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Comment by hsod | Hacker News Reader

This really doesn't match up with how the conversation/outrage is playing out on Twitter right now. People seem to be interpreting this as "Uber continues to track your location after you have deleted the app," when what really happened seemed to be "If you delete Uber and then reinstall it on the same phone, Uber knows that it's the same phone."

See for example this Tweet, with hundreds of retweets and lots of verified replies:

https://twitter.com/dnvolz/status/856166875511894016

"This is like a holy trinity of privacy disaster: 1) secret tracking that 2) persists after users delete app 3) in knowing violation of rules"

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Uber was tracking people after they left their rides, and it's unsure if they ever stopped.

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/12/01/503...

OK, but that's different from tracking people after they've deleted the app.

I'm genuinely curious how that would even work on the technical level. As an app developer, I'm not making the connection here as to how iOS would even allow that.

Edit: Read up a bit more on it. Turns out it was the practice of fingerprinting and tracking after re-installs, not after an uninstall. TechCrunch provided a better technical description: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/23/uber-responds-to-report-th...

To me it seems like this is mischaracterized to make it sound worse than it is. Can someone explain why people are making a big deal about this practice?

Its because its fashionable to beat the horse that Uber is a terrible company led by a terrible man. I personally am no fan of Uber or Travis, but I do get disgusted sometimes when the media hypes certain perceptions to an inappropriate degree.

So for all means continue to investigate the seemingly terrible and anti-women culture and the fraudulent stealing of Technology from Google. But like you said, don't mischaracterize other facts to make them sound more terrible than what they really are.

Because it violated their agreement with Apple and accessed private APIs, infringed on user privacy, and they geofenced the behavior to try to sneak it past app review. It's another example of Uber knowingly being evil.

Well for one, it's against Apple's rules to do this. And just because it's "industry practice" doesn't mean you get a free pass.

That's true, but there's a bit of live by the sword, die by the sword here. Uber is no stranger to the power of propaganda with their campaigns on the sharing economy, unions, regulations, etc.

Because we all expect journalistic integrity from Uber. Uber provides a service people need. Journalism is blogspam garbage.

You think that Uber is a service that people need? This sounds like exactly the kind of company that should be held to a high standard.

But how do you judge uber if you can't trust journalistic integrity? The very people you trust to think for you are unqualified - which leads me to believe so is your opinion. This seems to be the problem with Fake News.

Is there a specific journalistic integrity issue going on with this article?

Nope. He's just being a contrarian clown.

You're not addressing what I'm saying. What I said has nothing to do with journalism

If we were to judge companies solely through a moral lense, sure.

But in the direct interest of capitalism, and indirectly consumers, it's terrible to restrict important businesses.

Important businesses are the ones that need restrictions the most. "Too big to fail" doesn't work, for society or consumers.

"A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on."

C.H. Spurgeon, Gems from Spurgeon (1859)

Well Churchill, of all people would know it pretty well.

One of the risks of refusing to talk about services is that you're at the mercy of games of telephone. People describe what you're doing to journalists who carefully dilute anecdotes and details to obscure their exact source. Then you don't comment directly on the system because it's a secret, and here you are.

The problem for Uber is that they /are/ scummy. They proudly bend every possible rule to their advantage. It's easy to believe the worst about them.

jesus. that guy is a reuters "reporter" as well. stuff like this is what encourages the concept of 'fake news'

The concept of fake news Rose from one guy making shit up for ad money. The whole ordeal about how fake news is this sinister plot to disinform is a disinformation effort in itself. There's a big difference about reporting while being misinformed vs disinforming or to harness views.

what i'm saying is that people doing misinformed reporting causes people to not trust the news at all. and let's cynical people (trump) label all journalism as fake news

I think it takes a certain kind of individual to trust everything they read at face value without getting multiple points of view on an issue and researching their own facts. Not saying we shouldn't hold reporters accountable to higher standards but we live in a time where everything is rushed and pumped out as "content' for ad revenue.

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