2 ms·

Doesn't seem much different than Google indexing the web. They were just crawling Lyft.

• pluma 10y ago
  They created fake accounts with fake geolocation to extract information, then they exploited a design flaw in Lyft's software to perform an enumeration attack that allowed them to extract full information about all drivers in real time in order to exploit that information financially. Google crawls public websites while respecting counter-measures like the `robots.txt` protocol. They also don't create fake accounts. They most certainly don't perform enumeration attacks to find more content to index. This is nothing like what Google does. If Google did this, they'd be called out the same way. Heck, if anything, this is similar to what Aaron Swartz did, except Aaron did it to make the information public rather than profit from it for financial gain -- and the data he did it with was neither sensitive nor private.