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Uber CEO Plays with Fire

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#491

Post by kkyryl »

eganist wrote: post #483
kkyryl wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

situations like this is what makes it really hard for others in this space to survive. I run https://clean.email (and we don't store/retain/sell any data, just charge people to use it) and the biggest issue we have is lack of trust because of news like this. although every day someone would still email with a question "why you are not free like unroll.me".. sigh.

Interesting. I can't click your Terms of Use link. Would you happen to have a direct link handy?

We have them on the "about" page – https://clean.email/about – but we are actually working on a separate page right now. as I said above – we can and should do better putting our policies front and center.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#492

Post by kkyryl »

tptacek wrote: post #489
kkyryl wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

situations like this is what makes it really hard for others in this space to survive. I run https://clean.email (and we don't store/retain/sell any data, just charge people to use it) and the biggest issue we have is lack of trust because of news like this. although every day someone would still email with a question "why you are not free like unroll.me".. sigh.

I understand that you don't retain user emails, and that's good, but do I understand that your service has somewhere a database of OAuth bearer tokens that provide direct access to the email archives of everyone who has signed up for your service? How do you protect that? I would be terrified.

yes, that is correct. we actually started without keeping refresh tokens and only using access tokens – but they expire really fast and google api randomly stops accepting them so we had to start keeping refresh tokens as well.

they are encrypted and can only be decrypted by "scan" and "action" (delete, trash, etc) jobs, job servers are not exposed to the outside and can only be accessed via the private network via ssh using access keys and only from a specific node which has those keys. keys are password protected. access to that specific node is restricted to a set of known public ip addresses. database and job servers are different servers of course. database servers are also only accessible within the private network.

the only thing that's publicly exposed is a load balancer. to access anything else we log in to the "gateway" instance which we access by ip only and it does not have any domain name associated with it.

with all that – I am very open to ideas about protecting that further.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#493

Post by insomniacity »

kkyryl wrote: post #492
tptacek wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that you don't retain user emails, and that's good, but do I understand that your service has somewhere a database of OAuth bearer tokens that provide direct access to the email archives of everyone who has signed up for your service? How do you protect that? I would be terrified.

yes, that is correct. we actually started without keeping refresh tokens and only using access tokens – but they expire really fast and google api randomly stops accepting them so we had to start keeping refresh tokens as well. they are encrypted and can only be decrypted by "scan" and "action" (delete, trash, etc) jobs, job servers are not exposed to the outside and can only be accessed via the private network via s…

Encryption at rest? Backups and encryption thereof?

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#494

Post by kkyryl »

insomniacity wrote: post #493
kkyryl wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, that is correct. we actually started without keeping refresh tokens and only using access tokens – but they expire really fast and google api randomly stops accepting them so we had to start keeping refresh tokens as well. they are encrypted and can only be decrypted by "scan" and "action" (delete, trash, etc) jobs, job servers are not exposed to the outside and can only be accessed via the private network via s…

Encryption at rest? Backups and encryption thereof?

All job servers are stateless by design and easily disposable/replaceable with a fresh build so we don't back them up. we don't back up user data either – it's deleted within 24 fours (or immediately on request). the only thing backed up is a table with refresh tokens which are encrypted and decryption keys are not backed up with it.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#495

Post by Skuzzzy »

mcculley wrote: post #490
bluejekyll wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I ask is about private key movement. I'm curious how you share that across devices. It's the biggest issue in e2e encryption imo. Just curious if you do anything novel there.

I don't do anything novel. I have my private key on three devices.

How do you get that private key on each of your devices, this is a real issue for a lot of less technical users.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#496

Post by florean »

stingrae wrote: post #358
vlozko wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because it violated their agreement with Apple and accessed private APIs, infringed on user privacy, and they geofenced the behavior to try to sneak it past app review. It's another example of Uber knowingly being evil.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#497

Post by florean »

stagbeetle wrote: post #387
clample wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that Uber is a service that people need? This sounds like exactly the kind of company that should be held to a high standard.

If we were to judge companies solely through a moral lense, sure. But in the direct interest of capitalism, and indirectly consumers, it's terrible to restrict important businesses.

Important businesses are the ones that need restrictions the most. "Too big to fail" doesn't work, for society or consumers.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#498

Post by gnuarch »

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..

What do you guys think of Mixmax? Heard of people liking their service for making appointments within Gmail, and e.g. receiving read receipts. From their privacy policy:

> [...] Mixmax may securely access or store your name, your Gmail email address, your Gmail emails and other conversations, and your Gmail contact list [...] We may anonymize your Personal Information so that you are not individually identified, and provide that information to our partners.

https://mixmax.com/privacy.html https://mixpanel.com/privacy/

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#499

Post by devy »

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..

This is why I didn't and never will trust 3rd parties products/services getting accessed to my inbox and reading my emails wholesale in order to mine data or provide value.

Paribus is another of such services that I am aware that require you open your inbox access to them (the pull model).

There is nothing wrong with reading your emails with your explicit consent but I believe a push model like TripIt/Kayak's previous push model (send email receipts to trips@tripit/kayak.com) is a safer way to avoid privacy being violated and abused.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#500

Post by caarlos0 »

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…

Suggestion: delete Unroll.me account, fill reasons with "Other", and then "Privacy! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180463"
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