Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers

#171

Post by memmcgee » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:23 AM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #87

Mz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion: This is not about the drivers. They were engaging in activity intended to be actively hostile to a competitor. That is why this is wrong. It is one thing to build a competitive business. It is another to try to actively undermine the competition, and not because your service is simply better. I get rather tired of a world in which "Well, technically, it didn't break any existing rules, so it should be oka…

Hey, good reply. Thanks! I think this convinced me. My issue was that I see myself as a pretty moral person, but if I were working for a startup and was tasked with "Implement a way to know how many Lyft drivers are out on the road," I could see myself doing something very similar to what Uber did, and also feeling mildly clever about it. Isn't that what we call out-of-the-box thinking? It seems like there's a fine l…

If we determine how right something is with how clever it is, we can justify some pretty messed up things.

Re: Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers

#172

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:26 AM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #162

anigbrowl wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't need an ethics course in a university to think ethically. I've never taken one. Moral philosophy is something you either care about or don't. If you do care, it's easy to refine your thinking through the use of books by debating, though the latter is slow. The simple question 'would I be pissed off if I were on the other side of this situation?' will get you halfway home in almost every case. It is your…

I don't owe you anything. I don't have a duty to you. It's not my responsibility to be ethical toward you or to anyone else. If I were out on the street begging you for money, how much do you think you'd give me? Would you take me in, let me use your shower, eat your food, patiently wait for weeks for me to get a job? Would you treat me like family? How far will your ethics go when pushed to the limit? Now, I'd like…

You don't owe me anything, you owe it to yourself.

Re: Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers

#173

Post by vinceguidry » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:27 AM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #119

cookiecaper wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to wonder how much business/competition experience some of these guys replying to you have. Tech people live in a bubble. Because our skills are in high demand and there's a pretty strong natural aptitude barrier limiting the number of new competitors, our experiences competing in the tech bubble can be very misleading. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. If you are lazy about competing, or trying to "go easy"…

how are you supposed to compete if you can't see what your competitor is doing? Well, that's the issue, isn't it? I had your mindset going into this, but Uber is getting sued for exactly that, and public opinion is (apparently) strongly against the idea that you should use your competitor's API's at all. So how do you look objectively at this and conclude "Well, even though a popular company is now being sued for thi…

This sounds ultimately like a political question and not an ethical one. Meaning, public opinion needs to spar with private interests on numerous related matters in order to arrive at a conclusion, because no one person is going to be able to figure it out themselves. Until then the area is a frontier where you must tread carefully and keep your wits about you.

What makes the US a good place for business is its very willingness to forgive certain types of transgressions, which would get you crucified in Europe. We instinctively understand that this stuff is hard and until legal lines are drawn and sometimes even in that case, we're not going to hang your ass out to dry.

I think the reason for this is that a lot of innovations can come out of this process. If we held ethical transgressor's feet to the fire without fail then we'd never find really interesting products and services that never would have existed otherwise.

If you operate outside of safe, established, legal and ethical grounds, then you're throwing your fate to the court of public opinion, and that feels right to me.

Re: Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers

#174

Post by cookiecaper » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:29 AM UTC

pyrale wrote: post #170

cookiecaper wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Did you have to impersonate someone who's supposed to have access to it in order to watch it? That seems more like the question that would decide it. Is it impersonation if I just don't go in wearing the opposing team's colors? What if I go wearing the playing team's jersey? What if I'm the coach of that other team so I wear a hat and sunglasses? Where's the line of "impersonation"? This can't be taken as an absolut…

It is interesting to note that, were they applied to physical private property, most of your arguments would clear the stealing of anything that is not bolted to the ground. So I'm trying to answer to you in this light. Who has legal property of the data in question : Obviously, Lyft. Does Uber, by accessing this data, benefit from it : obviously, yes. Do they, by accessing the data, deprive Lyft from the use of this…

>It is interesting to note that, were they applied to physical private property, most of your arguments would clear the stealing of anything that is not bolted to the ground.

This is exactly the flawed analogy that incumbents use to keep anti-competitive legislation like the CFAA and extreme copyright regimes in place, but it doesn't work.

>Well, our laws work like that for pretty much every other aspect of property laws. The owner's only responsibility is to make sure that potential users know the thing is not up for grabs.

They don't universally work like that for public places or businesses. There are significant restrictions in how access to public businesses can be restricted, as well significant accessibility and regulatory requirements before such a place is authorized to open (even if the building is not open to the public). Property owners have to put up with a lot of crap they don't like from their tenants and/or customers. There are whole sectors of law dealing with this.

Beyond that, we're not talking about real/physical property. We're talking about sending copies of bits around. The mere fact that Lyft could've hypothetically charged Uber for access to these bits is not really relevant. Unless Lyft can make an argument that Uber's access was materially disruptive, it should be A-OK in my book. We don't need to adhere to a broken analogy.

When you open for business, you're making a deal with the community. That deal is not well-represented by the CFAA. This is one of the rare instances when the CFAA is being deployed against the larger company, but that doesn't make it a fair law, and note that you still have to have gazillion dollars to consider a suit under this; no garage-based startup is going to be benefited by the CFAA. Drop this one and get Uber on something they deserve to get gotten on.

Re: Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers

#175

Post by memmcgee » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:30 AM UTC

mdpopescu wrote: post #154

venture_lol wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you forgot to lock your front door, everyone can walk into your house and help themselves to your properties?

Quoting @zaphar: > The Lyft API is authenticated In other words, the door was locked and you gave the key to a guy, who then peed on the carpet. While that was impolite, he was definitely not guilty of breaking and entering.

If you gave the key to a guy so they could watch your dog, they're still guilty of theft if they steal your stuff.

Also did Lyft know they were giving the key to Uber? If someone impersonates your dog sitter to get the key to your house, they still did not have permission to enter your house so it's still breaking and entering.

Re: Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers

#176

Post by zero_shift » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:36 AM UTC

dave5104 wrote: post #76

Neliquat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know it can be both...

Sure, I wouldn't be surprised if some reporter at TechCrunch had a vendetta against Uber. But I have been barely getting much of my Uber news from TechCrunch lately. So either the entire tech media has a vendetta against Uber, or it's not both.

I have a vendetta against Uber too: they keep getting away with murder.

Re: Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers

#177

Post by mquander » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 8:13 AM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #159

mquander wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a baseline, deception is immoral. If you want to be deceptive, you should have a good reason. Your winning a zero-sum game isn't a reason anyone else should be happy about. In the football tapes example, I don't think there is anything deceptive happening, because everyone understands that other teams are doing this. However, if it were explicitly against the rules or implicitly against established norms to review…

>In the football tapes example, I don't think there is anything deceptive happening, because everyone understands that other teams are doing this. However, if it were explicitly against the rules or implicitly against established norms to review other team's tapes, doing so and not telling the other teams is deceptive and wrong. I agree. The implicit context is that it is in-bounds to investigate your competitors thr…

I think I understand your perspective, thanks for these comments.

Re: Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers

#178

Post by fidget » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 8:38 AM UTC

SamReidHughes wrote: post #166

nulagrithom wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today I was asked for the 10th damn time to build something that could expose a small amount of HIPAA data. The last 9 times I explained how building this feature would, at the least, require a security audit, but nobody understood why I was making such a big deal. Today, I almost said "Fuck it, if you want to make a blatantly negligent mistake then just reply to this email detailing once more how stupid this is and…

What boggles my mind is the notion that a potential HIPAA violation is some grand immorality. It's just information about somebody. It's nice to keep secret, but no great loss to society if it was made public.

Please let me know where you work, so I can avoid any product potentially produced by you.

Re: Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers

#179

Post by Applejinx » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 8:40 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #110

WhitneyLand wrote: post #60

There is something weird about the tactics of Uber execs. I don't think it's all an ethics failure. A lot of the lying and cheating they do seems like an objectively poor risk/reward proposition and I think many companies would not even get to the ethics question because they would stop when realizing the ideas are stupid when you add up the negatives. Stealing Google's autonomous auto IP could be a crime that actual…

It's not weird at all. It looks pretty obviously like a pump and dump scheme. This behavior is fraud, and i bet the juiciest stuff is yet to come. I'm sure the criminal complaint coming from some US Attorney will reveal that somebody was cashing out in private markets. This is no different than a boiler room.

I don't agree with that. I think it's related to the fundamental nature of speculative capitalism. This is Uber 'virtue signaling'.

With regard to stock market valuation, what humans might consider values is reversed. Stock market speculators think (or are designed to think, in the case of software agents) like sharks, not community members or citizens or team members. The equation is 'feed or die' and value is intentionally the only factor.

The common denominator of all these Uber behaviors is this: aggressive or even psychotic competitiveness, beyond any conceivable rule or law. w.r.t their stock valuation this is virtue signaling. For this behavior not to benefit them, they have to not only LOSE the lawsuit in question but also have it damage them more than they gained in 'appearance of psychotic competitiveness'.

That's possible, but it's really important to understand the virtue signalling aspect. If the behavior persuades a bunch of amoral stock speculators that Uber is their kind of company it can directly translate into capital valuation that can in turn be spent on lawyers for trying to win the legal cases.

And since the value proposition here is establishing a giant multinational corporation that ignores any and all laws, documenting additional laws or rules broken only underscores the value proposition.

Virtue signalling… in Hell. (literally!)

Re: Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers

#180

Post by NumberCruncher » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 8:43 AM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #87

Mz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion: This is not about the drivers. They were engaging in activity intended to be actively hostile to a competitor. That is why this is wrong. It is one thing to build a competitive business. It is another to try to actively undermine the competition, and not because your service is simply better. I get rather tired of a world in which "Well, technically, it didn't break any existing rules, so it should be oka…

Hey, good reply. Thanks! I think this convinced me. My issue was that I see myself as a pretty moral person, but if I were working for a startup and was tasked with "Implement a way to know how many Lyft drivers are out on the road," I could see myself doing something very similar to what Uber did, and also feeling mildly clever about it. Isn't that what we call out-of-the-box thinking? It seems like there's a fine l…

>> It seems like there's a fine line between being clever and being morally bankrupt.

It is still a fine line if you are the one whose rights are violated? For example "using my laptop in a way it wasn't intended" in order to hack your laptop and to steal your passwords is a "Clever Hack" or "Morally Bankrupt"?