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Comment by ancarda | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to get very skeptical to be honest. I tried to read that article looking for some hard evidence, one link went to BuzzFeed, where that linked to Forbes. I'm finding it hard to get more information.

In the wake of fake news, I'm asking for links, and not to other news sources. How do we know all this dirt isn't coming from Lyft? They're certainly going to benefit from this.

I read through the documentcloud link, Uber collects a lot of data, is honestly all I can see. I feel like I've missed something important, but I'm reading on my phone so I couldn't really search or read properly.

Could you help me understand?

(For the record, I don't use Uber or any ride-sharing platform and I don't have any stocks/shares. I have no incentive to watch them succeed or fail.)

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So "Hell" was the name of their program for tracking Lyft drivers, and "Heaven" or "God View" was the name of their program for tracking Uber passengers. The allegations of Uber employees abusing the privacy of individual passengers using God View go back to at least 2014, so this actually isn't anything new, just more specifics about who they were spying on. See here for a screenshot of their God View emailed to a journalist without her permission: https://www.buzzfeed.com/johanabhuiyan/uber-is-investigating...

And see here for their cute Dr. Evil mascot that's part of their God View, which doesn't seem so funny any more: https://www.engadget.com/2014/11/19/uber-godview-tracking/

> See here for a screenshot of their God View emailed to a journalist without her permission

That screenshot doesn't really have anything bad in it, to be fair. It's a view of their cars in the city.

No, it shows the last two weeks of Uber activity for the journalist:

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2014-11/18/2...

Ah, sure. Is the complaint that they make that readily available to some set of people? It'd be silly to not expect them to have rider history in general

There is a difference between having anonymised data available for analysis and individuals having direct access to complete individual data sets.

> In the wake of fake news

Well, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it might be enemy action, but a constant stream of mischief and abuse stories coming for the past few years... that's just how Uber rolls. The company should have been put down long ago, but now it's a good time too.

> but a constant stream of mischief and abuse stories coming for the past few years... that's just how Uber rolls

So if some piece of information is repeated enough times it is definitely true? I don't want to defend Uber here, I just think that your reasoning in this sentence is flawed.

>In the U.S. alone, the company is involved in 173 lawsuits

http://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/columnists/opinion-dont-b...

They've even got a wikipedia page dedicated just to their legal problems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_protests_and_legal_action...

At a certain point I think we should probably accept that it's not a great company.

Not trying to defend Uber here, but no individual legal allegation is proof of guilt. Mathematically, if every allegation holds zero proof of guilt, then in aggregate, even 173 allegations sum to zero proof of guilt.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14123332

They are an org of unethical people doing unethical and illegal things. The sooner Uber implodes, the better for the world as a whole.

But again, that's just a restatement of accusations, not evidence.

This is an intentionally obtuse position. The quoted commenter is referring to distinct events, not repetition of a single event.

I didn't mean repeating the same piece of information, I meant that each story was about some new mischief. Tax issues, employee vs contractor, operating illegally, price changes, uninsured drivers, spying on journalists, threatening journalists, sabotaging competition... that's just few old stories off the top of my head.

> In the wake of fake news, I'm asking for links, and not to other news sources.

What do you mean? In the end, news sources are by definition where we get information from. A blogger is also a news source. So is someone posting on facebook/twitter.

I assume there referencing the fake news craze issue hitting the internet. This is where people create websites just to post one fake news story that is completely false.

Annoying people now use it for anything published on a website or anything a newspaper prints they disagree with.

The problem is that sometimes a fake news article gets picked by a more reputable outlet and disseminated to other news sites from there. Unless an article cites their sources, it's sometimes difficult to be sure whether they're reporting something based on their own investigation into the matter, or whether they're just regurgitating something they saw in another article.

Well, what does OP want those links to point to? Uber's internal network?

At this point it's not 'hard evidence', but it is testimony from the guy who claims to have been responsible for cleaning up after evidence was destroyed or cut off during raids. That's pretty damning, and worth a look...

The testimony of a guy under oath no less. And a testimony consistent with a pattern of illegal behavior that surely warrants a deep (criminal?) investigation with discovery.

He's not just a guy. He was the director of infosec and was the direct report to the CSO

"I'm starting to get very skeptical to be honest. I tried to read that article looking for some hard evidence, one link went to BuzzFeed, where that linked to Forbes. I'm finding it hard to get more information."

(Edit: the fact that you did know about documentcloud link and relegate it's mention to the third paragraph of your comment is not very convincing about your quest for truth)

WTF are you talking about? The first external link in the body of the article is to the sworn testimony of the whistle-blower in question https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3227535-Spangenberg-...

It is lack of proper supervision of sensitive data that's the issue.

I know the in the UK team leaders and those with access to data on the phone network have to be PV vetted - that the same as TS clearance in the USA.

After all you don't want some one looking up the queens private number or details of GCHQ's private circuits.

As sketchy as it may sound, BuzzFeed has a legitimate journalism arm: BuzzFeed News.

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