So, no one was really able to answer my question last thread. In fact, I mostly got snarky condescending replies. I've stopped caring about such things though, so hopefully good-faith questions are still welcome:
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.
If you read this article (https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/hell-o-uber/) you'll find it goes much futher then just accessing Lyft's public API. They created fake customer accounts, spoofed their locations and even linked the data about drivers they got from this to their own drivers. So what's wrong with this? To quote the article, possibly: "breach of contract, unfair business practices, stealing trade secrets and violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act".
It's frightening to see users on a forum now support a bad law like the CFAA because it could be used against a company that they happen to like at the moment. A bad law is a bad law. It doesn't magically become a good law when it could be used against someone you don't like.
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.
My opinion: This is not about the drivers. They were engaging in activity intended to be actively hostile to a competitor. That is why this is wrong.
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.
Hey, good reply. Thanks! I think this convinced me.
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.
Laws are just our social norms ("how we do things around here") codified into actionable rules.
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.
> It is another to try to actively undermine the competition, and not because your service is simply better.
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?
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?
I think Lyft tries to avoid directly smearing Uber for a couple reasons: 1) Uber paves the way for them legally by using a lot of Uber VC money to fight regulation and lobby, which helps both companies. 2) Lyft is doing a lot of the same things that Uber is doing, they're just less gross about it, but they still skirt laws and do other things government actors may not like, so it would be a bit of kettle and pot.
It's a good bet that Lyft lawyers are currently preparing and there are probably top level negotiations ongoing between Lyft and Uber regarding this area.
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
"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"
For completeness, the earlier article[1] also quoted a lawyer who listed other reasons various parties might take action: "breach of contract, unfair business practices, stealing trade secrets and violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act"
I would prefer businesses compete on the services they provide to their customers, not on how effectively they can sneakily torpedo their competitors (by, in this case, trying to deny them their suppliers).
You can make a good argument that's exactly what Uber did. They tried to obtain field data to make competitive decision.
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?
Lyft should have a good case. A few years ago, there was case where one company had their employees calling the support line of another company (think it was the cable industry) to tie up support and resources that were meant for real customers.
I will answer you simply and I hope concisely. Most industries have an incredibly high barrier to entry: if you woke up tomorrow wanting to sell heavy farm equipment, you felt this is what you were on this planet to do, the chances that you would be selling heavy farm equipment 12 months later is less than 0.0005%.
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.
Its against the competitive spirit of business. Like if I'm trying to run the best taxi service and someone runs a better one, that's fine, but if someone is stalking my driver's and spying on them, that's bullshit. It's cheating.
Uber is capable of running the best service on a merit basis. Cheating this way is just childish and should be corrected immediately imo.
If you drive for Uber, you presumably agreed to some kind of contract where it's OK for them to track your every move. Drivers who only work for Lyft made no such agreement with Uber. That's probably what this will hinge on.
"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.
Consider the difference between a race and a boxing match. They're both sports but if you sign up for one and find yourself involved in the other you'd be unhappy. In law this sort of things is referred to as 'tortious interference'; Uber isn't running their own business here, but trying to fuck up Lyft's If they want to play that game, then why shouldn't Lyft send spies to their offices and attempt o steal Uber's corporate info? This sort of no-holds-barred capitalism has been tried before and people didn't like it.
What's wrong with me offering a starving third world child the ability to be my full time house maid for $1 a day and room and board? Many of them would love the chance. Some will literally die from expose and lack of food and clean water. Yet it would be quite illegal for me to give them a chance to survive.
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.)
I gather this is a good-faith question, but it's a little boggling to me how you can be asking it.
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?
I'm going to repeat my previous answer to your previous question, as I posted it late and you probably didn't see it :
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.
I think u read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14190719 it answers this question well. Even though the end result might have been good for Lyft Drivers, that's not the point. The point is this crossed a clear criminal line that we all want enforced for future cases like this. i.e. what if next time it's Pepsi Breaking into Coke etc etc and the group it benefits is different.
>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.
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.
HN proves, in the comments of nearly every story about Uber, that there's nothing wrong with any of the shitty things this company does to its competitors or customers.
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.
I'll offer a good faith answer, even though I'm pretty sure you'll dismiss it as snarky condescension.
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.
Yea, violating the TOS of your competitors API so you can directly compete with them is very risky, and due to the overly broad nature of CFAA it could easily end with multiple Uber employees in prison if pursued criminally.
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.
There is something weird about the tactics of Uber execs. I don't think it's all an ethics failure.
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.
It's not weird at all. It looks pretty obviously like a pump and dump scheme. This behavior is fraud, and i bet the juiciest stuff is yet to come.
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.
I don't agree with that. I think it's related to the fundamental nature of speculative capitalism. This is Uber 'virtue signaling'.
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.
Excellent point. I, too, had been wondering about Uber's priorities. Realizing that the stock valuation at the time of IPO is their only guiding metric has made the pieces fall into place for me.
Who says no one raised an objection or said something?
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.
I just send the rockets up, where they come down is not my department.
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.
> Why do people pay taxes, that are used to fund immoral actions? ... 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.
silicon valley has filled up with the types of money chasing individuals who would have once become investment bankers on wall street and brought similar morals with them
Today I was asked for the 10th damn time to build something that could expose a small amount of HIPAA data. The last 9 times I explained how building this feature would, at the least, require a security audit, but nobody understood why I was making such a big deal.
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.
I'm not sure that a Lyft driver suing has as much bad potential for Uber as a class action of former Uber drivers. Given the reported churn there's likely a significant pool of those drivers, and since Uber apparently considers both Lyft and McDonald's as competitors, it seems likely that many of them are not feeling wealthy.
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.
This would likely depend on the terms of the contract with the drivers and on what statements if any were made to drivers about how rides were allocated, prioritized, etc.
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.
Is there a separate lawsuit from Lyft Inc., or is the sole lawsuit originating as a class action filed on the behalf of the driver(s)?
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.
Uber lost me as a customer if there are other options. I was in Houston this past weekend and everyone is using Uber, no one using Lyft, etc.
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 ?
One after the other. To put a conspiracy/playful hat on - seriously this is not my serious opinion - could it be that Uber is getting set up? Not necessarily framed but "oops, this just got leaked" set of dominoes. Apparently quite a few people are mad at Uber, like Apple, and Google, and the taxi drivers ...
I would guess it's a combination of intentional leaks and reporters smelling blood in the water. Maybe also the upper management did something to lose the favor of people that would normally protect them from these kind of events (big investors). Or at least put a stop to them.
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.
I postulate that many more companies do this type of behavior than you realize, and the heightened attention, and entrenched competition are sure to surface every little screwup. So basically its a bit of both.
It's more like their competitors were always encouraging and spreading the negative press, and eventually it reached a tipping point that emboldened insiders to speak out and everyone went all out because it's a scandal and a way to be vindicated against Uber.
Readit News
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels
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.
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.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/hell-o-uber/
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?
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!)
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.
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.
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...
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