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Comment by kbart | Hacker News Reader

"Uber as a company is very ethical and takes the responsibility that we are entrusted with very seriously."

Probably every company has said that, yet we know how that usually turns out sooner rather than later (I'm looking at you, WhatsApp).

"So I know it's not easy to believe, and it's easy for me to say since I work here, but nothing nefarious is going on. If there was, we the engineers would be against it completely."

For now. What if a new higher manager comes and decides to use this information for other purposes (ad, sale etc.)? Some engineers might quit, but costumers can't take their data back.

My takeaway is: do not trust companies with more data than necessary to provide you a service and this is exactly such case.

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> Probably every company has said that

Does your company have a set of values to which it says it holds itself and its employees? Excellent - lets play Enron Bingo! Go through your company values and every time one of them matches or strongly overlaps with the list provided in Enrons 1998 Annual Report[1] - Shout "WOOOO" really loudly.

[1] * - RESPECT - INTEGRITY - COMMUNICATION - EXCELLENCE

This is brilliant! As a fellow skeptic of "corporate values" I'm going to remember this one.
It might be a fun exercise to trawl through the company values of failed / disgraced companies to see if there's any pattern, or compare to genuinely ethical companies (if there is such a thing) to see whether there's a contrast.

> Excellent - lets play Enron Bingo! Go through your company values and every time one of them matches or strongly overlaps with the list provided in Enrons 1998 Annual Report[1] - Shout "WOOOO" really loudly.
Now there are two people who insist on escorting me out of the building.

Whatsapp was ethical, the problem is with the company that bought them. And they didn't necessarily know that when they sold (even if, an offer of that size is hard to decline).

[Harsh words ahead]
Hindsight is 20/20, and based on that I personally would say WhatsApp was not ethical even when it was a standalone company. If it had been so, it wouldn't have allowed Facebook to acquire it in the first place! I realize this sounds harsh and probably implies bad motives on the owners, but whatever WhatsApp wrote in its blogs pre-acquisition were all principles that could be sold at the right price. That's exactly what it has come to now that we know how it's being used.
I would also consider it insulting to human intelligence if the WhatsApp founders had truly believed that they would be able to continue with their stated privacy stance after being bought by Facebook, of all companies (what they wrote on the blog at that time can be seen as public posturing).

You don't need hindsight. You just need to look at the many many times it has happened before.
Cash pressure + lots of valuable assets liquidised legally that just require a change to ToS = said assets for sale + temporary bad PR.

I call bullshit on not knowing that Facebook is a privacy whoring company before WhatsApp sold to them.

Hey, who cares about ethics when there's billions of dollars on the table /s

I mean who wouldn't have realistically accepted literally billions of dollars to sell an app people willingly install on their phones? Ethics is all relative.

Were they profitable before? Were the controlling parties financially comfortable?
If my company is profitable (or has revenue growth and is likely to become profitable) and a scummy company wants to buy it, I'm going to say no.
Hard as it may be for some of the HN/VC crowd to believe, but there are people out there who start companies with their own money, because they believe in something. At no point does "find some fat megacorp to buy us our" enter the game plan.

That's exactly my point. If company is ethical today, it doesn't mean it will be tomorrow, for whatever reasons.

> an offer of that size is hard to decline
Ethics isn't about doing the right thing when it's easy.

> but costumers can't take their data back.
For a US company, yes. For EU companies, the EU privacy law says you can only use the data for the original purposes, and based on what the person consented to. You can't grab all data (since that's overbroad), and "consent" can't just be "click through on legalese".
If you're concerened about privacy, don't use US companies.

In Canada too you can request all of the data that a company has on you. You just have to fill in a form or call the company and if they refuse you can contact the privacy office in your respective province or the federal privacy commision or just plain lawyer up.

bold statement, but actually what they do here would be totally legal in the EU. cause they say it's for fraud detection. Basically EU is not better when it comes to privacy. The law is totally crap and doesn't actually defend against anything.

I thought the drop-off points for large buildings could be a very reasonable justification for extending the tracking window for a few minutes on either side of the drive.
I understand that this could fall into 'data necessary to provide a better service' as opposed to simply providing the service as-is, but it seems like drop-off point locations are quite fundamental.

Why do you imply that I go inside the building I asked Uber driver to stop by? Actually, most of the time I get out on the corner and walk to my destination (which address I did not provide to Uber), because of traffic restrictions in city center.

I am very anti-tracking, but to be fair IF Uber is being above board with their intentions, this is exactly the type of question they could answer.

I'm not sure how this data actually helps. I'll tell Uber where to pick me up, and where I want to go, and I can tell the driver exactly where to stop.
Now, if this is to feed into their plans for autonomous taxis, that's all very well because I am really looking forward to being able to summon an autonomous electric car to take me wherever I want to go, but I still don't understand why they care about more than where I actually get out.

It has to do with collusion between driver and passenger. It protects everyone involved. It prevents a passenger from getting in the vehicle and saying, "I told the app I was going to the bijou duplex but I really need a driver 3 hours to run a bunch of errands. I think we can work out a deal thats beneficial to us both..." that's just one of millions of possible scenarios. Uber can now tell if driver and passenger just drove by the bijou duplex never ending the fare. All of this other squabbling about privacy blah blah blah is senseless. Just ask yourself one question, whom is it that is actually tracking me? For what reason? OK that's two questions. I think once you answer those questions you'll come to the same conclusion time after time, "I'm just not important." On that note one can also conclude, "There's nothing about me, nothing I do, say nor anyplace I go is needed by Zuckerberg. He's doing just fine without my info. The worst thing that's gonna happen is I'll mysteriously get toothpaste coupons or rental car discounts."

I take it you stand behind the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument?

Yes and no. A few years ago I realised my digital bathroom scale's calibration was out of whack so like anyone whom might have lost the instructions I google the make and model of my scale to download them.
Later that evening while on a different computer I noticed in the right-hand margin of facebook an ad for bathroom scales. I was horrified. I felt violated, tracked and spied on. This wasn't spill over from localised cookies. There was a database somewhere keeping track of my online activities and passing that info along to whomever asked for it I guess.
On the one hand nobody cares or is watching what I'm doing. But what if I'm a high school teacher and a female student infatuated with me males advances which after being rebuffed goes public with false accusations of how I tried to rape her, will I be sitting in court watching a prosecutor show a jury the gay monkey porn sites I visit because he or she was able to subpoena this "database" of all my online activity and now because of it I may lose my job or career? I don't know. Maybe that's the whole reason privacy rights are such an issue.
If it means catching bad guys I'm for it but if it means scrutinizing the innocent then yeah of course I don't want my privacy violated.

Earlier this year, WhatsApp implemented platform-wide, end-to-end encryption, based on the Signal Protocol: https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/05/whatsapp-completes-end-to-...
That should be applauded.

I fundamentally agree with you about giving only as much data as necessary. Personally I don't know why we force a binary decision on location tracking. If it were Google or Facebook doing it to me, iI would be distressed.

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