3 ms·
If I were Lyft, I might try to detect what traffic is coming from suspect clients and present an inaccurate view to them to maximize inefficient spending on Ube
by pkkim 10y ago
If I were Lyft, I might try to detect what traffic is coming from suspect clients and present an inaccurate view to them to maximize inefficient spending on Uber's part. This seems like it should be easy to do without harming someone in case you inaccurately label someone as illegitimate.
- pluma 10y agoIt is interesting that Lyft didn't detect this malicious behaviour and this raises some questions. Did Uber try to obscure what they were doing by spreading the requests over various IPs to cover their tracks? This would indicate that they knew they were doing something malicious (which could affect sentencing if this is considered a federal crime under US law which it actually might be -- though IANAL). If this really was "realtime", why didn't Lyft notice the unusual request volume? What could they have done to detect this as suspicious and investigate? Are there some specific lessons other companies could learn from this?
- kyrra 10y agoDetecting these kinds of behaviors is hard without generating false positives. GPS on phones arent always the most reliable thing, especially if the user is opening and closing the app. An app that did try to stop this type of behavior was Pokémon Go. It took them a while to do even halfway well.