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

311–320 of 529 posts

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#311

Post by clarkmoody »

odonnellryan wrote: post #120
valuearb wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The immigrants driving 12 hours a day are paying hella rents to the taxi companies for that privilege. There is a reason NYC taxi medallions were being traded for over $1M, because the taxi companies lobbied to limit the supply of taxis and were making massive profits leasing those medallions to drivers.

There are other reasons why you'd want to limit the number of drivers. It is not good for NYC to have too many taxis, or too many Uber or Lyft drivers. There should be enough, but there is a point where there are too many people driving through the streets of NYC looking to pick up riders.

> too many taxis

> There should be enough

And who gets to decide how many is "enough" or "too many"?

Shouldn't it be the voluntary actions of individuals coordinated by the price system, rather than a centralized planning board? When ride prices are very high, new competitors come in to serve the demand. When prices are low, the least efficient cars stop giving rides, and the supply shrinks. The price system coordinates the actions of countless individuals without the need for a central planner.

Note: I'm not defending Uber / Lyft in any way, as I'm not familiar enough with the latest drama.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#312

Post by snikolic »

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..

Slice (unroll.me) is owned by Rakuten, who also owns a whole family of companies including Ebates, Rakuten Marketing (a fairly large adtech company), Viber, Buy.com, and lots of others. Slice's data has all sorts of interesting applications, both within the Rakuten family and to third parties like Uber. If you're a Slice/unroll.me user, I'd bet that a lot of your online experience is shaped by the data you share with Slice. A lot of Rakuten's other properties actually share office space with Slice in San Mateo, so there's obviously plenty of opportunity for collaboration. :-)

The irony is that Rakuten also owns a significant (12 percent?) stake in Lyft. Pretty funny that one Rakuten property was selling data to Uber who used it to hurt a second Rakuten property.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#313

Post by karlkatzke »

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..

I worked for a company that nearly acquired unroll.me. At the time, which was over three years ago, they had kept a copy of every single email of yours that you sent or received while a part of their service. Those emails were kept in a series of poorly secured S3 buckets. A large part of Slice buying unroll.me was for access to those email archives. Specifically, they wanted to look for keyword trends and for receipts from online purchases.

The founders of unroll.me were pretty dishonest, which is a large part of why the company I worked for declined to purchase the company. As an example, one of the problems was how the founders had valued and then diluted equity shares that employees held. To make a long story short, there weren't any circumstances in which employees who held options or an equity stake would see any money.

I hope you weren't emailed any legal documents or passwords written in the clear.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#314

Post by neom »

odonnellryan wrote: post #143
zilchers wrote: post #89

I'm off uber after a BS "5 minute" issue. I've been using it for years, they literally had to burn so much goodwill to get me to stop using them, it's almost impressive.

You're talking about them tracking you for up to five minutes after they drop you off, right? I've also left Uber for Lyft.

Ditto and I'd done a lot of rides; https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1804713823185446&set...

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#315

Post by gsteinb88 »

hackuser wrote: post #306
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.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bury_the_lede

OP is implying the "real story" (i.e. the most important part of the article) is not what the article begins with

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#316

Post by amitagarwal »

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…

Here's an open source Google Script that lets you easily unsubscribe from bulk emails in Gmail. Source on Github. https://www.labnol.org/internet/gmail-unsubscribe/28806/

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#317

Post by eropple »

gdulli wrote: post #273
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..

> Wow I think this unroll.me thing is the real scandal here. How is it a scandal? Competitive intel is a normal and widespread thing and it's not a scandal that people don't read a privacy policy that says, "We may collect, use, transfer, sell, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose."

> it's not a scandal that people don't read a privacy policy that says, "We may collect, use, transfer, sell, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose."

That companies are allowed to have such a non-privacy policy damned well should be. The number of privacy policies I'd have to read on a daily basis to function on the Internet is ludicrous and it is only because of my job working for companies like that that I know that those privacy policies exist in the first place.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#318

Post by [deleted] »

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..

[deleted]

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#320

Post by Tiktaalik »

clarkmoody wrote: post #311
odonnellryan wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other reasons why you'd want to limit the number of drivers. It is not good for NYC to have too many taxis, or too many Uber or Lyft drivers. There should be enough, but there is a point where there are too many people driving through the streets of NYC looking to pick up riders.

> too many taxis > There should be enough And who gets to decide how many is "enough" or "too many"? Shouldn't it be the voluntary actions of individuals coordinated by the price system, rather than a centralized planning board? When ride prices are very high, new competitors come in to serve the demand. When prices are low, the least efficient cars stop giving rides, and the supply shrinks. The price system coordina…

The city needs to regulate transportation in order to prevent an abuse of the commons that makes everything worse for everyone.

Cars impose negative externalities on others in that they take up space on the road and increase traffic congestion. This is not factored into any pricing system.

Too many taxis is potentially bad in that they increase traffic congestion and make public transit less efficient. This can result in worse transportation options for low income persons, especially in the case where the taxis are Lyft/Uber type ride shares that are only hailable with a smart phone and may be more expensive due to surge pricing.

A potential solution is to introduce comprehensive road pricing such that a car pays for its amount of road use.

Post reply on HN