own privacy and now I kind of feel betrayed..

Really? I never got that. While I'm also a little unsettled by the selling data part, the value prop was always pretty clearly simplifying unsubscribing en masse, which necessarily involved handing over access to the contents of your emails.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#306

Post by hackuser »

ErikAugust wrote: post #138

Buried lede here: "They spent much of their energy one-upping rivals like Lyft. Uber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of…

> lede

It may be of interest to you, but it isn't the lede of the story. The lede is a pattern of behavior by the CEO, of which that is one element.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#307

Post by gdulli »

sgustard wrote: post #301
rosser wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their own site: "Unroll.Me is a free service ", emphasis added. If it's free for you, you're the product.

>If it's free for you, you're the product. So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information? Since the answer is obviously no (and in fact, purchasing behavior is the juiciest stuff to sell, be it Comcast, Target, etc), then this tired trope is meaningless.

If X then Y doesn't imply anything about not-X, but that doesn't mean it's less useful for describing X.

It's moot anyway because the answer is out there publicly and no heuristic is needed to resolve it.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#308

Post by woogiewonka »

oculusthrift wrote: post #212
woogiewonka wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of fake news Rose from one guy making shit up for ad money. The whole ordeal about how fake news is this sinister plot to disinform is a disinformation effort in itself. There's a big difference about reporting while being misinformed vs disinforming or to harness views.

what i'm saying is that people doing misinformed reporting causes people to not trust the news at all. and let's cynical people (trump) label all journalism as fake news

I think it takes a certain kind of individual to trust everything they read at face value without getting multiple points of view on an issue and researching their own facts. Not saying we shouldn't hold reporters accountable to higher standards but we live in a time where everything is rushed and pumped out as "content' for ad revenue.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#309

Post by jwdunne »

sgustard wrote: post #301
rosser wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their own site: "Unroll.Me is a free service ", emphasis added. If it's free for you, you're the product.

>If it's free for you, you're the product. So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information? Since the answer is obviously no (and in fact, purchasing behavior is the juiciest stuff to sell, be it Comcast, Target, etc), then this tired trope is meaningless.

In the UK, O2 has a line in their terms and conditions that pretty much say they're allowed to sell your data to 3rd parties.

Now it's obvious why I've got people calling me asking about my recent loan that may have had PPI or that traumatic car crash I was in a few years ago, even though I've never in my life on both fronts. It's my bloody carrier!

If you use Google, shop in a supermarket, use a mobile phone, have the internet, your data is being collected and, in most cases, being sold to "chosen partners for marketing purposes". Everyone's doing it because they can make money from it.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#310

Post by aeturnum »

hsod wrote: post #110
pdog wrote: post #36

From the article, explained: At the time, Uber was dealing with widespread account fraud in places like China, where tricksters bought stolen iPhones that were erased of their memory and resold. Some Uber drivers there would then create dozens of fake email addresses to sign up for new Uber rider accounts attached to each phone, and request rides from those phones, which they would then accept. Since Uber was handing…

This really doesn't match up with how the conversation/outrage is playing out on Twitter right now. People seem to be interpreting this as "Uber continues to track your location after you have deleted the app," when what really happened seemed to be "If you delete Uber and then reinstall it on the same phone, Uber knows that it's the same phone." See for example this Tweet, with hundreds of retweets and lots of verif…

One of the risks of refusing to talk about services is that you're at the mercy of games of telephone. People describe what you're doing to journalists who carefully dilute anecdotes and details to obscure their exact source. Then you don't comment directly on the system because it's a secret, and here you are.

The problem for Uber is that they /are/ scummy. They proudly bend every possible rule to their advantage. It's easy to believe the worst about them.

Post reply on HN