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I think the relevant part that distinguishes whether it's ethical is whether you are deceptively taking advantage of another party. If Uber wouldn't be willing

I think the relevant part that distinguishes whether it's ethical is whether you are deceptively taking advantage of another party. If Uber wouldn't be willing to tell Lyft what they are doing with their API, and Lyft would stop them if they knew, then that's a good signal that it's not very ethical to do it. (Of course, if you're a consequentialist, then you might still like the action if it were serving some greater good. But this seems more like a zero-sum game between Uber and Lyft, at best.) I suspect that if you were working for the same startup and you were tasked with "Implement a way to know how many Lyft drivers are out on the road, and make sure Lyft can't tell we're doing it" then you might hesitate.

cookiecaper 9y ago
Lyft is making this information available to anyone who signs up and accesses it, there's no subterfuge going on. They didn't plant a mole in Lyft to send them secret internal documents. They didn't steal their code and copy its innovations. The mere fact that Lyft "would [try to] stop them" makes it immoral? How does that work? Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game to figure out what plays they like to use? Surely they would try to stop me from doing this if they could, because they want me to know as little about their playbook as possible, because they'd prefer to win. They might even tell the clerk not to sell the tape to anyone who is wearing my team's colors to try to keep it out of enemy hands. But there's nothing wrong with reviewing the tapes, even if they've tried to stop me from doing so. What makes your competitors pleasure a barometer of morality? Almost always, winners are going to be happy and losers are going to be sad. Is it immoral for anyone to win or lose?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  They broke the agreement they signed to gain access to that information and intended to break that agreement from the outset. That's outright fraud to gain access. This isn't some kind of gray area like you're trying to pretend.
- exergy 9y ago
  I think the party that sued are the drivers themselves who allege that collection such information is tantamount to wiretapping. I could be wrong in my interpretation though. On the other hand, I completely disagree with your last paragraph. That kind of world is my definition of hell. Winners are "happier"? On what metric? Is Lyft a "loser" company? Are it's employees losers? Who's "unhappy" in this scenario? A "win at all cost" culture that leaves the losers in the dust sounds like a nasty, vile dystopia.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    >On the other hand, I completely disagree with your last paragraph. That kind of world is my definition of hell. Winners are "happier"? On what metric? Is Lyft a "loser" company? Are it's employees losers? Who's "unhappy" in this scenario? A "win at all cost" culture that leaves the losers in the dust sounds like a nasty, vile dystopia. It's not "win at all costs". It's "win at some costs"; in other words, a competition with some rules. Business is a competition and your competitors are going to be looking for and actively exploiting the advantages they can get over you. This necessarily requires you to look for advantages you can get over them or just cede the market, and if you're willing to do that, there's no point in competing in the first place. It's sad how HN is here demanding meticulous adherence to a clause buried deep in the incumbent's ToS and pretending that violating it is some basic moral misdeed.
    - xaa 9y ago
      > It's sad how HN is here demanding meticulous adherence to a clause buried deep in the incumbent's ToS and pretending that violating it is some basic moral misdeed. Probably because the context for a "TOS violation" is very different between a large company and an individual, and because the motives for this violation are venal. And because Uber is a serial violator of pretty much every rule it comes into contact with. I doubt you'd find many here who would see a problem with, say, a researcher violating the same clause to get data for a research project. Large companies can afford lawyers to read TOS documents. Normal people don't have the time or expertise to read them, usually. And who writes TOS documents in the first place? Large companies. It is a double standard if a company wants their TOS followed, but breaks other companies'. So it is coherent to argue that large companies have a higher burden to follow a TOS more "meticulously" than individuals do.
- mquander 9y ago
  As a baseline, deception is immoral. If you want to be deceptive, you should have a good reason. Your winning a zero-sum game isn't a reason anyone else should be happy about. In the football tapes example, I don't think there is anything deceptive happening, because everyone understands that other teams are doing this. However, if it were explicitly against the rules or implicitly against established norms to review other team's tapes, doing so and not telling the other teams is deceptive and wrong. I think I disagree that there was no subterfuge in the Lyft case? I don't actually know this, but I assume that if Lyft knew this was happening, they would behave differently, and if the drivers knew this was happening, they would behave differently. If you do something that you know a lot of other people would care a lot about, it is in my opinion your responsibility not to try to conceal it from them. If it's not difficult, as in this case, you should notify them explicitly.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    >In the football tapes example, I don't think there is anything deceptive happening, because everyone understands that other teams are doing this. However, if it were explicitly against the rules or implicitly against established norms to review other team's tapes, doing so and not telling the other teams is deceptive and wrong. I agree. The implicit context is that it is in-bounds to investigate your competitors through their public-facing offerings, even if they try to stop you. You don't have to stop competing just because they say please. Through an accident of law (the CFAA was enacted before it was possible to get home internet service), Lyft was able to make this illegal. Lyft is trying to block public information from getting into their competitor's hands. IMO, that's the anti-competitive activity here.
    - mquander 9y ago
      I think I understand your perspective, thanks for these comments.
    - ddalex 9y ago
      Fair enough, one should be able to machine read APIs that power a public web page without fear of repercussions. But that's not a public API that Uber was tapping into. It was a private API that requires an agreement to be signed in order to access it. Uber signed and then violated the agreement, by providing fake data through the APIs. At the moment that the agreement was broken, their access to the API become illegal.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Oh please, like Lyft doesn't have Terms of Service for their API and like Uber doesn't have a legal department full of people whose; job is to study such things. Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game [...] No, because they can do the same withyour last game. It's called a level playing field, which is clearly a foreign concept to the people who work at Uber. What makes your competitors pleasure a barometer of morality? Almost always, winners are going to be happy and losers are going to be sad. Is it immoral for anyone to win or lose? There's more to competition than the zero-sum variety.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    >No, because they can do the same withyour last game. It's called a level playing field, which is clearly a foreign concept to the people who work at Uber. And Lyft can access Uber's API, unless they're scrupulously avoiding doing so for legal reasons, which doesn't seem all that likely. There's a lot of stuff that is technically illegal, but we'd all be paralyzed if we followed the letter of the law (or every contract we sign) precisely. I'm sure Lyft and Uber BOTH understand this, as they're both generally operating in direct violation of local taxi regulations. It's funny to read so many people acting like violating a ToS is some moral horror, apparently unaware that the ToS is routinely violated by normal usage, and that like most contracts, they're intentionally written that way. The goal of this, as all contracts, is to a) have a reason to sue someone they dislike and b) have a defense against suits from someone that dislikes them. Since the user has no individual/direct bargaining power, the contract will always be massively favorable to the company. Businesses sue each other for breach of contract all the time. It could even be argued that this is not fundamentally immoral, which is why it's a civil matter; disagreements in business will sometimes occur, and resorting to the civil dispute resolution system that's in place for exactly this reason is not necessarily a sign of malfeasance. No one reads ToS except lawyers, and then only when they're looking for something to sue over and/or decide how much likely they're going to get sued. Like most contracts, it doesn't become a consideration until something goes south. In the football analogy, the opposing team could easily concoct a situation where a ToS prevents an opposing team member from watching the video of the game by creating an interstitial landing page that says "You must agree to the Terms to view this site", the person checking OK, and then viewing the video that technically was prefixed by mandatory agreement to a document that buried language like "This video must not be used against us in any way." under 50 paragraphs of boilerplate. This is unfair because they were able to say "Please don't compete with us, k?" in a potentially technically legally-binding way? Come on now. >There's more to competition than the zero-sum variety. OK? It's not zero-sum just because some are happy and some are sad.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  They're making it available, but isn't it being made available under a specific license? > Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game to figure out what plays they like to use? Did you have to impersonate someone who's supposed to have access to it in order to watch it? That seems more like the question that would decide it. "Because they don't want you to" is a bad way to phrase it, even if it gets to the core of things. After all, they wrote their license agreement based on what they want you to do, right? > there's no subterfuge going on "I want API access." "We only give that to drivers." "OK, I'm a driver." "OK, here's API access" Are you going to argue that Uber's devs could've had that theoretical conversation without being intentionally deceptive?
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    >Did you have to impersonate someone who's supposed to have access to it in order to watch it? That seems more like the question that would decide it. Is it impersonation if I just don't go in wearing the opposing team's colors? What if I go wearing the playing team's jersey? What if I'm the coach of that other team so I wear a hat and sunglasses? Where's the line of "impersonation"? This can't be taken as an absolute unless we concede that we must say "OK" just because they say "Please don't", even if they're able to find a way to make this technically legally binding. Morality does NOT require us to give up as soon as someone tries to block us. >"Because they don't want you to" is a bad way to phrase it, even if it gets to the core of things. After all, they wrote their license agreement based on what they want you to do, right? Sure. I'm not disputing that this was almost definitely a technical violation of the CFAA. The CFAA is a disgustingly overbroad and outdated law, and Lyft finagling their process to get under its cover shouldn't be a moral indictment of Uber. [The bright side of this is that if similar lawsuits start coming out against some other big players, the law might finally change.] Are licensing agreements automatically eval'd into moral absolutes? If we take such a strict position we can never win against any moderately powerful entity. The path to ascendancy for most companies involves "avoid a lawsuit", because frequently there are laws on the books that could take them down. Google is a great example; their conduct technically violates the CFAA and rampantly violates copyright, even though the courts ended up giving them a pass in Perfect 10 v. Amazon because they're afraid to shut down Google. >Are you going to argue that Uber's devs could've had that theoretical conversation without being intentionally deceptive? I'll argue that it doesn't cross the threshold from "deception required to be basically functional in a competitive environment" into "immoral and personally compromising deception". When you enter business, you know you are entering a competitive market where part of the game is getting an advantage over your competitors, and their attempting to do so over you. Concocting a complex legal apparatus that gives some meat to any potential lawsuit between competitors is routine. It doesn't affect the morality of the process, despite the theatrics of the court.

cookiecaper 9y ago

Lyft is making this information available to anyone who signs up and accesses it, there's no subterfuge going on. They didn't plant a mole in Lyft to send them secret internal documents. They didn't steal their code and copy its innovations. The mere fact that Lyft "would [try to] stop them" makes it immoral? How does that work? Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game to figure out what plays they like to use? Surely they would try to stop me from doing this if they could, because they want me to know as little about their playbook as possible, because they'd prefer to win. They might even tell the clerk not to sell the tape to anyone who is wearing my team's colors to try to keep it out of enemy hands. But there's nothing wrong with reviewing the tapes, even if they've tried to stop me from doing so. What makes your competitors pleasure a barometer of morality? Almost always, winners are going to be happy and losers are going to be sad. Is it immoral for anyone to win or lose?

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
They broke the agreement they signed to gain access to that information and intended to break that agreement from the outset. That's outright fraud to gain access. This isn't some kind of gray area like you're trying to pretend.
exergy 9y ago
I think the party that sued are the drivers themselves who allege that collection such information is tantamount to wiretapping. I could be wrong in my interpretation though. On the other hand, I completely disagree with your last paragraph. That kind of world is my definition of hell. Winners are "happier"? On what metric? Is Lyft a "loser" company? Are it's employees losers? Who's "unhappy" in this scenario? A "win at all cost" culture that leaves the losers in the dust sounds like a nasty, vile dystopia.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  >On the other hand, I completely disagree with your last paragraph. That kind of world is my definition of hell. Winners are "happier"? On what metric? Is Lyft a "loser" company? Are it's employees losers? Who's "unhappy" in this scenario? A "win at all cost" culture that leaves the losers in the dust sounds like a nasty, vile dystopia. It's not "win at all costs". It's "win at some costs"; in other words, a competition with some rules. Business is a competition and your competitors are going to be looking for and actively exploiting the advantages they can get over you. This necessarily requires you to look for advantages you can get over them or just cede the market, and if you're willing to do that, there's no point in competing in the first place. It's sad how HN is here demanding meticulous adherence to a clause buried deep in the incumbent's ToS and pretending that violating it is some basic moral misdeed.
  - xaa 9y ago
    > It's sad how HN is here demanding meticulous adherence to a clause buried deep in the incumbent's ToS and pretending that violating it is some basic moral misdeed. Probably because the context for a "TOS violation" is very different between a large company and an individual, and because the motives for this violation are venal. And because Uber is a serial violator of pretty much every rule it comes into contact with. I doubt you'd find many here who would see a problem with, say, a researcher violating the same clause to get data for a research project. Large companies can afford lawyers to read TOS documents. Normal people don't have the time or expertise to read them, usually. And who writes TOS documents in the first place? Large companies. It is a double standard if a company wants their TOS followed, but breaks other companies'. So it is coherent to argue that large companies have a higher burden to follow a TOS more "meticulously" than individuals do.
mquander 9y ago
As a baseline, deception is immoral. If you want to be deceptive, you should have a good reason. Your winning a zero-sum game isn't a reason anyone else should be happy about. In the football tapes example, I don't think there is anything deceptive happening, because everyone understands that other teams are doing this. However, if it were explicitly against the rules or implicitly against established norms to review other team's tapes, doing so and not telling the other teams is deceptive and wrong. I think I disagree that there was no subterfuge in the Lyft case? I don't actually know this, but I assume that if Lyft knew this was happening, they would behave differently, and if the drivers knew this was happening, they would behave differently. If you do something that you know a lot of other people would care a lot about, it is in my opinion your responsibility not to try to conceal it from them. If it's not difficult, as in this case, you should notify them explicitly.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  >In the football tapes example, I don't think there is anything deceptive happening, because everyone understands that other teams are doing this. However, if it were explicitly against the rules or implicitly against established norms to review other team's tapes, doing so and not telling the other teams is deceptive and wrong. I agree. The implicit context is that it is in-bounds to investigate your competitors through their public-facing offerings, even if they try to stop you. You don't have to stop competing just because they say please. Through an accident of law (the CFAA was enacted before it was possible to get home internet service), Lyft was able to make this illegal. Lyft is trying to block public information from getting into their competitor's hands. IMO, that's the anti-competitive activity here.
  - mquander 9y ago
    I think I understand your perspective, thanks for these comments.
  - ddalex 9y ago
    Fair enough, one should be able to machine read APIs that power a public web page without fear of repercussions. But that's not a public API that Uber was tapping into. It was a private API that requires an agreement to be signed in order to access it. Uber signed and then violated the agreement, by providing fake data through the APIs. At the moment that the agreement was broken, their access to the API become illegal.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Oh please, like Lyft doesn't have Terms of Service for their API and like Uber doesn't have a legal department full of people whose; job is to study such things. Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game [...] No, because they can do the same withyour last game. It's called a level playing field, which is clearly a foreign concept to the people who work at Uber. What makes your competitors pleasure a barometer of morality? Almost always, winners are going to be happy and losers are going to be sad. Is it immoral for anyone to win or lose? There's more to competition than the zero-sum variety.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  >No, because they can do the same withyour last game. It's called a level playing field, which is clearly a foreign concept to the people who work at Uber. And Lyft can access Uber's API, unless they're scrupulously avoiding doing so for legal reasons, which doesn't seem all that likely. There's a lot of stuff that is technically illegal, but we'd all be paralyzed if we followed the letter of the law (or every contract we sign) precisely. I'm sure Lyft and Uber BOTH understand this, as they're both generally operating in direct violation of local taxi regulations. It's funny to read so many people acting like violating a ToS is some moral horror, apparently unaware that the ToS is routinely violated by normal usage, and that like most contracts, they're intentionally written that way. The goal of this, as all contracts, is to a) have a reason to sue someone they dislike and b) have a defense against suits from someone that dislikes them. Since the user has no individual/direct bargaining power, the contract will always be massively favorable to the company. Businesses sue each other for breach of contract all the time. It could even be argued that this is not fundamentally immoral, which is why it's a civil matter; disagreements in business will sometimes occur, and resorting to the civil dispute resolution system that's in place for exactly this reason is not necessarily a sign of malfeasance. No one reads ToS except lawyers, and then only when they're looking for something to sue over and/or decide how much likely they're going to get sued. Like most contracts, it doesn't become a consideration until something goes south. In the football analogy, the opposing team could easily concoct a situation where a ToS prevents an opposing team member from watching the video of the game by creating an interstitial landing page that says "You must agree to the Terms to view this site", the person checking OK, and then viewing the video that technically was prefixed by mandatory agreement to a document that buried language like "This video must not be used against us in any way." under 50 paragraphs of boilerplate. This is unfair because they were able to say "Please don't compete with us, k?" in a potentially technically legally-binding way? Come on now. >There's more to competition than the zero-sum variety. OK? It's not zero-sum just because some are happy and some are sad.
khedoros1 9y ago
They're making it available, but isn't it being made available under a specific license? > Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game to figure out what plays they like to use? Did you have to impersonate someone who's supposed to have access to it in order to watch it? That seems more like the question that would decide it. "Because they don't want you to" is a bad way to phrase it, even if it gets to the core of things. After all, they wrote their license agreement based on what they want you to do, right? > there's no subterfuge going on "I want API access." "We only give that to drivers." "OK, I'm a driver." "OK, here's API access" Are you going to argue that Uber's devs could've had that theoretical conversation without being intentionally deceptive?
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  >Did you have to impersonate someone who's supposed to have access to it in order to watch it? That seems more like the question that would decide it. Is it impersonation if I just don't go in wearing the opposing team's colors? What if I go wearing the playing team's jersey? What if I'm the coach of that other team so I wear a hat and sunglasses? Where's the line of "impersonation"? This can't be taken as an absolute unless we concede that we must say "OK" just because they say "Please don't", even if they're able to find a way to make this technically legally binding. Morality does NOT require us to give up as soon as someone tries to block us. >"Because they don't want you to" is a bad way to phrase it, even if it gets to the core of things. After all, they wrote their license agreement based on what they want you to do, right? Sure. I'm not disputing that this was almost definitely a technical violation of the CFAA. The CFAA is a disgustingly overbroad and outdated law, and Lyft finagling their process to get under its cover shouldn't be a moral indictment of Uber. [The bright side of this is that if similar lawsuits start coming out against some other big players, the law might finally change.] Are licensing agreements automatically eval'd into moral absolutes? If we take such a strict position we can never win against any moderately powerful entity. The path to ascendancy for most companies involves "avoid a lawsuit", because frequently there are laws on the books that could take them down. Google is a great example; their conduct technically violates the CFAA and rampantly violates copyright, even though the courts ended up giving them a pass in Perfect 10 v. Amazon because they're afraid to shut down Google. >Are you going to argue that Uber's devs could've had that theoretical conversation without being intentionally deceptive? I'll argue that it doesn't cross the threshold from "deception required to be basically functional in a competitive environment" into "immoral and personally compromising deception". When you enter business, you know you are entering a competitive market where part of the game is getting an advantage over your competitors, and their attempting to do so over you. Concocting a complex legal apparatus that gives some meat to any potential lawsuit between competitors is routine. It doesn't affect the morality of the process, despite the theatrics of the court.