Just heard this story on NPR whilst dropping the moody 13 year old to school
I will reserve my judgement on Uber and their charmant business practices whist i cast my eye over this somewhat Darth Vader approach to using tech to essentially deceive local government.
The Chicago Tribune reports
Uber’s secret ‘Greyball’ program shows just how far it will go to get its way
…/…
Friday’s twist came from a story in The New York Times about how Uber worked to identify and defeat government officials in a yearslong game of cat and mouse that spanned several nations. Uber mined customer geolocation data, credit-card information, app-usage habits and even social-media profiles to identify those working for city governments or driving for rival ride-hailing services.
The series of problems is all the more striking because of Uber’s long-running status as a proudly disruptive Silicon Valley darling — to the point that a remarkable range of businesses offering everything from baby-sitting to lunch delivery to massages got described as “the Uber of” whatever market they were targeting. Business schools, meanwhile, studied the future of the “sharing economy” that Uber seemed poised to lead.
“This is a really bad month. The number and kind of problems they have is an unusual array of bad luck and bad behavior combined,” said Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth University’s Tuck School of Business. Though he and other experts suggested the company could recover its momentum with better management, “Ultimately, your reputation is a complex thing,” he said. “There has to be a lot of bad stuff going on for this to make a difference. I still think they’re not there.”
Read the full article at http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/technology/ct-uber-greyball-20170303-story.html
