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Comment by lemevi | Hacker News Reader

> Have to assume driver phones can be compromised which means the data must be made tamper proof. So all the data is encrypted on the phone.

> In the background the Replication Service encrypts the data and sends it to the Messaging Service.

> The Messenger Service sends the backup to the phone.

As long as the phone can't ever read the encrypted data this is probably secure, but shifting costs onto the driver through using their bandwidth to store encrypted backup blobs seems unethical. The uber app on the phone isn't using this data to the benefit of the user, it can't as it is encrypted.

I don't think you should use a person's device for anything other than serving that person. This is the kind of thing though I would totally expect from Uber. Based on what the media has reported in the past, the whole company's culture seems toxic and dishonest from top to bottom.

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But the driver is served by this -- the driver wants the Uber platform to be scalable, available and ensure the 'successfully customer experience' the article refers to, so that they can continue to get paid for providing the rides.

Now, if Uber were offering a free 'lol cats apps' on the app store that surreptitiously ran this protocol in the background of unsuspecting users I think it would be a different case, but running technology that supports the goal of the main app doesn't feel out of bounds to me.

To your point, those phones are not the drivers personal phones, but they are provided by Uber. Uber is just storing information on their own hardware basically.

Apparently that's not true anymore. I was talking to some Uber drivers a couple of weeks ago in Vegas and they have to provide their own smartphone.

Exactly. You can download the driver application from the Uber Website. They are distributing it as an Enterprise application(on iPhone) thereby circumventing the App Store.

> I don't think you should use a person's device for anything other than serving that person.

I might have missed something to the contrary, but to me the article only describes how they use a drivers phone to store information about the trips he is making. Which the phone is involved in anyways.

Similar to storing stuff in the session cookie of a web app.

I agree - I read this as they are storing the current state for the trip the driver is engaged in on the phone so when datacenter failure occurs restoration source is the uber driver phone.

You have to store data on the client endpoints in realtime logistics applications; its just how it's done.

If you don't, networking failure scenarios will destroy your user experience since you'll end up with frequent irreconcilable data gaps with cellular networking being what it is.

In general I think it can be fine to use a person's device for other things.

A famous example is Skype: they were able to set up a global VoIP system with very little capital, by making it a peer-to-peer application rather than requiring a central server to route all calls. So your computer was used to forward unrelated calls, but that's generally fine, the burden on each individual user is low.

In the Skype case, there were tons of computers out there, owned by individuals but mostly idle, and Skype managed to use them more productively--that is a win for everybody. With mobile phones it might be a bit different because the bandwidth is limited, but still, people can see how much data the uber app is using, and decide whether it is worth the benefit to use it to hail uber cars or not.

Skype example proves exactly the opposite: the main reason they had to switch back to a centralized setup is because as mobile became a more dominant usage scenario P2P became untenable. Supernodes had to serve quite large and -- worse -- constant traffic which kept them alive (draining battery and consuming data).

From the article, it seems this is not a true p2p architecture. It's more of a hub and spoke model, with each phone connected to the cloud, but not to other phones.

Yeah, that's why I was saying that Uber (mobile) might be different from the original Skype (PCs).

Is that compatible with this?:

  Why choose this approach? The traditional approach would be much simpler. I
  think it is to make sure the customer always has a good 
  customer experience and losing trip information for an 
  active trip would make for a horrible customer experience. 

  By building their syncing strategy around the phone, even thought it's 
  complicated and takes a lot work, Uber is able to preserve trip data and make
  for a seamless customer experience even on datacenter 
  failures.

If the phone can't unencrypt it, it can't take advantage of the data if the datacenter goes down surely?

edit: p.s. dang if you read this, please can we get a way to do quotes with automatic text-wrapping >:

> I don't think you should use a person's device for anything other than serving that person.

It's not the person's device. Uber requires all drivers to have a separate phone just for Uber usage. I had always assumed it was so that drivers wouldn't hit on passengers by calling them after dropping off. The distributed data backup seems like another advantage.

> assumed it was so that drivers wouldn't hit on passengers

To my knowledge, Uber relays calls between drivers and passengers through its own phone network, which effectively anonymizes each end.

For example, an Uber driver once called me, and then my phone lost service. I tried to call back with a friend's phone, and an automated Uber message said that there were no active rides associated with my friend's number.

When I took Uber outside the US, this wasn't true. The app faithfully showed my real phone number on the driver's phone (the driver took the +1 as a queue to not call me and instead drive slowly in hopes of finding me).

Are you sure it was your real phone number, or was it just an American number that Uber owned? That's what they use in the US -- a pool of numbers that they bought to function as masks.

It's to protect the privacy of drivers as much as as passengers.

I think its a solid solution from a tech standpoint. Phone (or any end point for that matter) holding on to data/state during a DC failover and being aware of an outage happening at the DC makes the recovery process, so much more graceful. One could argue that if this solution was not in place, driver would have lost the trip data during a datacenter outage which would have cost him his earnings. So this is directly helping drivers in exchange for him allowing to store encrypted data on their phones during such outages.If anything I would explicitly say this to the driver installing an Uber app and seek a acknowledgement. You are also over indexing on what you hear in media about Uber. What you are quintessentially saying is, there were two solutions available for the same problem and engineers ended up choosing this one, because he wanted a dishonest solution over a honest one, so he can fall in line with the company culture, which is dishonest :). That does not make sense at all.

Which is a shame because the actual boots on the ground are usually very kind, clean, and courteous, and the ride is far, far superior to cab experiences. At least anecdotally, here in Philadelphia, PA.

Most people are great. Ridesharing is great. There are different mentalities in the coordination organizations, though.

For example, a Lyft driver mentioned to me they had an Uber recruiter in their car the other day. The person was pushy, insistent and distracting, which motivated this driver's loyalty to Lyft and gave me a subtle, mental "-1" for Uber.

The concept is obviously sound, but that doesn't make the companies driving it immune to failure.

Are you sure it was an recruiter? Uber doesn't hire them afaik. Probably a driver wanting to claim the $500 referral bonus. I've had plenty of Lyft drivers doing the same and my response is always "cool, give me your card!"

I'm sure the distinction is important to people in the industry, but from the outside, someone who pesters drivers in the hopes of receiving $500 referral bonuses is a recruiter.

Not only Uber used to hire them (I don't know if they still do), it also provided them with burner iPhones and credit cards so that they can continue recruiting and cancelling rides as Lyft tries to ban them from the network. There was a bit of media shitstorm about this some time ago.

Seems inline with a lot of the other ways they have sneakily taken a greater share from drivers. They used to give drivers the phone and service for a refundable deposit. Then they started charging $10 per week for use of the Uber phone, eventually they allowed drivers to BYOD and now they are using their data plans as a backup service.

The so called "safe rides" fee is another example of Uber dishonesty. The percentage of the fare that goes to Uber w/o having to actually say they are changing the split has gone way up. That was set initially at $1 and it looks like it is up to around $1.50 now. This is in addition to the 20% cut Uber takes off the top of the actual fare.

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