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Uber CEO Plays with Fire

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#451

Post by raesene2 »

kkyryl wrote: post #450
ianwalter wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I'm certainly not eager to sign up for another service like this after finding out that the last one I used sold my data. It's getting really tough to trust third party services with your data these days.

my point exactly. I was just discussing this with a friend – there's really no way for us to prove that we don't keep or don't sell the data we get access to (aside from clearer tos/policies). and it's even scarier with iCloud for example – they don't have oAuth and people need to enter their passwords to scan/clean. (they do have "app-specific" passwords though but looks like people have hard time figuring those out…

Well there is, but it's not cheap. You get a trusted third party to Audit you and publish the result of their Audit, something similar to a SAS70.

It's not a perfect solution but it's an option to consider

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#452

Post by ktta »

ars wrote: post #45

For all the criticism he is getting, this would never have happened without him. Taxi companies are too strong, and the US needed someone like him to break barriers. Lyft would never have existed without Uber. Now that Uber broke through the path (and is getting destroyed for it) the way is open for lots of other companies. It happens all the time that the company that invents or creates something new, does not actua…

That's something that interests me about CEOs who constantly face criticism. It was always CEOs like Kalanick who bring difficult but much needed change because they are brave (yes, I said it) enough to make some decisions.

It's always easy to point out the things they did and criticize them, but it is harder to realize the work that they put in and the choices they make to keep their company (and most of the time, the industry they're in prosper). If he would've played by all the rules, Uber would've had to put up a Goodbye page on their homepage a while ago. Taxi industry would've tried to decimate it, and what ever would've happened, wouldn't be good for the transportation ecosystem as a whole. Self driving taxis are even being talked about because of Uber. I think Uber moved the arrival of self driving taxis from the concept to the street a decade earlier (although I have to say it might've taken longer if Levandowski was never at Uber; lets wait for the outcome of the lawsuit)

Makes me think of Steve Jobs in the same way. Steve Jobs was (and still is in parts of the internet) intensely hated for his contributions. But he made a change in the computing industry which made computers (electronics in general) much more beautiful and a pleasure to use. Bringing about that kind of change is very difficult in my opinion, and we need brazen people like Jobs and Kalanick. They are sometimes immoral with their choices, but people tend to forget the world we live in often is too.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#453

Post by hantusk »

FabHK wrote: post #207
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can buy a new phone for $5 and the referral bonus is $20, there's $15 arbitrage to be made just by buying up as many phones as you can. So I think their goal is not so much about identifying people, but identifying devices in order to prevent this loophole.

But can you buy (even a stolen) iPhone for USD 5?

The question is, can you buy it and sell it again with less than a 20$ loss

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#454

Post by kkyryl »

raesene2 wrote: post #451
kkyryl wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my point exactly. I was just discussing this with a friend – there's really no way for us to prove that we don't keep or don't sell the data we get access to (aside from clearer tos/policies). and it's even scarier with iCloud for example – they don't have oAuth and people need to enter their passwords to scan/clean. (they do have "app-specific" passwords though but looks like people have hard time figuring those out…

Well there is, but it's not cheap. You get a trusted third party to Audit you and publish the result of their Audit, something similar to a SAS70. It's not a perfect solution but it's an option to consider

fair point – this is something we consider doing before expanding to b2b market. but:

my day job is in ecommerce (I work as a product manager at FastSpring) and I used to work on CleanMyMac at MacPaw – had to work with trust in both. it's somewhat unexpected but people who are buying software for themselves usually don't care about PCI compliance, audits, and other artifacts of "institutional validation". they care about a "norton secured" badge, proper language, recommendation from a person they know, a review at the website they read, "that green thing with the lock in my browser".. we're now at the phase where we are trying to find the right combination.

just to be clear – it's very different from project to project and depends on the audience. what I'm saying is that we're making decisions emotionally mostly based on our prior experience and rely on internal "thermometer" to tell us if what we're seeing is trustworhty.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#455

Post by mdpopescu »

Spivak wrote: post #335
uzoodoo wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Are we really at the point where people are being called naive for trusting a company to act ethically? It's no wonder people outside of tech hate us.

As a general rule, if you give an organization any kind of advantage over you, sooner or later someone in that organization will abuse it.

The saying "power corrupts" is more correctly expressed as "power attracts the corruptible".

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#456

Post by DrJaws »

kkyryl wrote: post #447
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clicked, I read your value prop, I just can't see myself paying $95+ /year for less obnoxious email in my inbox. It's really not that big of a problem to me.

ugh. I have "Yearly pricing to the homepage" sitting in my to-do list for a few weeks :) so – there's yearly pricing (and it starts with 14.99 / year (I know, this looks really weird, but it took us some time to get to this pricing). now, whether it's valuable enough to justify the price – depends a lot on how you use your email. we've got users managing 3-5 accounts with hundreds of thousands of emails each and they…

Then why you complain?

You offer plain and simply ask for 8€ per month per account.

That's simply a ridiculous amount of money for 99% of the people, what you have but we can't see is part of the problem, not the trust, the price is just not worth for what you offer, so, don't complain about "not a single new customer from 50 clicks".

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#457

Post by kkyryl »

DrJaws wrote: post #456
kkyryl wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ugh. I have "Yearly pricing to the homepage" sitting in my to-do list for a few weeks :) so – there's yearly pricing (and it starts with 14.99 / year (I know, this looks really weird, but it took us some time to get to this pricing). now, whether it's valuable enough to justify the price – depends a lot on how you use your email. we've got users managing 3-5 accounts with hundreds of thousands of emails each and they…

Then why you complain? You offer plain and simply ask for 8€ per month per account. That's simply a ridiculous amount of money for 99% of the people, what you have but we can't see is part of the problem, not the trust, the price is just not worth for what you offer, so, don't complain about "not a single new customer from 50 clicks".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182152 ;)

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#458

Post by S3curityPlu5 »

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..

Yes thanks I just deactivated unroll.me and deleted my account, make sure you change your email password and deny them access from your email provider as well.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#459

Post by yread »

rattray wrote: post #377
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..

Here's the link to revoke perms: https://myaccount.google.com/permissions I just disconnected from one or two services which had access to my gmail (reasonably so).

Thanks, why the fuck does Swift keyboard need access to all my emails?

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#460

Post by mightykan »

valuearb wrote: post #347
idlewords wrote: post #213

The buried lede here is that Apple did nothing to protect users from a company that openly and willfully strip-mined their privacy in violation of App Store rules.

I guess you didn't understand the buried lede then. Apple forced them to stop. The offense was extremely minor and didn't hurt anyones privacy (unless you view iPhones as persons).

Getting device serial numbers through private APIs and transferring this information to their servers isn’t “extremely minor.” Any other lesser-known developer would’ve been rejected if not outright banned. Apple has something to answer here. Why is Uber still allowed in? How many offenses are companies allowed?
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