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

351–360 of 488 posts

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#351

Post by stingrae »

vlozko wrote: post #323
hsod wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To me it seems like this is mischaracterized to make it sound worse than it is. Can someone explain why people are making a big deal about this practice?

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#352

Post by NelsonMinar »

yawaworht12 wrote: post #238
NelsonMinar wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your optimism is refreshing. The only way Uber makes sense is if they get a monopoly. Uber has been trying to make sure no other company can be profitable by subsidizing rides to unsustainably low prices, in the hope they are the last company standing.

All the companies subsidize rides, including Lyft and Didi. No company would willingly do it if the others didn't do it as well, except maybe to increase market liquidity as the market maker. Why single out Uber when all the companies in this space are doing the exact same?

Because Uber is the market leader, with the most investment, and with the largest subsidies. Given your short posting history's unusual interest in Uber stories you probably know about that already.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#353

Post by AlexandrB »

valuearb wrote: post #332
ijafri wrote: post #237

I don't know but Uber has proven to be a shinny example of a ponzy scheme within a larger ponzy scheme. They will never be profitable, Burning billions, so is the case with Careem whom I met, and their staff was at loss to tell how this is a viable business to run. They disrupted taxi drivers, making good earnings. They benefited a lot to consumers eliminating overcharging by common taxi drivers. But as an entreprene…

Hard to imagine how they won't be profitable. The cost of providing the service is pennies and they get dollars per transaction.

But then shouldn't they be profitable already? How are they losing multiple billions per year if they're profitable per unit.

If the answer is they need to raise prices and/or reduce the drivers' cut, how will they be better than the taxi services they're replacing? Many taxi services up here in Canada already have apps that are close to on par with what Uber offers.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#354

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

Natsu wrote: post #336
karlkatzke wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In terms only of capabilities, that makes me wonder a lot about Gmail. I don't see anything there that they couldn't do if they wished to do it on a far grander scale. Granted, I tend to think the people who run Gmail are more honest than that, but if someday the wrong people retired and others took over or what have you, I wonder just how suddenly that could change?

Gmail doesn't need to sell data to anyone, they use it for rest of the google suites like google.com, adsense, youtube, doubleclick, and all the other properties they own.

In fact it would be a stupid idea for them to sell any of that data directly to a 3rd party. Instead they package them in user friendly (marketer/advertiser friendly) ways to capitalize. Some of these are shady and I'm not a fan but overall I think this approach is fine.

The problem happens when you sell user data to a 3rd party.

Here's an example: Let's say you start an email newsletter about travel. You get millions of subscribers. Then you start putting ads on your email. Maybe sometimes even send sponsored messages. This is kind of annoying but not "unethical".

On the other hand, the same company could take all the email list and sell it to bunch of travel agencies. Then all the million users who subscribed suddenly start receiving spam emails from these travel agencies. This is unethical because they literally "sold" your email address.

Of course this is more of an extreme example, but the pattern is the same.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#355

Post by taude »

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 agree, the unenroll.me is a whole other story here that should be dug into deeper

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#356

Post by dbg31415 »

Random Question: Why doesn't Apple do clean uninstalls once you remove an app? Every time I re-add Uber (I usually delete it since I live in Austin and it's useless... but then when I travel I re-add it when I want a ride) it already has my account and password saved. I'd be a lot happier if it did a clean install.

Not just Uber, but every app... any idea how I can do a true clean uninstall when I remove an app from my iPhone?

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#357

Post by alphonsegaston »

hgdude wrote: post #338
karlkatzke wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

tech has become a cesspool of slimy founders + and unbridled capitalism - this needs to stop for the greater good

I agree, but it won't until the bubble pops, and even that won't sort out the monopolists. As long as it's centered around VCs with more money than sense or morals, tech is going to continue unabated in its transformation into Wall Street 2.0

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#358

Post by lutusp »

valuearb wrote: post #339
lutusp wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This type of unsubstantive, inflammatory comment ... My comment doesn't have these properties, in fact it's the conventional view, as shown here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/theory-knowledge/201201... There's no way to have a meaningful conversation about Kalanick -- or Steve Jobs -- without addressing these issues. Would you prefer that topics having a psychological dimension be categorically excluded fro…

There is nothing conventional about psychology. You might as well have posted a link to a scientology article.

> You might as well have posted a link to a scientology article.

Yes, true. Psychologists will disagree with you, but yes. Also, psychologists don't own narcissism -- it predates their field by thousands of years. They're free to discuss it, as we all are, but they don't have a special standing.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#359

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#360

Post by noamhacker »

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…

A couple years ago, I almost signed up for unroll.me but I stopped myself. It didn't seem worth it to give some service full access to my gmail account, when I could just spend a few minutes unsubscribing manually.
Post reply on HN