Uber CEO Plays with Fire • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#321

Post by porpoisemonkey » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 9:49 PM UTC

koolba wrote: post #106

rhino369 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>regular taxi system as that's even more corrupt and despicable. The idea that the taxis are corrupt and despicable is 100% Uber/Lyft propaganda. The idea that a bunch of immigrants driving 12 hours a day to support a meager income for their families are a cabal of special interests is ridiculous. Uber and Lyft are better than taxis because of the on demand nature and they are cheaper because of better utilization. B…

The problem with taxis isn't corruption (at the driver level). It's that the service is uniformly terrible. There's no incentive to improve as you'll likely never see the same driver twice. The drivers don't care because it's not worth to them to care. Add to that the issue that every taxi ride I've taken in recent memory involved the driver spending the entire ride complaining about the low fare (which is 2x the Ube…

> Add to that the issue that every taxi ride I've taken in recent memory involved the driver spending the entire ride complaining about the low fare

To be fair most of the conversations I've had with Lyft drivers quickly turned to fair price and their own financial issues too. (I've never ridden Uber so I don't have any data points to compare.)

Maybe they're just trying to develop a context for any tip you might give?

> the driver spending the entire ride complaining about the low fare (which is 2x the UberX fare).

My understanding is that UberX fares seen by riders are ridiculously low (significantly below the cost of the ride) and are actually subsidized by Uber so I'm not sure if that's a great price comparison point.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/uber-true-cost-uh...

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#322

Post by rosser » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 9:51 PM UTC

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.

Whether I'm paying for a service is orthogonal to what its ToS allows them to do with my data. When I'm not paying for it, you can be pretty confident the ToS explicitly allows it, with even money on its being phrased in abstrusely arcane legalese. They have to make money somehow...

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#323

Post by allover » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 9:58 PM UTC

gdulli wrote: post #280

chinathrow wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend recommended unroll.me once. I carefully read their ToS and it was clear that they get full read access to your whole Gmail-Inbox. Now we know what they are doing it and how. I hope they get shutdown within the aftermath of this story.

Why on earth would a service get shut down for allowing consenting adults to opt into an agreement that allows anonymized data to be shared in a compliant way?

They wouldn't 'get shut down' for it, but if the service was transparent about what they were doing people would likely unsubscribe/cease to sign up. It really depends if anyone is prepared to take them to task on it.

> 'consenting adults'

Are you consenting if you don't know what you're consenting to.

> anonymized data

Widely understood that anonymized data is bullshit, which is why the term "de-anonymized" exists. It's especially bullshit when there are no 'standards' as to what constitutes it.

> shared in a compliant way

What does that even mean.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#324

Post by yeldarb » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 10:02 PM UTC

stevenwoo wrote: post #235

ams6110 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it "quietly stopped working" I'd have to assume the latter.

Thanks, I just remember that when I stored the items the documentation recommended that one put in the keychain list, then deleted the app off of an actual device for testing purposes and reinstalled the app on that same device, all those items would still be there so I (wrongly in hindsight ) assumed it was the desired behavior by Apple otherwise other developers would have complained.

I believe that is the desired behavior with the Keychain.

Pretty sure this is about persisting data after the entire device has been wiped. Not just the app removed and re-installed.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#325

Post by digitalzombie » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 10:15 PM UTC

karlkatzke wrote: post #313

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..

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 receip…

... This is why I treat equity and ipo as monopoly money.

It's ok that we pay you sub market salary because you get great ipo and equity.

Yeaaaah no.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#326

Post by valuearb » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 10:18 PM UTC

Tiktaalik wrote: post #320

clarkmoody wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 resul…

Cabs aren't imposing negative externalities, all cars are. Limiting cabs does nothing to address the problems of congestion, it makes it more likely that people will drive their own cars.

You are correct the solution to congestion is to use tolls in some manner, whether on parking or entry to freeway/city. But they have to apply to all vehicles, not just cabs.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#327

Post by Spivak » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 10:18 PM UTC

gdulli wrote: post #274

jldugger wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's generally true, I'm not sure that's really an excuse for deceptive behavior.

Since the privacy policy explains in clear English that your data will be sold it would be more deceptive if they didn't sell your data.

And since no one actually reads the privacy policy, users likely expect that the only data they're retaining is about email subscriptions, and that it will only be used internally and not sold to 3rd parties.

It's still unethical.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#328

Post by maxerickson » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 10:20 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #266

maxerickson wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably don't. Look at my first comment. I said "It'd be nice". It wasn't a comment about what would be good for Apple or bad for Uber or anything like that, it was just a remark about how I see it.

But it wouldn't be nice. It would be terrible for everyone involved, Apple, Uber, Uber/Apple customers.

The immediate effect would be unpleasant for users.

Longer term I think it is harder to say.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#329

Post by valuearb » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

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.

The great news about Ubers is they aren't driving through the streets of NYC looking to pickup riders. They are either driving to pick up someone who requested them, or they are parked.

There are good reasons to limit cars.

There is zero good reasons to limit cabs. Cabs reduce congestion. Apply limits to cabs and not private cars just means more people driving instead of sharing rides.

Limiting cabs is anti-competitive behavior to benefit cab companies, pure and simple.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#330

Post by vlozko » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

hsod wrote: post #236

tedivm wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber was tracking people after they left their rides, and it's unsure if they ever stopped. http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/12/01/503...

OK, but that's different from tracking people after they've deleted the app .

I'm genuinely curious how that would even work on the technical level. As an app developer, I'm not making the connection here as to how iOS would even allow that.

Edit: Read up a bit more on it. Turns out it was the practice of fingerprinting and tracking after re-installs, not after an uninstall. TechCrunch provided a better technical description: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/23/uber-responds-to-report-th...