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How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

nytimes.com

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Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#781

Post by thecrazyone »

xg15 wrote: post #700
yummyfajitas wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think you are making the wrong distinction. Fleeing a police officer is explicitly illegal, I believe the crime is resisting arrest or something equivalent. Actively telling all your hooker friends to stay home because the cops are out is not illegal. Nor is it illegal to say "oh hi there officer" before your hooker friend propositions a cop. That's basically what Uber did.

> Nor is it illegal to say "oh hi there officer" before your hooker friend propositions a cop. That's basically what Uber did. Uber built an infrastructure to be able to systematically detect and obstruct officers in all locations they are operating. Comparing this with saying "hi officer" is a slight understatement.

The difference is with the scale then? At what point on this scale (number of instances of the act) does the illegality start?

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#782

Post by princeb »

odbol wrote: post #639
booleandilemma wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, sorry, Uber doesn't get to resort to some kind of corporate vigilantism and "do whatever it can to continue operating". Uber can go through the proper legal channels to address the concerns it has.

Laws take years, even decades to change. We'd never have any progress if every technological advancement had to wait for the law to catch up and regulate it.

I know. HIPAA and SEC regulations are the reason why tech can't quite seem to disrupt the medical and financial industry. I wish a company like Uber will just go in and break every rule until enforcement finally realizes medical and financial regulation is a silly idea.

Tax avoidance and laundering of criminal money is a genuine value-add to many an individual's portfolio I don't know why governments around the world want to prevent banks from doing it.

Arthur Andersen did nothing wrong.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#783

Post by eddieplan9 »

lordnacho wrote: post #283
eddieplan9 wrote: post #207

I am trying to come up with an analogy to comprehend this. Imagine a city government has a rule against palm oil and no restaurants are supposed to use palm oil. A restaurant think that rule is nuts and decides to protest it publicly by using it. At the same time, they rip off the label from the palm oil. The city was having trouble finding the palm oil in the restaurant. You can claim that the restaurant has broken…

Imagine murder is illegal. But some guy thinks it isn't and does it anyway. He puts bodies in acid, hides them in concrete, and so on. Now this kind of behaviour is likely to mean the authorities will take a lot longer to find murderers. Murderers will get away with it from time to time. And a lot of resource needs to be spent just to find the criminals. We do tend to be more forgiving with crimes where the criminal…

Equating outdated city-level taxi regulations to universal law punishing murder is disingenuous, to say the least.

FTC did a report [1] in 1984 about taxi regulations and pointed out why cities were not well-equipped nor incentivized to regulate for the purpose of market efficiency:

> There are, in fact, reasons to doubt that existing regulations are efficient. One problem is that the analytical and informatiqnal problems involved in determining the efficient levels of the relevant policy variables are great. It is doubtful that regulatory authorities generally have the necessary expertise or information to determine these levels. Also, taxi ordinances and the government agencies that issue taxi regulations may not be motivated primarily by concern for market failure and achievement of an efficient resource allocation. It appears that taxi regulations have often been designed to protect public transit systems and existing taxi firms from competition.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/ec...

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#784

Post by fatbird »

davidf18 wrote: post #745

There are laws that protect people from physical harm such as licensing for doctors or to keep people in certain fields from working too many hours (e.g. airline pilots and Emergency Room Doctors). There are laws that protect patents, copyrights, and other forms of IP so that inventors, writers can get some returns on their work. Then there are laws put in place by special interest groups to benefit themselves econom…

If taxi regulation is rent-seeking, then why can't Uber (and Lyft) profitably undercut the taxi industry, since they're not paying rents?

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#785

Post by jdmichal »

warcher wrote: post #511
jdmichal wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More or less Redbox' strategy too, from what I can tell. Prices have been creeping up ever since the major competition (Blockbuster et al) dropped out of the market. And I suspect it's not because the costs to run machines has been increasing...

I imagine a great deal of it is the studios increasing their take. This has been a perennial problem for Spotify and other licensees of other media content. Netflix rolls their own now. Really, it's hard to imagine a future for Redbox in ten years. Even the convenience of a vending machine movie store is nothing next to me not even getting off the couch.

With the prices at $2, which becomes $4 if I don't remember to return it on time... I often opt to pay the $5 to rent using a digital platform. Only time I pick up from Redbox is if I am at the store anyway.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#786

Post by xg15 »

thecrazyone wrote: post #781
xg15 wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nor is it illegal to say "oh hi there officer" before your hooker friend propositions a cop. That's basically what Uber did. Uber built an infrastructure to be able to systematically detect and obstruct officers in all locations they are operating. Comparing this with saying "hi officer" is a slight understatement.

The difference is with the scale then? At what point on this scale (number of instances of the act) does the illegality start?

I don't know how this is handled in US law, but in many law systems there is the question of intent. If you say "hi officer" with the intent of warning your partner that might in theory already be illegal. (obstruction of justice)

While in that case, intent would be be very difficult to prove, it's rather obvious if you spend planning time and resources building a software tool with the express purpose to warn you of officers.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#787

Post by lacampbell »

freeflight wrote: post #776
lacampbell wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. If you dislike "government" so much you are always free to move to a place where there's less or even none of it. Case in point: Somalia has barely any government to speak of, pretty much no regulations and very high rates of firearms ownership, it's basically "libertarian utopia". Strangely enough, barely any libertarians would want to live there? Oh, a Somalia expert. I was wondering when one of these…

I never claimed to be an "expert" on Somalia, I merely pointed out that it's among those countries that have what supposedly makes a good "libertarian utopia": Barely any regulations, due to the government being ineffective at actually enforcing them, and high rates of firearms ownership. >Somalia has had a central government since 2007 - but I'm sure you already knew that. They have some government going that is bar…

I'm calling you out for your incredibly cheap tactic of bringing up Somalia. I'd bet money on the fact that you know nothing about it and would struggle to locate it on an un-labelled map of Africa. If you aren't able to tell me anything interesting on the quality of life when the country had a central government vs when it didn't, you should probably keep your mouth shut on the subject.

I might as well ask someone advocating for social democracy to move to North Korea, because "it's among those countries that have what supposedly makes a good 'socialist utopia'". I would rightly be panned for this. Doubly so if I had not the faintest idea of North Koreas history or situation.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#788

Post by lacampbell »

usrusr wrote: post #683
lacampbell wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What have you heard about Somalia? Please give a brief over view of what you know about it, and what about it you heard was nice.

It demonstrates all the benefits of the very weak government some people wish for.

Please enlighten me on the quality of life in Somalia while it had a central government, vs before it had one. Statistics are slow and unreliable coming out of there, so feel free to limit you answer to the Barre Administration, as well as those areas that during the Civil war were under control of the Islamic Courts Union and the Transitional Goverments.

I look forward to being amazed by the breadth of your knowledge about the history and conditions of Somalia and how it pertains to libertarianism.

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#789

Post by a3n »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #227
a3n wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sideways thought: this could be a good way for a criminal to vet someone before a meeting. "Take an Uber and meet me at 1st and Green."

Facebook is already better, with number of mutual friends. It does require having a social circle that's relatively immune from law enforcement coercion.

I'm not on facebook. Does that make me trustworthy or untrustworthy to a potential criminal employer? :)

Re: How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

#790

Post by mindcrime »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #364
mindcrime wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that when you give a subset of a population an institutionalized monopoly on the user of force, you're always going to get bad government eventually. That's why the State should never have the power to do anything that an individual could not justly do. http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html

>I would argue that when you give a subset of a population an institutionalized monopoly on the user of force, you're always going to get bad government eventually. Why?

Because those in control are inevitably going to become corrupt and use their power to advance their own personal agendas.
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