> In 2017, the New York Times reported that Uber had identified various local politicians and regulators and served them a separate, misleading version of the Uber app to avoid regulatory penalties. At the time, Uber acknowledged that it had run the program, called “greyball,” but said it was used to deny ride requests to “opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers,” among other groups.
get user; if user.flags contains ["grayball"] then load controller1; else load controller2
This says more about Uber's callous disregard for legal regulations, labor rights and the hyper-aggressive-venture-capitalist-funded environment that it exists in as a corporation than anything about data mining.
Basically "f the government, we do as we please" by Uber.
Though obviously the data collection itself is terrible as well.
Uber's practices are what happens when you take a bunch of young aggressive business school grads who think Ayn Rand is the best thing since sliced bread and give them hundreds of millions of dollars to hire engineering employees.
More on Ubey and "greyball", which has been extensively covered in the US press: https://www.google.com/search?&q=uber+greyball
As just about anyone who has done business in an entirely cash-based economy where things are done verbally and on handshakes with little or no electronic or paper based record keeping will know all too well.