Tag: uber

最近 Uber 的 CEO 被 Tim Cook 叫去喝咖啡的事情被報導出來：「Uber’s C.E.O. Plays With Fire」，裡面提到了 Uber 試著要「辨別」使用者的 iPhone，而這違反蘋果的政策：

To halt the activity, Uber engineers assigned a persistent identity to iPhones with a small piece of code, a practice called “fingerprinting.” Uber could then identify an iPhone and prevent itself from being fooled even after the device was erased of its contents.

There was one problem: Fingerprinting iPhones broke Apple’s rules. Mr. Cook believed that wiping an iPhone should ensure that no trace of the owner’s identity remained on the device.

而 Uber 的搞法是針對蘋果總部所在地點屏蔽這個功能：

So Mr. Kalanick told his engineers to “geofence” Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., a way to digitally identify people reviewing Uber’s software in a specific location. Uber would then obfuscate its code for people within that geofenced area, essentially drawing a digital lasso around those it wanted to keep in the dark. Apple employees at its headquarters were unable to see Uber’s fingerprinting.

然後被蘋果工程師抓到，於是 Tim Cook 把人叫來喝咖啡：

The ruse did not last. Apple engineers outside of Cupertino caught on to Uber’s methods, prompting Mr. Cook to call Mr. Kalanick to his office.

另外提到了 Uber 從 Unroll.me 買來 Lyft 的帳單資料當作分析：

Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft’s business. (Lyft, too, operates a competitive intelligence team.)

而更精彩的在 Hacker News 上的這串爆了不少料，提到 Unroll 會把所有信件掃下來，丟到 S3 上面：

I worked for a company that nearly acquired unroll.me. At the time, which was over three years ago, they had kept a copy of every single email of yours that you sent or received while a part of their service. Those emails were kept in a series of poorly secured S3 buckets. A large part of Slice buying unroll.me was for access to those email archives. Specifically, they wanted to look for keyword trends and for receipts from online purchases.

The founders of unroll.me were pretty dishonest, which is a large part of why the company I worked for declined to purchase the company. As an example, one of the problems was how the founders had valued and then diluted equity shares that employees held. To make a long story short, there weren't any circumstances in which employees who held options or an equity stake would see any money.

I hope you weren't emailed any legal documents or passwords written in the clear.

而在 FAQ 的「If I delete my Unroll.Me account, what will happen to all of my previously rolled up emails?」裡則是說我們沒有存你的信件：

這爆米花要多買一些了...