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Comment by magoon | Hacker News Reader

The tides turn when your government starts investigating people, versus investigating crimes.

From the article, it sounds like these investigations are mainly run-of-the-mill criminal cases:

   A large number of the law enforcement requests were 
   related to fraud investigations or the use of stolen 
   credit cards, according to the report.

But why that would require 12 million user records to be disclosed to the government, of course, is another question entirely.

Might just be "incidental collection". https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/758637-lesson-4-job-...

Just for perspective, 12 million users (assuming this is US-based) is 3.7% of the US population in aggregate. This is an even higher percentage of Uber's US user base (probably by a factor of 10 or 20).

Per the article, the 12 million records were disclosed to "regulators", not law enforcement. From "transparencyreport.uber.com", it looks like the primary consumers were California (~5M) and NYC (~3M), followed by various other cities, states, and airports.

"regulators" who likely share their data freely with the government or law enforcement anyway. I see no reason to make a distinction where no practical distinction exists.

You have no idea the ungodly amount of accounts that carders create.

I believe that for that particular type of fraud the distinction between people and users becomes important — especially with a product that has a user sponsor new user promotion, fakes accounts are probably common. That could explain the alarmingly large number of _accounts_ being investigated, presumably not as many individuals.

The weasel words here are "A large number" because the spin statement is intended to portray an image to the reader that is absent in actual fact. If there were a majority, or a high percentage, they surely would have trumpted said high percentage. Instead, the ambiguous "a large number" is used, which could mean "999"

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