I think its a solid solution from a tech standpoint. Phone (or any end point for that matter) holding on to data/state during a DC failover and being aware of

I think its a solid solution from a tech standpoint. Phone (or any end point for that matter) holding on to data/state during a DC failover and being aware of an outage happening at the DC makes the recovery process, so much more graceful. One could argue that if this solution was not in place, driver would have lost the trip data during a datacenter outage which would have cost him his earnings. So this is directly helping drivers in exchange for him allowing to store encrypted data on their phones during such outages.If anything I would explicitly say this to the driver installing an Uber app and seek a acknowledgement. You are also over indexing on what you hear in media about Uber. What you are quintessentially saying is, there were two solutions available for the same problem and engineers ended up choosing this one, because he wanted a dishonest solution over a honest one, so he can fall in line with the company culture, which is dishonest :). That does not make sense at all.