Uber gets sued over alleged ‘Hell’ program to track Lyft drivers
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What's wrong with Uber tracking Lyft drivers? What is wrong with using a competitor's API to get real-time tactical information about them? Not only did it not harm Lyft drivers, but it actually aided them: Several of them were offered hundreds of dollars by Uber to switch companies. Most drivers are trying to make end's meet, and from speaking directly with drivers, this was seen as a universally positive thing. "I was like, yes! Where do I sign? $400 bucks is amazing. Too bad my car was too old for Uber."
Though I guess if Mr. Gonzales wins his lawsuit, it will give the answer to these questions and more.
This I'm most interested in, as the DoJ has frequently used the hammer against those who violate the act.
EDIT: Would love to get your opinion rayiner if you read this comment on what the odds are the DoJ prosecutes for this.
https://www.eff.org/issues/cfaa
"Even first-time offenses for accessing a protected computer without sufficient "authorization" can be punishable by up to five years in prison each (ten years for repeat offenses), plus fines. Violations of other parts of the CFAA are punishable by up to ten years, 20 years, and even life in prison. The excessive penalties were a key factor in the government's case against Aaron Swartz, where eleven out of thirteen alleged crimes were CFAA offenses, some of which were "unauthorized" access claims."
I doubt Uber had authorization to use Lyft's API in the manner they did.
Swartz had illegally entered a staff-only routing closet at MIT and hard-wired his laptop into the router so he could suck down files rapidly. This is what really cast the case as a criminal thing; he was arrested fleeing MIT Police as they pursued what I suspect they only knew as "the guy who is breaking into the closet and doing weird stuff with our network". Once you're taken down on B&E, you already have a prosecutor's attention, and it's common for them to throw on all the charges that they think will stick, especially when they have high resume value like cybercrime prosecution.
Swartz was acting as an activist who had previously acknowledged the illegal nature of his actions in his stirring "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" [0], which includes the phrase "[t]here is no justice in following unjust laws". He was also operating as an individual outside of the context of a liability shield like a corporation.
I hate the CFAA and regularly post against it on this forum, and I disagree heartily with the prosecution of Swartz. But it's not likely that those criminal charges would be replicated in a B2B scenario where a company accesses an otherwise-public resource, and the furthest they go is using a proxy to shield their identity. Many civil cases where exactly this has happened have been brought without criminal charges being filed, probably most often because the criminal chain reaction never gets activated by something like breaking and entering, as it did in Swartz's case, because personal information is not compromised/leaked, and because the behavior is usually stopped pretty dead by the lawsuit.
I assume if someone were to disobey the judge's injunction preventing them from continuing to violate the CFAA, they'd be arrested initially on contempt charges and then formal charges for breaking the CFAA may be filed.
I'm not a lawyer.
[0] https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
I must ask, as a non-lawyer, how did you learn so much about these things?
At worst this should result in tortious interference as a trespass to chattels case with damages calculated at the cost of the computing services that Lyft was denied.
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 okay, right?" gets used to justify all kinds of ugly stuff. We live in a world that our existing laws were not designed to account for because it hadn't been invented yet, nor even imagined. It is almost like saying "Well, if we invented magic and used magic to murder people, hey, we should be allowed to get away with murder because our current laws don't have clauses that address the use of magic, amirite??!!"
Uh, no. You are not right. And I hope we will develop laws and rules that spell out that you are not right.
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 line between being clever and being morally bankrupt. Clever hack: Using a language feature in a way it wasn't intended. Morally bankrupt: Using a competitor's API in a way it wasn't intended.
So it was really hard to work through these concerns, or even begin to address them without talking publicly about it. But bringing it up publicly seems to entail people talking down to you (see the replies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14189381 in this thread). Just an interesting situation.
(Of course, if you're a consequentialist, then you might still like the action if it were serving some greater good. But this seems more like a zero-sum game between Uber and Lyft, at best.)
I suspect that if you were working for the same startup and you were tasked with "Implement a way to know how many Lyft drivers are out on the road, and make sure Lyft can't tell we're doing it" then you might hesitate.
The mere fact that Lyft "would [try to] stop them" makes it immoral? How does that work?
Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game to figure out what plays they like to use? Surely they would try to stop me from doing this if they could, because they want me to know as little about their playbook as possible, because they'd prefer to win. They might even tell the clerk not to sell the tape to anyone who is wearing my team's colors to try to keep it out of enemy hands. But there's nothing wrong with reviewing the tapes, even if they've tried to stop me from doing so.
What makes your competitors pleasure a barometer of morality? Almost always, winners are going to be happy and losers are going to be sad. Is it immoral for anyone to win or lose?
> Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game to figure out what plays they like to use?
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.
"Because they don't want you to" is a bad way to phrase it, even if it gets to the core of things. After all, they wrote their license agreement based on what they want you to do, right?
> there's no subterfuge going on
"I want API access."
"We only give that to drivers."
"OK, I'm a driver."
"OK, here's API access"
Are you going to argue that Uber's devs could've had that theoretical conversation without being intentionally deceptive?
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 absolute unless we concede that we must say "OK" just because they say "Please don't", even if they're able to find a way to make this technically legally binding.
Morality does NOT require us to give up as soon as someone tries to block us.
>"Because they don't want you to" is a bad way to phrase it, even if it gets to the core of things. After all, they wrote their license agreement based on what they want you to do, right?
Sure. I'm not disputing that this was almost definitely a technical violation of the CFAA. The CFAA is a disgustingly overbroad and outdated law, and Lyft finagling their process to get under its cover shouldn't be a moral indictment of Uber. [The bright side of this is that if similar lawsuits start coming out against some other big players, the law might finally change.]
Are licensing agreements automatically eval'd into moral absolutes? If we take such a strict position we can never win against any moderately powerful entity.
The path to ascendancy for most companies involves "avoid a lawsuit", because frequently there are laws on the books that could take them down. Google is a great example; their conduct technically violates the CFAA and rampantly violates copyright, even though the courts ended up giving them a pass in Perfect 10 v. Amazon because they're afraid to shut down Google.
>Are you going to argue that Uber's devs could've had that theoretical conversation without being intentionally deceptive?
I'll argue that it doesn't cross the threshold from "deception required to be basically functional in a competitive environment" into "immoral and personally compromising deception".
When you enter business, you know you are entering a competitive market where part of the game is getting an advantage over your competitors, and their attempting to do so over you. Concocting a complex legal apparatus that gives some meat to any potential lawsuit between competitors is routine. It doesn't affect the morality of the process, despite the theatrics of the court.
You're playing with the words, rather than the meaning behind them, and you're smart enough to know that. You're mixing up morality and legality a lot, which I find interesting. I wouldn't say that they have much to do with each other. I'd consider corporations (generally speaking) as amoral entities, striving against the bounds of punishment under the law, and the law as an amoral construct acting as the buffer and interface between other entities (individuals, corporations, other nations). Its job is to act in the interests of the people, one aspect of which is encouraging, but also regulating, the competition in the market. Working toward an even playing field, and correcting when it falls short of providing that.
> I'll argue that it doesn't cross the threshold from "deception required to be basically functional in a competitive environment" into "immoral and personally compromising deception".
I'd argue that it crosses the threshold into behavior that should fall outside the bounds of legal competition. We're better off with many weaker competitors than we are with one strong one.
That's the funny thing about this. I completely agree that we're better with many smaller competitors. The CFAA, like most such laws, is routinely used to stop small competitors. The CFAA is a huge reason that tech incumbents are able to keep their de-facto monopolies, exactly because they make up licensing agreements that say "Reading our site means you swear you won't compete against us" and then send out a firm full of $1k/hr lawyers to do their dirty work.
An "even playing field" would not put force of law behind such fantastical, unrealistic, and anti-competitive assertions. Signing up for the other guy's ToS is not something that would fire off moral alarm bells in your average person. It's naive to believe that anyone adheres to these absurdities, and you have to be a huge company to enforce them.
The false belief that businesses actually restrain themselves to align with such regulations instead of fighting hard to get in a winning position is exactly what leads to damaging laws like the CFAA in the first place.
The net effect is that small innovators get obliterated and denounced for trying to get some leverage while companies playing in the hundreds of millions (Lyft and Uber) can squabble in court before deciding to save some dough and draw up a settlement that says they'll stop accessing the other guy's API (at which point they'll find a proxy or replacement).
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 data ? At first glance, the answer would be no : when you access data, you don't remove it. However, one of the benefits of owning data is to be able to sell it. By accessing this data, Uber removes or lowers the ability for Lyft to sell this data to Uber. In a more general way, one of the benefits of property is to enjoy the sole use of the owned item. Uber violates this.
Now let's look at deniability : Did Uber know the owner of the data did not want them to access it : yes, obviously. Did Uber get access to this data without seeking it ? No, they deliberately sought to access it. Did Lyft put in place barriers to restrict access to this data, and give a clear warning about who was to use it ? Yes, they did.
> This can't be taken as an absolute unless we concede that we must say "OK" just because they say "Please don't"
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.
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.
These problems can all be discussed in the prism of restraining property rights for public benefit (e.g. restriction of copyright for quoting). In Uber's case, though, there is no public interest in restraining Lyft's rights.
> 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
None of these regulation relate to liability of potential thieves, but to public safety. In our case, this would mean Lyft may be on the hook for not protecting drivers' and users' data, not that the person appropriating these data is not also on the hook.
> The mere fact that Lyft could've hypothetically charged Uber for access to these bits is not really relevant.
Property laws very specifically state that the owner is entitled to the fruit of his property. You may criticize the whole ownership system, but this is a clear cut case of Uber appropriating data that they didn't create. The only question here is whether the terms of access Lyft gave to third parties was explicit enough for Uber to understand that it had no right to this data, and whether Uber also understood this fact.
> When you open for business, you're making a deal with the community.
The nature of that deal is codified in the terms of service. While most terms of service may be seen unfair towards customers, in this case, 1) Uber is not a customer and 2) the aspects of the terms that were violated are hard to consider unfair.
There are plenty of exceptions that could/should be discussed in the scope of CFAA : scientific/historian work, hacking that benefits the customer and/or the owner, work of arts, etc. I would welcome amending the law in this light.
Uber's action fits none of these legitimate uses, and is actually a good example of why CFAA was introduced in the first place.
The public interest is in maintaining a fair and open market. You can't blind your competitors and expect to get beneficial competition.
IMO we need to be much more aggressive about this and err toward keeping the market accessible for new entrants v. keeping an ideologically-pure sanctum for corporate property rights. The powerful will always use try to use their influence to get the government enforcing rules that are to their benefit.
If you think it's absurd for Target to be able to issue a blanket ban on Walmart employees shopping in their stores in order to "protect their intellectual property", you should think this is absurd too. "But, Target could've sold information about their stores to Walmart! Walmart employees are stealing by going in there without their Walmart hats on!" Give me a break.
You're speaking in favor of treating intellectual property identical to real property. It doesn't work that way. Information can co-exist without diminishing or blocking anything, whereas occupation or usage of real property cannot.
Some IP rights are reasonable, but contrary to real property laws that merely codify the natural human behavior to protect and preserve physical property, IP contradicts the natural human impulse to spread information far and wide. "Information wants to be free" and all that. IP is a government-granted monopoly on information, and it's something we should be very wary about.
>None of these regulation relate to liability of potential thieves, but to public safety.
That's because no theft is occurring. Theft requires illegally taking something. Uber hasn't taken anything or caused any actual deprivation. The theory that they maybe COULD HAVE sold it to Uber is ridiculous. We can't protect everything based merely on its hypothetical, untested market value; the fact is that Lyft was giving this away.
>The nature of that deal is codified in the terms of service. While most terms of service may be seen unfair towards customers, in this case, 1) Uber is not a customer and 2) the aspects of the terms that were violated are hard to consider unfair.
I disagree, I think they're easy to consider unfair, and I think people would readily agree if the parties had swapped positions.
>Uber's action fits none of these legitimate uses, and is actually a good example of why CFAA was introduced in the first place.
The CFAA was introduced after a panic caused by the Matthew Broderick film War Games. "The internet" was not something that the public had even heard about, let alone had in their homes. It was intended to prevent hacking into military, industrial, and financial computer systems.
Should we accept that, e.g. Lyft send some of their employees to be recruited at Uber and then leak the info back to Uber ? That's, afaik, illegal.
You must realize that, while you criticize CFAA for promoting big business, a small company will never have decent means to resist an unrestricted corporate warfare.
By creating a clear delimitation between what in your information system is public, and what is private, CFAA allows smaller companies to protect information critical to their business (not IP, private info), so that they don't have to invest in oversized devensive methods.
> the fact is that Lyft was giving this away.
Lyft was giving this away to business partners with whom they had contractual relations. Uber impersonated contractors, and violated these contractual relations.
Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game [...]
No, because they can do the same withyour last game. It's called a level playing field, which is clearly a foreign concept to the people who work at Uber.
What makes your competitors pleasure a barometer of morality? Almost always, winners are going to be happy and losers are going to be sad. Is it immoral for anyone to win or lose?
There's more to competition than the zero-sum variety.
Uber certainly has people in the legal department to study such things. They also clearly have accountants calculating if the chance and cost of being caught is greater than the rewards of breaking the rules.
I worked at a big corporation. The legal department was not a morality watch dog. Accounting would have a cow and decide x needed to be changed, legal would try to come up with justification for how we can defend this in a court of law if sued.
And Lyft can access Uber's API, unless they're scrupulously avoiding doing so for legal reasons, which doesn't seem all that likely. There's a lot of stuff that is technically illegal, but we'd all be paralyzed if we followed the letter of the law (or every contract we sign) precisely. I'm sure Lyft and Uber BOTH understand this, as they're both generally operating in direct violation of local taxi regulations.
It's funny to read so many people acting like violating a ToS is some moral horror, apparently unaware that the ToS is routinely violated by normal usage, and that like most contracts, they're intentionally written that way. The goal of this, as all contracts, is to a) have a reason to sue someone they dislike and b) have a defense against suits from someone that dislikes them. Since the user has no individual/direct bargaining power, the contract will always be massively favorable to the company.
Businesses sue each other for breach of contract all the time. It could even be argued that this is not fundamentally immoral, which is why it's a civil matter; disagreements in business will sometimes occur, and resorting to the civil dispute resolution system that's in place for exactly this reason is not necessarily a sign of malfeasance.
No one reads ToS except lawyers, and then only when they're looking for something to sue over and/or decide how much likely they're going to get sued. Like most contracts, it doesn't become a consideration until something goes south.
In the football analogy, the opposing team could easily concoct a situation where a ToS prevents an opposing team member from watching the video of the game by creating an interstitial landing page that says "You must agree to the Terms to view this site", the person checking OK, and then viewing the video that technically was prefixed by mandatory agreement to a document that buried language like "This video must not be used against us in any way." under 50 paragraphs of boilerplate. This is unfair because they were able to say "Please don't compete with us, k?" in a potentially technically legally-binding way? Come on now.
>There's more to competition than the zero-sum variety.
OK? It's not zero-sum just because some are happy and some are sad.
A very convenient excuse, which is precisely why I don't find it convincing. Please spare me your patronizing explanations of Terms of Service; having already studied law they're not very impressive.
OK? It's not zero-sum just because some are happy and some are sad.
Win-loss outcomes are zero-sum by definition. I don't see this discussion going anywhere productive from here.
Do you have an argument that's not "it was unfair because it was technically illegal and Lyft probably didn't like it"? Maybe there'd be a more impressive answer if you could offer a more impressive proposition.
>Win-loss outcomes are zero-sum by definition. I don't see this discussion going anywhere productive from here.
This is pure fantasy. Win-loss is an unavoidable fact of any competition. You are competing because you are trying to get the the same limited resource (in this case, the market for a ride-hailing app). That's what makes it a competition.
Giving up because you don't like competing is the same as a loss. The entity that gets that portion of the resource won, and the entity that didn't lost. A loss doesn't have to be wholly unprofitable, but it's still a loss.
You have arbitrarily defined all competitions as fundamentally zero-sum. You say they're zero-sum by definition: the definitions I know of win means that someone has gained something and loss means that someone has either failed to gain something they wanted or lost something they had (not necessarily in proportion to the person who won).
This is only zero-sum if you believe that all resources could be utilized equally well in anyone's hands. This is not even communistic or socialistic where a central authority decides the appropriate way to allocate resources, it's just anarchy.
Only in a very restricted framework. If one side goes out of business and one side only makes a minor gain (and lots of remaining competition exists), that is obviously not zero sum from any perspective
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 think I disagree that there was no subterfuge in the Lyft case? I don't actually know this, but I assume that if Lyft knew this was happening, they would behave differently, and if the drivers knew this was happening, they would behave differently.
If you do something that you know a lot of other people would care a lot about, it is in my opinion your responsibility not to try to conceal it from them. If it's not difficult, as in this case, you should notify them explicitly.
I agree. The implicit context is that it is in-bounds to investigate your competitors through their public-facing offerings, even if they try to stop you. You don't have to stop competing just because they say please. Through an accident of law (the CFAA was enacted before it was possible to get home internet service), Lyft was able to make this illegal. Lyft is trying to block public information from getting into their competitor's hands. IMO, that's the anti-competitive activity here.
But that's not a public API that Uber was tapping into. It was a private API that requires an agreement to be signed in order to access it. Uber signed and then violated the agreement, by providing fake data through the APIs.
At the moment that the agreement was broken, their access to the API become illegal.
That's outright fraud to gain access.
This isn't some kind of gray area like you're trying to pretend.
On the other hand, I completely disagree with your last paragraph. That kind of world is my definition of hell. Winners are "happier"? On what metric? Is Lyft a "loser" company? Are it's employees losers? Who's "unhappy" in this scenario? A "win at all cost" culture that leaves the losers in the dust sounds like a nasty, vile dystopia.
It's not "win at all costs". It's "win at some costs"; in other words, a competition with some rules.
Business is a competition and your competitors are going to be looking for and actively exploiting the advantages they can get over you. This necessarily requires you to look for advantages you can get over them or just cede the market, and if you're willing to do that, there's no point in competing in the first place.
It's sad how HN is here demanding meticulous adherence to a clause buried deep in the incumbent's ToS and pretending that violating it is some basic moral misdeed.
Probably because the context for a "TOS violation" is very different between a large company and an individual, and because the motives for this violation are venal. And because Uber is a serial violator of pretty much every rule it comes into contact with. I doubt you'd find many here who would see a problem with, say, a researcher violating the same clause to get data for a research project.
Large companies can afford lawyers to read TOS documents. Normal people don't have the time or expertise to read them, usually. And who writes TOS documents in the first place? Large companies. It is a double standard if a company wants their TOS followed, but breaks other companies'. So it is coherent to argue that large companies have a higher burden to follow a TOS more "meticulously" than individuals do.
I have had a couple of law classes. I found them hard. I put a lot more effort into my first law class than the statistics class I took the same quarter and did vastly better in statistics. I also worked in a very legally driven industry for over five years. That was an experience sort of counter to my general nature. It was a growth experience.
I try hard to not talk down to anyone, if at all possible. I don't always get it right, but I don't think that fosters good discussion. If you can't ask the "dumb" questions, then we have a very big problem. At that point, only the people already in the know can talk at all and that's a very big problem.
So thank you for asking a sincere question in good faith. :-)
Lyft explicitly say you can't use their API to compete with them. How can violating their terms of service be in any kind of grey area?
I'm not posing rhetorical questions. I'm asking you an honest question. Why would you think it's okay to use a service in a manner that the service explicitly prohibits?
Being pretty moral and having strong work ethics are two different things. I believe (or at least hope) that our profession mostly sees itself as moral.
However, in terms of ethics, we suck. We rarely take time to think about the consequences of our action, and what impacts it may have. We rarely build elaborate thought about what we should and should not do. Therefore, when the time comes to do something, we are left unprepared, we cannot envision the moral dilemnas of things and the consequences of what we do, and we go for it without even thinking about it.
This is why so many IT people end up doing things they may regret : they are not necessarily immoral, but they never thought seriously about what they should and should not do in their job.
I know that this is a different situation, because you could make the argument that if you're a business, you'd better fully read and understand every clause of every ToS. But it was difficult to integrate that mentality when we, as consumers, don't treat ToS's as legally binding. And most of us didn't have an ethics course in university. So when we're being asked by an employer to do X, and X is something that we do as consumers, then at what point are we supposed to think "Nope, this is wrong"?
The point is, treating these issues like they're incredibly obvious helps no one. It takes more effort to debate it in good faith than to simply assert "It's obvious," but it doesn't change anybody's mind.
It's very likely that you might just go along with something in the moment, unless you've thought about it in advance and are able to recognize it.
When I was in grad school I knew a student who was almost completely amoral - not that has was evil, but it seemed like right and wrong never even entered into his decision process. For example, he decided that it might be profitable to write splog-creation software. He even brought in different outputs and did user testing in the lab, asking fellow students if they preferred output A or B, which had more believable testimonials, and if they were suffering from acne, which would they be more likely to buy from, etc.
It seemed scummy to me, but it took a long time for me to put my finger on exactly why. Wasn't it just another kind of advertising? It helped sell the acne medicine, which was a benefit to those that bought and sold it, right?
Your answers might be different, which is why it's good to think these things through for yourself. For me, what I came to was that the Google search engine is good, and it provides a lot of value by making it possible to find what you're actually looking for. The splogs where siphoning off some of that value, and giving it to that student.
They provided value to the student, but they made the internet worse for everyone else because it would be harder to find what actually worked well or was organically best. Basically a tragedy of the commons, and the result was a net negative - he destroyed a lot more value than he was able to capture, even though it was only a papercut from each person. It's much better to create more value than you capture, so the world is a better place for having you in it.
I think that kind of approach might be applicable here. Is Uber competing in a way that is beneficial to their customers, and therefore net positive? If they compete by trying to hobble or destroy Lyft that kind of sucks, but if they win by having a better product or a better approach to business, that seems more fair and results in a better outcome, a better world. Run faster, don't kick the other racer's ankles.
That sounds like a good rule of thumb for trying to apply to questions of business morality. "Are we trying to run faster than them? Or are we trying to kick them in the ankles?"
I mean, lots of people are young and just starting out and haven't had the time to think a lot of things through. Or they are busy developing expertise in things other than law and morality, but still need some kind of guiding principle. I think this is a good, simple rubric.
An example:
In American football, it's perfectly fine to take down the other guys hard if you cannot catch up.
That said, rules such as "don't kick other racer's ankles" are generally for the overall good -- we don't want a wild west approach and end up with wounded and hurt players all over the place and hence, the game gets less fun. Notice: there is a balance here between absolute ruthlessness and let's have some rules so we don't all end up with no functioning legs.
However, at the goal line, if touchdown is about to take place, I can guarantee you a player will go for other guy's ankle hard even if it would mean suspension, penalty, etc. Why? Because in that moment, the primary overriding priority is to prevent the touch down. That said, it is possible to cross the line in "kicking the other guy's ankle".
Generally speaking, you should endeavor to create rules that you can agree with regardless of which side of the fence you happen to currently be on. If the roles were reversed and your reaction is now "Hey, wait a minute, that's not fair!" then you should reconsider your current position.
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 responsibility as a sentient being to make moral decisions, otherwise you're just half alive.
Now, I'd like to be ethical. I want to choose to be. And I'd like us all to be ethical to each other. But you should make the case that it's beneficial for people to be ethical to each other because XYZ, not because they have a "responsibility" to do so, or that they're "half-alive" if they don't. And to say that ethics -- a massive topic that has flummoxed philosophers for thousands of years -- is easy, is just wishful thinking.
Well, you just implicitly made your own case for ethics, one of the strongest ones, IMO: any situation where there is a tradeoff between individual gain and communal loss, ethical thinking is required. If that tradeoff doesn't exist, like the win-win situations that can be encountered in many economic situations, ethics aren't required.
Therefore it's never "beneficial" to you as an individual to be ethical in any individual situation. It's only as the ethical decisions begin to pile up across society that we see clearly it is more beneficial in the aggregate if everyone co-operates than if everyone defects.
anigbrowl is just noting some common heuristics that generate similar ethical outcomes but using simpler logic.
Anyway, I think the reason people are going beyond legality to morality here is that Uber has established a pattern of behavior over time as an actor that doesn't follow the rules and does whatever it wants. It isn't accidental; they've exhausted their reserves of good faith.
I've seen other posters ask this question, but I don't think this line of argument applies in this situation.
You're comparing a large ($70B Valuation!), multinational corporation, with the average personal consumer. The former is sophisticated, with an entire dedicated legal department of highly trained, expensive, and experienced lawyers dedicated to scrutinizing legal agreements the company enters and hedging against any legal liabilities. Not to mention the teams of engineers - which collectively have decades of real-world experience building and competing in tech.
Yes, the average personal consumer likely has violated TOS agreements, but violating TOS agreements is far from a real concern for most people. The average consumer barely knows how to read - it makes little sense to equivocate Uber's behavior and intentions with that of the average Joe Schmoe.
> I know that this is a different situation, because you could make the argument that if you're a business, you'd better fully read and understand every clause of every ToS
Exactly.
> But it was difficult to integrate that mentality when we, as consumers, don't treat ToS's as legally binding.
This is why corporations have legal departments and other dedicated departments to handle a host of other issues that the average consumer would find difficult: HR, accounting, etc.
The level of sophistication, and thus the "mentality" of a corporation, especially one as large as Uber, cannot be compared to the average consumer.
> And most of us didn't have an ethics course in university.
Most of us also don't have a dedicated team of lawyers. It's also worth mentioning that new works and veterans alike are often required to go through various ethics courses and workshops as part of their corporate training. Even if this was not the case, the more senior engineers at Uber have most definitely experienced comparable situations. The fact that upper management endorsed these practices is telling and indicative of the overall culture at Uber.
Not all companies behave like this - some large MNCs behave in the exact opposite: extremely conservative when it comes to toeing the line with zero-tolerance policies in place that exact immediate, and harsh, punishment to any employee or manager that violate company policies / guidelines.
> The point is, treating these issues like they're incredibly obvious helps no one. It takes more effort to debate it in good faith than to simply assert "It's obvious," but it doesn't change anybody's mind.
I agree that hindsight is always 20/20 and what appears obvious today might not have been in the "heat of the moment" so to speak. But you have to wonder if at some point over the past few years, someone at Uber spoke up about their practices?
What seems obvious to me is that those involved knew they were breaking Lyft's TOS and that their actions were borderline unethical, definitely in the grey at the very least. That's why they took great pains to hide their behavior and obfuscate their actions. How do you explain the geofence they placed on Apple HQ? That was designed explicitly to hide their violations of Apple's TOS.
Uber is not a naive actor here. Any argument that advances this view is highly disingenuous, especially here on HN. Let's not kid ourselves, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck....
Read literally, many terms of service would block any access whatsoever, as phraseology blocking "any automated or manual access" is popular. [0] Isn't all access either automated or manual?
The question is not if you're going to violate the ToS, since in most cases, just using the service invariably does so. Rather, the question is whether your misuse is going to make the company upset enough to sue you. And if it does, it doesn't necessarily mean anything unethical or unfair occurred; it just means something that upset that company occurred.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22automated+or+manual%22+%2... ; 131,000 results
Would it be more moral to report the API use to Lyft? Those folks are just trying to earn a living too, right? Would lent you feel just as clever reporting their vulnerability to them?
Actions can only be evaluated as moral/immoral/amoral when you've taken the time to define a system of morals.
It's the difference between a requirements document and an implementation--just as you can't determine the suitability of software without knowing its requirements, you can't determine the suitability of an action without knowing your morals.
Suppose you've decided you want to live in a society that respects the "Don't lie, steal, or cheat" maxims (for whatever reason--I've chosen this here because they're explicatively short!):
Then determining what's moral/immoral/amoral becomes an application of: 1) Does this encourage me (or someone else) to intentionally misrepresent the truth? 2) Does this encourage me (or someone else) to take something that hasn't been given? 3) Does this encourage me (or someone else) to misrepresent the truth for gain?
On the other hand, consider a company's system of "Maximize profit while minimizing legal liability": 1) Does this encourage me (or someone else) to maximize our company's profit? 2) Does this encourage me (or someone else) to expose our company to legal liability?
Notice that these two systems don't address the same concerns.
So the fine line exists because what's moral for the company MAY conflict with what's moral for the individual, and many of us don't like to think about /any/ ethical system (after all we're being paid to work in the latter!).
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"?
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" on someone, you are going to get eaten. This is a hard-coded biological response to scarcity, and it's not going to go away, so we best get used to it and stop being everyone else's doormat.
Successful companies are usually fairly ruthless; they're just good at keeping it quiet. Not only does what I know about Uber's program not surprise me (and I haven't read in-depth on it yet, so this is my disclaimer if there's something more repugnant than signing in to Lyft buried under the covers), but it's downright conventional.
Refusal to compete is suicide. Naively believing that the world will reward you if you play nice-nice and opt out of decisive, competitive action is the best way to find yourself/your company on a platter at someone else's table.
This ethos from some of the other commenters that you shouldn't do something because it might make your competitors unhappy is absurd. Show a little sporting spirit. If a competitor is making intelligence available, you absolutely should take advantage of it.
I've found the guiding star to be "Is this really immoral, or have we just been socialized to believe it's impolite or in bad taste?" One should realize that a lot of this socialization is provided by people who simply don't want you to become a strong competitor, and have indoctrinated this imaginary, soft, cushiony world into everyone's brains so that it's easier for them to come in and take what they want, and their constant empty blathering draws attention away from their dirty deeds. There's no need to allow ourselves to be victimized like that.
Specifically, it's ridiculous to claim that using an API in a way that isn't intended is "morally bankrupt". That's like saying it's morally bankrupt for Walmart employees to go to Target looking for places where they can get an advantage. Far from morally bankrupt, that's a fundamental component of capitalism; how are you supposed to compete if you can't see what your competitor is doing?
Patronizing competing services in a non-disruptive way is normal. Some may be familiar with "secret shoppers", people that companies pay to go to their stores on a random day and report back on the experience. These secret shoppers are also deployed to competing stores. How and/or why is this any different?
Private and undocumented APIs have been exploited by developers for decades. My understanding is that Uber was not even doing that, but rather just accessing the normal API in a non-disruptive way to learn some useful information about their competition.
That's a worldview you choose to hold because it suits your capitalistic philosophy. I've literally fought for my life in dark alleys and I don't agree with your claim - the fact that competition exists and can even be deadly does not establish it as the baseline norm of human behavior.
a lot of this socialization is provided by people who simply don't want you to become a strong competitor, and have indoctrinated this imaginary, soft, cushiony world into everyone's brains so that it's easier for them to come in and take what they want
I could just as easily say that people like yourself attempt to indoctrinate people with the notion that Darwinian competition is the unalterable way of the world in order to inculcate a combination of stoicism and paranoia that will inhibit them from coordinating with each other to limit your predatory activities. See, I can make up specious motivations for my interlocutors too.
It's a baseline norm of biology, which some humans are more willing to accept than others. "Survival of the fittest" implies that some are more fit; that is, some are winners and some are losers.
As long as energy cannot be created ex nihilo, this world will be fundamentally competitive. Wishing really hard won't work until someone wishes hard enough to undo the law of conservation of energy.
If most people are not willing to accept this, that explains a lot about tribe and power dynamics.
>I could just as easily say that people like yourself attempt to indoctrinate people with the notion that Darwinian competition is the unalterable way of the world in order to inculcate a combination of stoicism and paranoia that will inhibit them from coordinating with each other to limit your predatory activities. See, I can make up specious motivations for my interlocutors too.
Sure, there are people who make that assertion. That's fine? I think it's called a disagreement.
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 this, and all of my friends would think less of me for doing this, I should go ahead and do it anyway"?
I'm genuinely curious since you hit on exactly what I've been struggling to figure out.
I tried to say "It's hard to believe Lyft isn't doing exactly the same thing" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14104646 and the reply was "No, it's actually really easy to believe that Lyft isn't tricking Uber's computer systems into giving Lyft real-time info on Uber's drivers and fare prices. Please stop trying to make excuses for Uber's shitty behavior." And that's probably a fair reply. So how do you figure out whether you're doing something shitty, or just "breaking rules in a sporting way?" Is it just a coin toss? Is there an objective way to navigate these questions? It feels important to figure out answers to this kind of thing.
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.
Many of those people probably would've preferred the horse kill that guy instead of just bump him a little. Half of them probably feel that he deserved it, and they were happy to see him get hit.
It's easy to feel like the court of programmer opinion is much more evolved and sophisticated, but as far as I can tell, we're cut from the same cloth.
I was hoping there were a way to navigate ethical issues from a personal standpoint. It would be helpful to have a template: "I'm going to do S, and I know it's right because X." "I'm going to do T, even though it might be wrong, because Y." "I'm going to do V, even though it's wrong, because Z."
These decisions become ever-higher-stakes as responsibilities accrue. Is your loyalty to your employees and investors, whom you can pay more if you charge more, or your customers, who are looking to keep more of their "surplus" and may very well already have that money allocated to other needs? You can cast such dilemmas about most choices.
Anyway, religion is the framework that has been formulated to satisfy your very natural yearning for a moral standard or compass.
But even in religion, there is no hard deterministic path. Much like law, there are some baselines, but beyond that, the decision falls back into the individual's lap. That is why regular self-examination through prayer and introspection are core components of religion.
Good luck to you.
What would you be hoping to accomplish? To never step on anyone's toes or piss anyone off? A lot of these questions just don't have easy answers, no one has all the information.
Even when there's law available to draw from, you still have to have a court case or settlement negotiation or something because every situation is really different and nobody has all the facts.
There's no template because these are humans we're dealing with. They're smart, and not all of them care. If all you ever had to deal with were other ethical people, then you wouldn't need the law at all, you could just agree on things and nobody would try to abuse it.
PR is a thing because public opinion is extremely fickle. Most people are going to go wherever the wind is blowing.
You can see this readily on HN (and most other social media). The tone of the title and the first several comments set the tone for the entire thread. You can post the same comment in two different threads, one that started with positive comments and a neutral or positive title and one that started with negative comments/title, and find your comment +5 or +10 in the thread it aligns with and -1 or -3 in the thread it doesn't (this is particularly true on controversial topics).
This is also true of survey design. The way the questions are framed and phrased and the surrounding context of the survey has a huge effect on people's responses to the same fundamental question.
So I wouldn't worry too much that this is unpopular when it's framed as the big bad dominant player getting sued by the sweet innocent upstart for lurking under the covers, when the title calls the program "Hell", and when the larger context has been a flurry of negative press for Uber over a variety of topics during the last few months. Consider a few alternative framings, especially if you swap Uber and Lyft's positions, and you'll see that the hubbub is not really related to the actions alleged.
All in all, people prefer to believe nice, soft things as opposed to true, hard things. The powers that be take full advantage of this to socialize people away from meaningful competition or resistance.
It's very common for people to loudly oppose a tactic and work to cast it in a negative light while they quietly go about practicing it. The negative publicity they drum up deters a lot of potential competitors from using the same tactics and makes people unlikely to believe that they're engaging in something they "fight so hard against". With a little diversionary work, it's rare for these things to get blown open.
>the reply was "No, it's actually really easy to believe that Lyft isn't tricking Uber's computer systems into giving Lyft real-time info on Uber's drivers and fare prices. Please stop trying to make excuses for Uber's shitty behavior." And that's probably a fair reply.
I would speculate that this reply is solely about the poster satisfying his own ego. There is no content aside from "nuh-uh".
It might be easy for the naive to believe that everything is puppy dogs and rainbows, but after they get out there and give it the old college try, they'll quickly learn that it's not and either retreat into the cocoon of wage slavery or try harder next time.
>Is it just a coin toss? Is there an objective way to navigate these questions? It feels important to figure out answers to this kind of thing.
There is no hard formal definition. There isn't a way to compile it. The closest thing we have as a fundamental baseline is the law, but the law itself is up for interpretation and has many contradictory components, as we all know.
That's not to say that there aren't some moral absolutes, but ultimately, each person must find lines of comfort for himself independent of the commentary, because as discussed above, that commentary/outrage is more likely manufactured by enemy action than anything else. pg discusses this some in his essay on taboos [0], which you will probably find thought-provoking if you haven't read it yet.
I mention the tech bubble because stepping outside of it is shocking, and we have to manually internalize some of these harder lessons about human nature that others have to learn and accept immediately.
Why do so many software engineers have a disastrous run at getting promoted to management before falling back and telling everyone they're just more comfortable with code? Because as soon as they enter a field where there isn't a compiler to give a binary yes/no to their work product, perception becomes the primary field of battle.
That's a hard to place to live for someone who is used to meritocracy. You soon discover that you're vulnerable to all sorts of machinations and weaponry that you hadn't really noticed before. You notice that people will respond to you in very strange ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with the chain of events that lead to it, demanding a type of reasoning that departs hugely from what we're used to when we're dealing with code.
It's easy for us to think we have all of that down until we actually get in there, and then most of us end up with our heads spinning. That's ultimately good for us because it really helps us differentiate between what people say and what people mean, and appreciate what would be politely termed as the "nuance" in human behavior.
Put simply, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on to craft an illusory world for the general public. As PR and marketing become more advanced, this only increases. Don't worry so much about what people are saying, because more often than not, they're acting as mouthpieces for someone else, whether they're conscious of that or not.
So although you are right that it's a competitive world, you have to compete fairly - and be seen to compete fairly - or you will drive your customers away. You do need consider what people have been "socialised" to think (which is what morals are, really) because otherwise your competitors will have a significant edge.
Look at it this way. It is beneficial to society for entities (people or companies) to spend their energy improving their own service rather than degrading their competitors', because this results in the best possible service being available to that society. This is what all our anti-competitive laws - and innate sense of fairness - spring from.
I think you're right that you have to be seen as fair. I think it's important to actually be fair, but as I said above, the popular conception of "fairness" does not necessarily map. It really comes down to how good your PR dept is at framing your company and making sure you're in the news for things that no one can fault, and that your strategic moves are never publicized.
The short version is that people don't want to hear "how the sausage is made", but the environment, ultimately including your customers, still demands that you make it.
>You do need consider what people have been "socialised" to think (which is what morals are, really) because otherwise your competitors will have a significant edge.
Yeah, again, this is PR. I agree you need good PR. You also need to be realistic enough to know that the crap someone's PR department pumps out is not the end of the story. You have to make winning plays.
Simply brilliant!
I'm not sure that's what these other commenters are really saying. It seems to me that this sort of competition actually ends up being bad for the consumer. Good faith competition where you make your product better is what we hope our markets will do. When companies like uber instead try to hamstring the competition that's bad for consumers and should be discouraged.
Why should you not be able to use your competitor's public offerings to gather information that will be used to improve your product? Seeing the other guy's moves is a massive motivating factor to improve your own product, and provides useful feedback as much as modifications to your own product.
>When companies like uber instead try to hamstring the competition that's bad for consumers and should be discouraged.
Uber isn't trying to hamstring the competition. They're just trying to compete by learning about their competitor. This is how competition works. As far as I know, they didn't do anything that impeded Lyft's ability to operate (other than outcompeting them).
It sounds like the problem people have is just that Uber is the larger company right now. If Lyft had gotten into Uber's API (and there's no reason to necessarily assume they haven't), this thread would be much different.
Social norms develop and act much faster than laws, and I would suggest they are more powerful. In Uber's case, publicity about their underhanded tactics have caused huge numbers of people to delete the app. We don't have Uber where I live, but a visitor who suggested getting an Uber to the airport elicited an instant "No way I'm using those scum" reaction from me. That hurts Uber far more (and far more quickly) than any legal process.
I think the big lesson here is that you have to consider social norms at least as carefully as you do legal requirements. That's painful for software people because we love precision and predictability, so laws are cool and all those nebulous and confusing opinions that you have to talk to people to understand are icky.
I am curious where the line would be drawn here. Does it also undermine competitors when companies "poach" workers from competitors by offering a higher salary?
https://developer.lyft.com/docs/lyft-developer-platform-term...
One section I'd draw particular attention to reads,
"You Will Not: a. use the Platform or Service in any manner that is competitive to Lyft or the Service, including in connection with any application, website or other product or service that also includes, features, endorses, or otherwise supports in any way a third party that provides services competitive to Lyft’s products and services, in our sole discretion; ..."
So if Uber profited from that misuse, why wouldn't Lyft have a case?
If there is evidence Uber attempted a bridge too far such as using the fake accounts to divert Lyft drivers or in some way impacted Lyft level of customer service, Uber can all but ask Lyft not to squeeze too hard
I have no opinion on the actual legality of it.
If I set up a server to respond to only the people I choose, what restrictions can I make on it in your perfect world?
The web is open. If you put your a chair out in a public square with a sign on that back that says, "Only paying members can sit." don't be surprised when someone random sits in it.
A better analogy would putting your chair in a private room with a locked door and sign on the door that says ask management for access to the chair. Anyone who breaks in to use that chair definitely knows they aren't supposed to be there.
Do you really believe that?
The lengths people will go to justify Uber is amazing.
> 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.
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.
If I provide information to my customers, I have to provide the same information directly to my competitor? Why does that make the world better?
In this particular case, it makes the world better by recognizing that "prohibiting competition" is not a worthwhile goal for the state to promote. We recently had another spurt of articles praising California's policy of not enforcing noncompetes as to employees. Why are noncompetes for customers a better idea?
That's called mens rea and it's how, for example, various types of murder and accidental death are distinguished. It's kind of a core element of western jurisprudence...
Not that I think it will be pursued criminally, as Uber has power & influence on its side to protect it from repercussions people like myself would face for doing the same exact thing. I wish that weren't the case though, we should all be equal in the eyes of the law.
We'll find out regardless through discovery.
Market intelligence, market research, competitive analysis, swot, opposition research, take place everyday.
The way they went about it does seem to have put them in hot water. Question is did they cross a line with serious legal and business (as in cost) ramifications?
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/26/6067663/this-is-ubers-play...
As such under natural conditions there are few competitors in most industries. This is natural.
When incumbents apply even a modicium of "stop competitors" sauce, what had been "nearly impossible" can become "impossible." One of many, many examples of this would be dropping prices until new competitors are out of business.
For a lot of further examples that might expand your thinking but which don't for the most part apply to Uber, look up Monopoly behaviors.
But in short, with very good reason, what modern society has determined is that with regard to raising barriers of entry against potential competitors, the only fair thing to do is to completely ignore them.
Responding to them even minimally, such as dropping your prices until they're dead, is not considered in the interests of society over the long term. For similar (though not exactly the same) reasons, it is considered standard practice not to have a single strategic meeting with all of the direct competitors in the room, such as regarding pricing or other strategic aspects.
Again, what society has determined is that competitors need to, largely, ignore each other, and operate with respect to the market as though their competition did not exist.
I'm no professor, but since your question seems in earnest, after Googling the concepts I've mentioned please let me know if you are still of the same opinion as when you wrote your comment.
Uber is capable of running the best service on a merit basis. Cheating this way is just childish and should be corrected immediately imo.
"Hell originated after Uber created fake rider accounts on Lyft and used software to trick Lyft’s system into thinking those riders were in certain locations. This allowed Uber to see the eight closest available Lyft drivers to each fake rider."
That's probably going to cost them one way or the other. That's actively interfering with both Lyft and the driver.
IANAL, but that sounds a lot like "tortious interference" and maybe more.
Lyft, itself, on the other hand, has a much better case against Uber
I'm gone out the house 10 hours a day, sleep 8 hours, and have very few actual chores. They would only need to cook me a lunch to take to work, and do a little light cleaning. They could use the free time to jump online and learn from resources they would've never had access to. I'd even help them by getting them access to some skills appropriate help. There entire life would be massively improved, and once they feel ready to move back to their homeland and make their own living, I wouldn't stop them.
Yet that isn't only illegal, if I tried to foster a child and treated them this way I would be considered a horrible human being. Weird, no?
The main answer to this is that allowing this, while it may seem reasonable in a single case by case basis, caused massive social problems (child slavery lite) that justifies forbidding me from making an offer that could save the life of some child. The second and third order effects are too bad. (Or maybe they aren't and it would actually be better overall to allow it. It would be an interesting discussion either way.)
One company secretly installed software on the phones of employees of its competitor, in order to track those individuals and perform corporate espionage on its competition, and you ask what's wrong with that?
You say it should be ok because some of those employees were offered payouts to switch?
Not only does that not remotely excuse the behavior described in my second paragraph, ask yourself: why is Uber engaging in these tactics against its competitor? It's definitely not to spur healthy growth and competition in the industry -- it's to help drive a competitor out of business and cement its monopoly. And if it becomes more of a monopoly... do you think that will be good for its employees in the long run?
Uber supposedly has no competition relation with drivers. Adding that drivers may choose to work both for Uber and Lyft, this gives Uber leverage against a category of population they have been known to abuse. The danger here is the combination of undue knowledge and a de-facto dependency relation in the hands of a known offender.
In your example, you're saying Uber had to offer several hundreds of dollars for drivers to switch sides. However, nothing is said about how this spying contributed to this : maybe the offer could have been bigger. Maybe some drivers were precluded from receiving monetary deals because of it. etc.
>The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges Uber broadly invaded the privacy of the Lyft drivers, specifically violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act and Federal Wiretap Act and engaged in unfair competition.
It's up to a jury to decide whether or not that's the case here.
I once heard from an Uber driver that the CEOs of the two companies hated each other and have gone crazy competing against each other.
Either it's over a woman or they're really messed up in the head. Regardless, this is very disappointing.
Hard to believe this is a serious question, but the answer is that it's an invasion of privacy. "Tracking" is a polite way to put it, but if I'm reading it correctly, Uber is basically stalking them.
Just when I think Uber can't be any sleazier, they find a way.
P.S: Literally paraphrasing my Engineering Professional Practice course. An exam of which I just crushed!
Straight-up stealing code from Google? I've seen it justified here. Stalking people? That's okay, too. Screwing over competitors with software like this? Totally fine!
Uber can do no wrong on HN. It disgusts me, but I'll be satisfied when they've been destroyed through one or more of the myriad gigantic lawsuits they're fighting. The comments on that story ought to be amusing.
Legal terms of service.
Point 1: Lyft's API comes with a contractual agreement regarding acceptable usage. Uber deliberately breached that agreement. This is a breach of property rights.
Point 2: They breached Lyft's property rights with the intent of stalking Lyft drivers, and of harming Lyft as an organization. This shows the breach of property rights was not neutral or positive, but rather was an activity meant to harm the property owner, and to reduce the competitive landscape.
Point 3: It was a clear violation of law. I include this last because law only loosely correlates with morality; however law draws the lines on the playing field and it is worth explicitly noting that Uber arranged for its employees to break federal law, repeatedly, for Uber's benefit.
If you don't think property rights are important, go talk with a Libertarian.
I don't know enough either way, so I'd like to hear your explanation.
Not that I think it will be pursued criminally, as Uber has power & influence on its side to protect it from repercussions people like myself would face for doing the same exact thing.
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 actually moves the needle for the company (if it turns out they are guilty), so I guess they at least had significant upside with that one.
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.
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!)
What the OP suggests is that the risk/reward ratio for such activities is high. The whole point of doing these activities is that they have a great reward with a small risk of being caught. If the risk of getting caught is high, and the reward is low then what's the point of doing such activities.
Very few companies or things are that unique in fundamental ways. When everyone accepts that the norms, rules, or laws don't apply to someone or something, people are temporarily accepting that those things are being broken. There is always a reckoning.
Look in this very thread. A poster says they disagree with my position, because Uber is a unique animal that is "psychotically competitve". WTF does that mean? A: Uber thinks that no rules apply to them.
The ethical compromise made on behalf of all involved is startling, if this is true.
Even on mundane decisions unrelated to ethics, I've seen engineers object to things and get overruled. If you continue digging in your heels, the leadership will simply fire you or move you to another team and get someone else to do it.
If you did have strong ethical objections, it's likely you just left the company. Why stay at something where no one else shares your ethics? So the moral vacuum is somewhat self-reinforcing.
Besides all that, it's a lot easier to sit in a place of judgment when you weren't involved than, say, in a position where you needed the job to put food on the table for your family.
Why do people build weapons? Why do people pay taxes, that are used to fund immoral actions? Why do people provide services to immoral actors? Typically, the answer is money.
That seems like a stretch; people pay their taxes because they don't want to go to prison, not because of money. If anything, money would be an incentive not to pay your taxes, so it seems obvious that there's something stronger than money at play there.
similarly, there is nuance in each position. self-preservation motivates avoidance of prosecution, but it doesn't prevent individuals and companies from seeking the most effective legal means to avoid taxes, which sometimes is in a grey area w.r.t law and ethics. as well we should consider that while some public services are considered good and desirable, many of them aren't, and which is good and which is not is a judgment that varies heavily between individuals.
this isn't libertarian-land "taxes are theft" stuff. this is the basic social contract that everyone, libertarians and their opponents, all abide by.
US-specific:
* EV credit: $7500
* Solar panels on your roof: 30% federal tax credit (some states have incentives as well)
* Mortgage interest/insurance
* Educational expenses
* Charity contributions
* Tax loss harvesting of non-tax advantaged investment accounts
Some of the above require itemizing.
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 I'll just build it." If I get asked once more, I still might.
Does that make me an unethical money chasing individual? I dunno, maybe. And maybe I'm wrong and it's not a big deal -- I honestly don't know if that feature is a HIPAA violation or not. But most of all, I just want to keep my job and keep feeding my family.
I wouldn't be too quick to condemn the people that wrote this for Uber.
What if you could opt in to healthcare that was 20% cheaper, but was only subject to contractual promises of medical privacy, not the HIPAA. Would you take the deal?
IIRC the previous coverage noted that Uber was providing incentives to drivers who were using both systems, including both bonuses and steering passengers to the both-systems drivers to incentivize them to drop Lyft and only drive for Uber. The corollary of that is that there are a bunch of Uber-only drivers and former drivers who had their incomes hurt by Uber's redirection of profitable fares to 2-system drivers. THAT may be actionable, and a class action of former drivers seems like it wouldn't be that hard to put together.
If the drivers had been led to believe that ride allocation was "fair" (based on distance, predicted arrival time, etc.) or under their control (based on rides being presented to multiple drivers and assigned to the first responder) then finding that it was actually weighted in favor of people driving for Lyft might be a problem for them.
This also goes back to the principle of "anyone can sue for anything" as long as it's not frivolous, and this doesn't seem like it'd be considered such. A suit might not be successful, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't at least considered.
It would seem to me that the Lyft company has the strongest case here against Uber based on a violation of the terms of service for the private API that Uber abused.
If Lyft were successful in their lawsuit, that would lend confidence to a follow-on suit by drivers.
I ended up downloading their app and using it all weekend, and uninstalled it as soon as I got to the airport. I wonder how many other cities are basically exclusively Uber currently ?
Hence the problem they're trying to solve by poaching drivers. They're fine being the ISPs of ridesharing - ISPs are still in business.
Something to note is that half (3/6) of Uber's board members are internal (Uber employees). So perhaps Kalanick is under no pressure of being ousted (maybe he has tie-breaking/veto privilege as the chairman) by the board, and so people that do want him removed are resorting to leaking bad press, in the hope that external pressure will force a change.
This. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by people jumping on the 'gleeful schadenfreude and' bandwagon
Besides, you know the drill, if it's "in right now" it drives clicks.
Well I'll hang my hat now and grab my pitchfork to join the mob...
This is terrifying and must be stopped!
-- Jean-Paul Sartre
It might be erm... tantamount to admitting most of your activity is subject to legal challenge but the cost savings would be astronomical.
Can anyone explain how this is different from Google and Facebook following you around with informatics everywhere you go on the internet? The favicon trick is a pretty good example.
Another interesting question is how Uber has gone from being untouchable to assailable since the sexual harassment scandals. Uber is a populist creature. Their users used to protect them from harassment. Now, fewer people show up for protests or call their representatives to defend Travis and friends. Part of this is because, in most places, there are other options. Part of it is they lost their base.
[1] See 18 U.S.C. § 1030 a/k/a the CFAA
Google developed a hack for Safari to bypass the default third-party cookie blocking[0]
Facebook made private profile information available to apps installed by friends[1]
It seems rather arbitrary to distinguish Uber from the multiple occasions both Facebook and Google have had to answer or settle with the FTC for mishandling private user data.
[0] http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-pays-17m-to-settle-safar...
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases-proceedings/092-3184/f...
Maybe if they didn't act like coke-addled frat-boys in Vegas, they'd get better press.
If Uber wants to catch a break, maybe they should stop behaving like this...
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.
> You think the same about United...
Yes.
> ...and now American?
Dunno, haven't heard of it. Probably.
> Perhaps it just that the outraged minority now have a louder voice.
I don't understand the mechanism you're proposing? You're insinuating that this "minority" is today no larger than it was for...similar scandals in the past, I guess? Then why would readership for news about said scandals rise? How does loudness factor into this? Does Uber go to 11?
Anyway, you're wrong on the simplest of facts. It's not a minority: "Pollsters found generally negative attitudes toward United, with 47 percent viewing it unfavorably. Twenty-three percent see the airline favorably." (http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/aviation/329687-pol...)
> There is a financial benefit for them writing negative articles, outrage/scandal draws in viewers.
And to think that for centuries, we trusted journalists without ever noticing that they were paid (paid!) to write what they write. It's basically corruption! And now that I think of it, I can no longer trust the baker! That corrupt flour-power-wannabe is taking money to make bread!
you jest now, but in past eras there was SIGNIFICANT political conflict about the role millers and bakers played in distribution of grain resources.
I haven't heard of American being in the news lately--so can't comment on any wrongdoing that they've been up to.
Personally, I only read things that I don't want to read, and the options are really getting thin these days.