Uber used secret spyware to try to crush Australian startup GoCatch

I am absolutely confident that despite Uber being an ultra shady company, this news is even more nonsensical. The "surfcam" is more of a lead generation program for Uber and it even did this against Lyft. Infact Uber people would use the free credits of Lyft to take a ride and then market Uber.

Any driver worth his salt has all the car sharing apps installed and switches between them.

In this case it's pretty obvious the drivers saw no obvious advantage of being a gocatch driver and switched to Uber. Also here in Melbourne gocatch were just advertising as app for taxi service, not like ride sharing that Uber did.I never used them even if I had free credits from them.

Bad marketing, wrong targeting, crappy advertising but hey they got to blame someone else for their failure

I'd bet good money that this was one engineer with Charles or Burb MITMing their phone to get details on the GoCatch API, then scraping it with a python script.

It's the cyber equivalent of walking into a business and writing down the names on the name tags.

Complaining about stuff like this gives Australian companies a bad name.