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Uber CEO Plays with Fire

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#301

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

#302

Post by gdulli »

sgustard wrote: post #296
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

#303

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

#304

Post by jwdunne »

sgustard wrote: post #296
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

#305

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.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#306

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

#307

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

#308

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

#309

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

#310

Post by gsteinb88 »

hackuser wrote: post #301
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

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