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Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

Someone I know was just commenting that from convos w/ people in other companies, it seems many startups have benefitted from not being under the limelight, and thus had the chance to quietly clean up their own messes while Uber was taking all the heat from the media.

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Does anyone else find this whole thing more than a bit hypocritical?

Lyft is always telling you they are the better/ethical/woke ridesharing option - now their employees are reporting a culture of abusing customer privacy. I wish they had taken a look at their own practices before running million dollar ad campaigns full of celebrities celebrating their ‘wokeness’.

Uber had the kicker that invasion of privacy was a top-down policy explicitly used by management.

Lyft still done fucked up, but not to the level that Uber did.

Which news story about Uber makes invasion of privacy seem like a top-down policy?

Tracking a journalist: https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/19/7245447/uber-allegedly-t...

About the company specifically designing and building an internal tool to make this process easier: https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/19/7245447/uber-allegedly-t...

That whole "greyball" story, which involved personal tracking of law enforcement officers: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...

And don't forget they got hold of the medical records of a woman who'd reported she'd been raped by an Uber driver:

https://www.recode.net/2017/6/7/15754316/uber-executive-indi...

Much of the criticism against Uber concern top-level decisions, such as the creation and use of "Greyball", or actions and decisions from Kalanick himself and other top executives. Lyft maybe deserves blame for not building better and more automated audit systems and policies after knowing that these lookups could be abused.

So basically Uber is the Weinstein of startups.

But it appears that Weinstein helped to clean up the industry a lot. Would be great if Uber helps to make startups more responsible (I doubt that).

I always suspected that uber flames were fanned by its many competitors.

That may be, but the fires were caused by Uber.

Uber's dumpster fire didn't need any fanning.

What a day for Waze Carpool, then.

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