Comment by olliepop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olliepop | Hacker News Reader

> Uber has a team dedicated to collecting trade secrets from competing companies. Allegedly, the people involved use disappearing-message apps, anonymous servers, and secret computers and phones to communicate without leaving a trail.

If true, then this is absolutely unreal.

Add it to the growing list of dodgy Uber tactics:

Ride-hailing company (Uber) hit by revelations it used custom-built tool to deceive law enforcement, while latest departure of senior staffer deepens troubles https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr...

Uber employees have ordered and canceled more than 5,000 rides from rival Lyft since last October, according to new data provided by Lyft. http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/uber-fake-ride-re...

CNNMoney spoke to three Uber drivers who said they received a text message that said they were "forbidden" from driving with another company. http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/04/technology/uber-lyft/?iid=EL

Uber admitted on Tuesday that it underpaid its New York City-based drivers by millions of dollars over the past two and a half years https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/23/15681422/uber-underpaid-n...

Uber will stop its controversial practice of tracking users for up to five minutes after a trip has ended, as it attempts to turn around its mired public image. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/29/uber-u-tu...

Uber’s Hell program used fake passenger accounts to track the location and status of Lyft drivers. http://www.newsweek.com/uber-used-hell-program-track-lyft-dr...

When I hear stories like this I think of the developers who likely thought of and implemented the systems behind these criminal acts and I'm once more reminded that software developers, in aggregate, are on a similar level to '90s finance "tricksters" etc. We'll do whatever if the money is there.

It all comes to personal ethics.

Let's not ignore the group dynamic though either. People's moral convictions can be somewhat flexible when it comes to fitting in and blending in with a group, including a company.

Yes it's true that if your personal ethics are strong enough, you'll resist or exit a group whose ethics conflict with your own. It's also true that if the company has good ethics, you won't have to.

Meanwhile the weak-minded as Obi Wan might call them, will go with the flow and behave however the group behaves. If the group is impeccably ethical, they'll act accordingly. And if the group is predatory, they'll act accordingly.

In short, both individual and group ethics have to fail to get an Uber situation. And in business the group ethics and the tone are set from the top down - Travis. This is why people go on about the importance of company culture.

This is very true. Thanks for this comment, group dynamics might in fact be more important than personal ethics.

> both individual and group ethics have to fail

However, they don't have to fail at the same time or in a single step. This type of problem can creep in slowly over years as the "normalization of deviance"[1].

Richard Cook presented[2] a very useful model for how this type of problem creeps into complex system. The pressure from economic and workload concerns never goes away, so unless there is a proactive, explicit counter force, way to push back against that force, the system will inevitably be pushed toward failure. Therefor it's important to stop problems early when they are small. The magnitude of the counter force increases rapidly as behavior becomes increasingly deviant.

[1] http://www.rapp.org/archives/2015/12/normalization-of-devian...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60

Good links, thanks!

One unfortunate side of progress and technological advancement is that it can be unethical, in the hands of people with less ethics.

Think of it this way: 1. Anybody in robotics/ai/ml is helping uav technology used for military purpose. 2. Anybody in financial lending could help fuel financial crisis. 3. Anybody in software could be enabling surveillance technology without even realizing.

It's worse. They realize it, but don't care. Or rather, this is a cool project where we get to transcribe voice in real time.

If you implement any of this shit as an engineer and you try to Nuremberg your way out of responsibility, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Hi, what is that debate about Nuremberg? Did it allow to escape responsibility ? Genuinely interested.

Nurenberg is where they held the trials for Nazis after World War II. Many of them claimed that they were only following orders, which quickly became known as the “Nuremberg defense”.

I honestly don’t know to what degree it worked.

It’s obviously quite clear that it’s seen as a cowards way out; that people should have done the right thing in spite of orders.

It did not worked. And big names were not just following orders anyway. But it was not just covardly way out. The prewar German culture really thought that way. It was heavily militarized state and following orders was valued. In that culture, if you followed orders you should be fine and not following then was something very bad.

Yes, the reason the Allies had jointly agreed not to allow that defense was because they knew the Germans would use it like they did after WWI in Leipzig.

But, the Allies also had to reconcile this with the Yamashita standard; that commanders have to take responsibility for what their subordinates are doing even if they haven't explicitly ordered it to convict other war criminals, most famously Tomoyuki Yamashita for the crimes his soldiers committed in the Philippines.

Which leads to this back and forth tennis game at every ethical discussion of who's really responsible; the boss or the peon? IMHO, convict them both.

Both are really responsible. The idea that there must be single responsible party instead of multiple people responsible for their partial contributions is fallacy.

You can excuse peon when he trully has no other choice and does bare minimum to survive/protect familly/etc. These went above and beyond what was necessary to prove themselves, make their careers or out of conviction.

You can excuse boss when the soldiers disobeyed, he lost control and truly attempted to stop the situation. Not when it is smirk smirk we all know what is expected/tolerated what is going to happen. And these knew what will happen and wanted it happen.

It’s seen as a cowardly defense in that you argue against any personal resonsibility for something you were ordered to do.

In the particular case of the Nuremberg tribunals, no the superior orders defense did not work because the Allies had jointly decided to not allow it. However, during the My Lai massacre of 1968 US soldiers successfully used the defense to reduce their sentences when they were court martialed.

Comparing Uber engineers to Nuremberg trials is little bit too much.

Comparing the severity of the crimes, sure, that's very unfair.

Comparing the defenses I don't think is too much. If that is what engineers who did any of this shady stuff are telling themselves, that is. For all I know, they're high-five:ing each other over a drink.

Like I said in another (heavily downvoted) post, it’s time for the corporate death penalty.

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