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> It's hard to believe Lyft isn't doing exactly the same thing.

No, it's actually really easy to believe that Lyft isn't tricking Uber's computer systems into giving Lyft real-time info on Uber's drivers and fare prices. Please stop trying to make excuses for Uber's shitty behavior.

You aren't allowed to comment like this here, and you should definitely know this. You have to engage civilly and substantively with points you disagree with, not make a lowbrow "Uber is shitty and so are you" comment.

Respectfully, I disagree. He's not saying anything like what you claimed he said.

Yep, I agree with your disagreement. Oh well. Apologies to eridius.

I just wish we could maybe turn down the heated discourse from the maximum setting, since people are quick to escalate. But my original comment certainly didn't help in that regard.

So, now that I've chosen to be in the hot-seat regarding Uber, who's up for a debate? Why is this particular behavior unethical? If it's true they accessed Lyft's API, under what circumstances is it ok to do this as a competitor? I promise I have an open mind.

Usage of the API is bound by the terms of service. I've not read Lyft's ToS in detail, but I'm sure what Uber is doing is in violation of said terms. That's certainly unethical, potentially illegal.

(PS, thanks for the late level headedness!)

So to be clear, is it true to say that under no circumstances may a competitor access an API without it being unethical behavior? It seems like every business will have a ToS clause to cover that, so this is an interesting moral question.

Assuming it's unethical, if you were asked at your company to build a script that accesses a competitor's API, what should you do?

Isn't it difficult to claim in general that collecting data using a competitor's services is inherently unethical?

If you're using a competitor's API in a way the API was intended to be used, it's probably OK, even if your motivation is to gain intelligence. But when you're breaking the ToS or otherwise doing things it wasn't intended to do, that's a problem.

Hmm, I see. Is it possible to think of a single example where you could use a competitor's API in a way they intend, but also at a scale large enough to be useful from an intelligence perspective?

If there isn't one, it seems like the argument again reduces down to "It's never okay for a competitor to use an API," which could be problematic.

IANAL, but using Lyft's API to see pricing and availability (to model your pricing and/or where drivers are in abundance) seems at minimum in a grey area. Using it to de-anonymize drivers and try to poach them, feels like crossing the line to me.

Eridius answered the first part, so I'll tackle the second part. What you should do depends on many factors. First and foremost, is the access you are doing strictly forbidden? You'd be surprised how often it's not. Next you'd need to assess the intent of the access. Is it for a legitimate fair use reason (even if forbidden, aka it's a judgment call if you feel you could legitimately make a case it shouldn't be forbidden)? Ultimately the above two don't matter, it all comes down to a decision of "is keeping your job" more important than "doing what is ethical/legal/whatever"?

Maybe it is productive to compare this to Aaron Schwartz's violation of the terms of service, downloading information from a publishers api using a university account against the terms of service.

That was enough reason for a 35 year prison charge, plus 1 million damages.

Of course, he was an activist, doing it for ideological reasons, against corporate interests. Contrary to what one might expect, the class justice system in the US punishes that much harder than a big corporation doing the same for the non-ideological reason of making more profit.

Most people here seem to think it's benign, just a company competing hard, but that seems hypocritical to me.

As a competitor, this is merely unethical.

But 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.

"Merely"? I'd agree completely with your post if it weren't for that word. Makes it sound like being unethical is perfectly acceptable.

The use of merely is used to highlight that things are actually even worse.

My personal opinion on the state of the tech industry is we have a large ethics deficit, but this is beyond the point here.

> it's actually really easy to believe that Lyft isn't tricking Uber's computer systems

How, or why, is that really easy to believe?

Because most companies don't intentionally break the law or engage in fraudulent activity. Just because Uber does this all the time doesn't mean Uber's competitors must do it too.

Agree. Google not only tracked Bing but also set up fake results to catch them copying.

There's an app that compares the price from Uber, Lyft and others services.

These two examples are using data from computer systems in a way companies didn't intend. Have you guys ever thought that search engines scraping your site is opt-out?

We are just repelling this because Uber has a bad reputation.

> Google not only tracked Bing but also set up fake results to catch them copying.

I'm not sure I see the similarity. Google never sent false queries to Bing - Google sent synthetic queries to their own infrastructure, and observed how Microsoft's software (search engine, toolbar etc.) responded to that. There's

That seems closer to if Uber had just hired a team of people to use Lyft and record their observations (which is still problematic, as one of the results is tracking people without their knowledge, but for different reasons than falsifying queries to scrape this data).

> Notice the careful non-statement by Lyft.

They just don't want to be seen making a big deal out of something that later turns out to be nothing.

Or they're being smart with PR: they issue a statement saying this is concerning, but not too strongly worded, and let the general coverage and zeitgeist say all the things they'd like to say, but without anyone being able to pin those statements on them later.