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You can make a good argument that's exactly what Uber did. They tried to obtain field data to make competitive decision.

Market intelligence, market research, competitive analysis, swot, opposition research, take place everyday.

The way they went about it does seem to have put them in hot water. Question is did they cross a line with serious legal and business (as in cost) ramifications?

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You are definitely crossing a line when you provide burner phones to sabotage your competition. This article[1] on Verge even has screenshots of the app that Uber used internally to generate phone numbers that Lyft couldn't trace and that Uber people could use to create fake Lyft accounts. If you are part of the development team that wrote that internal app, you seriously miss a moral compass.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/26/6067663/this-is-ubers-play...

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