Uber used Greyball fake app to evade police across Europe | Hacker News Reader

Uber used Greyball fake app to evade police across Europe

theguardian.com

141 pointssorokod58 comments

Most of these Uber leaks have been well known for 5+ years. Hopefully EU regulators do what the US didn't and prosecute some of these clowns.

I was going to say hopefully EU regulators back off some of the insane Taxi regulations that require you to have 100,000€ or more to…drive people around

Taxi companies are basically legalized mafias everywhere in the world.

If any industry deserved to be disrupted it was theirs.

Check New York City's taxi medallions...

NYC’s medallions did have a primary purpose; to control traffic.

Manhattan is tiny and taxis represent an outsize amount of traffic since they don’t park most of the day like a commuter car. Uber’s proliferation was associated with a general decline in traffic speeds.

But increasing throughput. Given how shitty US public transport is in general, maybe that's the right tradeoff. New York is one of the best, but still shitty by EU standards.

> New York is one of the best, but still shitty by EU standards.

If we're talking about concrete things like throughput, the MTA is one of only a few systems with round-the-clock operation, and I don't think anywhere else matches its scale and reach.

The filth of the stations are a legitimate complaint...but given that my primary interest is my transit system moving me from place to place, I'd take it over the majority of EU systems in a heartbeat.

The system is great, when all services are in good condition.

This is fairly rare, particularly on weekends or nights.

I just recently visited NYC for a week after a few years away. Got in mid-week and was taking the subway around during the day, and thought wow it's really made huge improvements in reliability recently. Trains were all coming quickly and all lines were running. Then the weekend came around and half the lines were being re-routed and waits were much longer with lots of announced delays.

The city does a good job, especially by US standards, of making public transit a reliable, affordable way for people to go to and from work. But as far as getting around in day to day life outside of rush hour it is much worse and there's still a big need for Taxis or Uber. And I think with the increase in remote work recently this is more of an issue now than ever.

I do have to say I'm impressed by the Apple pay/NFC payment rollout though. No more flimsy Metrocards to worry about swiping and refilling is a nice improvement.

In effect this is indentured servitude. Most people are not aware how common paying to be allowed to start a business is in Europe. For instance, I was told by a restaurant owner in Rome that you have to pay 500,000 euros to the landowning catholic church to open a tiny restaurant storefront there. This is structured as a loan.

There needs to be an interpol arrest warrant for Travis Kalanick for racketeering. Uber was operating like a mafia family.

It doesn't matter that he resigned a while back. This is not acceptable and people need to know they will not get away with it.

bruh

youre literally talking about taxi companies who ran monopolies for decades with armed thugs ("police") literally running stings on competitors. wtf.

GP didn't mention those companies once.

the point is taxi companies been doing worse with govt sanction for years. ppl only care now bc govt isn't getting its $$$.

more like bureaucrats (and their families and friends) isnt getting their self-worth of mooching off of the taxpayers; people, not so much.

This is like the least problematic thing Uber has done tho? The "law enforcement" they were fucking with was basically being thugs for enforcing a monopolist power. Not very pro-consumer for the EU to try to go back to shitty overpriced taxi monopolies.

I think the buttons in offices to nuke all records electronically if being raided by authorities is maybe extremely illegal?

End of the day, tech companies exist and can attract investment due to IP protections provided by the rule of law.

That rule of law involves actually having the laws being followed.

VCs backing companies like Uber don't get to have it both ways and violate the laws they deem worthy of disrupting while employing legal departments to ensure the laws that protect their IP are followed.

That's not what they did, just closed access which is legal and fine. Nobody is obliagted to leave stuff easily available for access. They can go subpoena it instead if they want. The whole "kick down the doors and take everything" is authoritarian, it should only be used where legal attempts at getting specific documents don't work because somebody won't comply with the legal order. And raiding people is fucked up bc they don't usually get a chance to even review the warrant. From an article on it:

> Uber told the court it never deleted its files. It cooperated with a second search warrant that explicitly covered the files and agreed to collect provincial taxes for each ride.

Source: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uJe0Ue...

And there's nothing wrong with companies working around dumbass laws. Governments are too corrupt to fix them otherwise especially here with massive lobbying to keep them.

They didn't nuke anything, they just cut off access to remotely hosted resources.

From the PoV of a cop with a warrant, that is effectively the same thing. The evidence they have a warrant to collect is deliberately made inaccessible to anyone at that location.

> From the PoV of a cop with a warrant

Did this ever happen? The article makes no mention of warrants or subpoenas for live driver location data.

Even if such a warrant was issued, it would probably not be satisfied via the Uber app UI.

> Did this ever happen?

I've not seen it reported that it ever happened. The point is that they prepared for it and intended to take that action if the situation occurred. That they planned and implemented a method to obscure evidence is a strong indicator that they knew some of what they were doing was not legal (leaving aside discussion of where wrong & illegal do/don't overlap, in their opinion or ours or anyone else's).

> it would probably not be satisfied via the Uber app UI.

This part isn't about the app. It is about making data inaccessible at an office should the authorities enter that office - equivalent to quickly ramming documents through the shredder when you see an auditor approaching the building.

Have you read the article?

Greyball is a "fake version" of the Uber app. The Uber app displays a live map of driver locations. If the app thinks you're a cop, it will display fake locations.

> This part isn't about the app. It is about making data inaccessible at an office should the authorities enter that office - equivalent to quickly ramming documents through the shredder when you see an auditor approaching the building.

It's literally nothing to do with that.

It would appear I got myself confused between the collection dirty tricks that Uber have been shown to have perpetrated.

“they just cut off access to remotely hosted resources” from the top of this thread covers cutting off fixed locations as well as mobile app instances.

making sure taxis are safe for operation should be equally applied; being uber (and hence "the good guys") should not exempt you.

and being the good guys should necessarily include being okay with playing by the rules. if you build an entire UX to avoid that -> fuck you, I don't care what you're replacing you're undermining any benefit you could claim to society

youre not really trying the safety justification, not seriously? everybody remembers being in shitty cabs in places with "safety" regulations. if they cared about safety they could have designed an easy and simple process but this was about regulatory cature.

Would be good to compile that list.

In your opinion, how would Greyball rank vs. payed-for research on the benefits of Uber's economic model[1] ?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/12/uber-paid-acade...

I mean even if Uber paid for it the general consensus in economics is improving market efficiency is a net good. Like yeah obv it sucks for taxi drivers but the position of a lot of governments (EU more than most) is that consumer benefit at the expense of business is fine. So kinda inconsistent for the EU to say they'll go screw with other companies for consumer benefit but then "oh no not the poor cabbies, we can't let the cabbies make less money!" Also there's a lot of rent-seeking in traditional cab industry that comes from stuff like the high cost of entry and the lobbying to keep it in place so taking that out should make a better economic outcome.

The EU most certainly doesn't legislate taxi regulations.

If you think your local legislature is harming competition, speak to your local legislator. EU institutions can't help, by design, unless maybe if the unfair competition infringes your individual rights.

Previously on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785564

> Uber had built a dummy version of its own app

Is this why Uber had problem controlling the app size? https://eng.uber.com/how-uber-deals-with-large-ios-app-size/

Their app size problem is because of an unusual development constraint: they need the user to be able to move halfway across the planet and still have the app work without downloading any new resources. All the UI needs to be preloaded so that, say, if you travel from Rio to Toyko or Cape Town to Jakarta, you get off the plane and can hail a cab on even the flakiest of connections.

I'm not a lawyer, but isn't this going to be a pretty big obstruction of justice case?

IANAL as well, but I would guess not. They didn't destroy evidence (which can be obstruction), they just hid their data. Absent any warrants, I'm not sure what would compel Uber to give the police an accurate live feed of driver locations.

From reading the article, it seems that Uber displayed fake data in their app when they detected the user was law enforcement. This means that cops could not use the app to locate Uber drivers in real time.

I gotta say, I'm not sure I see the problem. Did Uber ever ignore / lie when hit with warrants or subpoenas? On what legal grounds is displaying fake data like this illegal?

I think you could make a case that this is obstruction of justice, but Uber never destroyed evidence.

In a way, Uber was doing similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_book_smugglers by fighting those absurd laws and regulation.

https://archive.ph/hKdNp

Lyft > Uber

I don't use Taxis much, but FWIW when I last used a Lyft (years ago) the driver told me how much happier he is with Lyft over Uber.

... are Lyft the good guys? Are they just a bit less bad? I'm not sure.

Lyft doesn't operate in Europe

Neither does Uber, in much of Europe.

This was expected considering they did it in the US long before.

Good. Fuck the taxi monopolies.

Devil's advocate, what's the issue here?

I'm obviously have my own biases, but why should I care that European regulators got bamboozled by Uber? Uber is clearly duplicitous, and I only have a hypodermic understanding of this, but were consumers ultimately harmed (other than the obvious wasting of time of the regulators)?

If your business model depends on breaking the law, then society is harmed.

Do Europeans not have a fifth amendment equivalent right? What law compels Uber to give all data at all times to the police without a warrant?

It's kind of society's job to fight off that harm. Companies can not expected to be nice.

Sure, which is why we have regulators, and the police, and other bodies to deal with the fact that some individuals don't respect the law.

That depends entirely on the law you're breaking and whether it actually helps society.

I (nor any other individual) don't get to decide whether or not a given law harms society.

We all, collectively, as a society decide that.

Even if you decide to break a law that has zero impact on anyone, that fact that others can see you doing that with impunity harms society.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of stupid laws. But going around breaking ones that are inconvenient to your business model is kind of a dick move.

In an ideal world I would agree. The problem is we don't live in an idea world and societies methods for creating laws are pretty terrible (without getting into the methods of enforcement).

So we are all left with a very imperfect set of laws.

And we absolutely do decide from moment to moment which ones to obey and which ones to ignore. That's not a moral judgement, it's just life. I can speed or not speed. I have to decide moment by moment whether to do it or not.

So that leaves us with a choice: obey unjust and counterproductive laws or disobey them.

And remember, obeying a law doesn't make it just. Something being a law doesn't make it just. So really when you choose to obey an unjust law, you are just choosing to act unjustly. It being the law doesn't make it just.

So while I might agree in a perfect world, and I don't want to make excuses for people who ignore laws for personal convenience, I don't think it's moral to just issue a defacto "no individual should ever ignore the law" judgement...

I actually think our current society is much too obedient. Too few people think about whether a law is moral or not and too many just blindly accept it or obey only got fear of getting into trouble.

But now I'm really soapboxing... :)

I don't think one necessarily follows from the other.

It does, if the assumption is that laws are passed by a democratic society for the benefit of said society. That's not always the case, but when it comes to something tangential to protecting consumer rights (like this case), evading these laws seems suspicious.

I agree, although I concede that this rational could be (and often is) used to justify terrible things.

Drivers were harmed too, and we should not overlook that.

Uber gets all the blame but in NYC the police are well known for impounding they cars of interracial couples as “illegal cabs” at the airport. They have toned it down a lot after news exposure and lawsuits but it still happens. The NYC medallion system led to a lot of abuse - the city auctioned a handful each year, often fetching over a million dollars each, and going to a handful of operators who could afford them. The drivers had to pay up front daily to rent them, the car, and give a portion of their fares also. If you took a car out of the lot you’d be working half the day just to break even with the rental fees. Uber was often a better deal.

Post Uber the medallion prices plunged and are now only worth a couple hundred thousand - probably less now. The city makes back some of the money by charging license fees to the app drivers.

Are there any legit sources for your accusations or is that some weird urban legend?

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