10 ms·

Uber Faces FBI Probe Over Program Targeting Rival Lyft

258 points by WisNorCan 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ArchReaper 9y ago
Non-paywall link?
- BoringCode 9y ago
  WSJ will show the full article if your referer header is set to twitter.com. You can do a search on Google like so: "https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-faces-fbi-probe-overprogram-targeting-rival-lyft-1504872001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-faces-fbi-probe-overprogra... site:twitter.com" https://twitter.com/binarybits/status/906145108277559296 https://twitter.com/binarybits/status/906145108277559296
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
soheil 9y ago
Paste the link in Twitter and click the first result for a non-paywall version.
- Accacin 9y ago
  Same thing basically, but there's a "Web" link underneath the title that will somewhat automate that for you. Edit: Ok. I realised this doesn't really work for WSJ. My bad.
- striking 9y ago
  Facebook version: http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fuber-faces-fbi-probe-overprogram-targeting-rival-lyft-1504872001 http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farti...
TaylorGood 9y ago
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/uber-is-apparently-facing-a-third-federal-criminal-investigation/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/uber-is-apparent...
rashkin 9y ago
There is definitely a fierce competition between ride hailing companies for the bigger market share in the industry. Uber has already damaged its reputation by how it does business in the past. Now the new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has more problems to solve and FBI probe on Uber is just an additional one.
fortythirteen 9y ago
Seriously, do we need any more incidents to prove that Uber is simply one of the most overtly grimey companies to ever exist?
brd 9y ago
Interesting to compare this to the recent LinkedIn case that favored web scrapers. Similar techniques, only difference is Uber's approach likely had a material impact on Lyft's service and cost. I think I'm okay with this trajectory of scraping being legally acceptable so long as no meaningful harm is done to the entity being scraped.
- _jal 9y ago
  This is generally how I've thought about it, too. Intent clearly also matters, and is easy to infer in many cases - scraping information looks quite a bit different than feeding a competitor's dispatch database with garbage events. Although I would love to hear a creative lawyer's story about how that was actually benign. If you're scraping data, make sure you go out of your way to be nice to their servers. With some fragile sites, it is easier than you think to knock them over, and you really want it to appear that you're going out of your way to not cause problems. (Also, look for another role - maintaining scrapers is miserable.)
mabbo 9y ago
Well, good. It's an investigation, not a definite thing. The FBI isn't charging anyone with anything, they just are saying "let's have a good look here and see if something illegal has gone on". There's lots of reasons to think they might be right, but I leave it to them to make the call. We should want investigations into possible crimes, especially when the overall victims are consumers who will have less competition for their money.
- whipoodle 9y ago
  I'm not saying I have a problem with this, but I'm not sure I'd agree with that characterization of FBI investigations.
  - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    Exactly. FBI investigations are not a "first point of contact" when a complaint has been made or someone has a question. Some law enforcement agency has already determined that there is something worth investigating, but they don't have all the tools required to investigate it fully, so it has escalated to the FBI. For law enforcement an FBI investigation is at least the equivalent in development terms of a priority ticket with Managers subscribing and asking for daily updates.
    - blackguardx 9y ago
      You are partially incorrect. The FBI only investigates federal crimes. They act as the initial point of contact for those crimes all the time. In fact, you can go to their office in San Francisco (and others I'm sure) and file a complaint in person.
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  We should want investigations into possible crimes,... Of course. That said, though, I wish they'd keep this sort of thing private so that there is more chance folks are actually innocent until proven guilty instead of having public opinion labeling you as such before the trial.
bko 9y ago
Serious question, Who gets the proceeds of an eventual settlement? It appears that Lyft was hurt or Lyft investors and uber was committing essentially fraud. But I feel like these settlements are normally used to line the pockets of the regulatory and persecutory bodies.
- matt4077 9y ago
  These are two different things... For a criminal probe such as this, any possible fines generally go into the administration's coffers. I know many people like to believe that prosecutors may be motivated by that money, the people making decisions on prosecution (US attorneys in this case) are so far removed from the general budget of the federal government that it's an absurd idea. The amounts are also negligible in the scheme of things. Then, there are class action lawsuits, where the settlement is usually divided among a large number of citizen that were actually harmed, and a rather big chunk goes to the lawyer. Note that the latter is also kinda how the system is supposed to work: almost by definition, class action lawsuits are used in cases where each individual was harmed only slightly, making an individual lawsuit too much of a hassle. The lawyers take on most of the risk of the trial. In both cases, it's more important where the money is coming from than where it's going: the preventative effects of such costs far outstrips the importance of healing the actual harm that occurred.
  - bko 9y ago
    Im not 100% convinced authorities are not motivated by settlement funds. In ny, the mayor used bank settlement funds to buy iPads for police. It was a significant amount of money. http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/490-14/mayor-de-blasio-commissioner-bratton-district-attorney-vance-major-initiative-to#/0 http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/490-14/mayor-de... Mortgage settlements were large and went to various administrative entities including prosecutors office. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/business/dealbook/24mortgagelist.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/business/dealbook/24mortg...
    - wavefunction 9y ago
asdfologist 9y ago
At this point, it would be more newsworthy to see what Uber is not being investigated for.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Crontab 9y ago
  Making a profit?
motardo 9y ago
If Papa John's calls in thousands of fake pizza delivery orders to Donimos, are they doing research on response times and how many drivers their competitor has, or are they committing a crime?
- cgb223 9y ago
  That depends, did Domino's pay for each pizza in full or cancel them when they made it 90% of the way there?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - sjg007 9y ago
    They'd probably still be charged. Also dominos and papa johns and even Pizza Hut don't compete in delivery zones (unless there is so much demand for pizza that it doesn't matter). The losers are the local shops. Prices are nationwide which is where the competition is. They really just want people to order a pizza delivery. Unless your are in New York but I guess that local pizza wins. Maybe a few downtown areas as well.
- michael_storm 9y ago
  That's exactly what we have a court system to answer.
- dsacco 9y ago
  The interesting thing about this example is that literally both of those specific companies (and other QSRs with online ordering) are actively researched by hedge funds this way. You can uncover a truly magnificent amount of data by doing this with, say, their mobile apps' private APIs. I have no idea if they do it to each other though. I'd guess not. To make this comment even more meta: I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how you can use this technique on Uber to get competitive intelligence about, for example, how many total restaurants are currently signed up for UberEats, how many have ever signed up and the rate at which more are signing up in each region. The UberEats mobile APIs offer a way to do this, though individual restaurants use non-sequential UUIDs; do this every day, break it out into a timeseries, and compare it to GrubHub. Voila, you've turned their game against them.
wbharding 9y ago
This probably explains why Uber charged me $2 last time I canceled a ride with them. They need a billing paradigm that prevents them from being taken advantage of by strategies like those that they employ against their competitors. Nevermind that the ride I canceled was 10+ minutes away, and was canceled immediately upon being booked. Advantage: Lyft.
- jamesmishra 9y ago
  Hey William, the reason Uber charges a cancellation fee is to compensate the driver for driving towards you. Without cancellation fees, drivers would have to eat the cost of whatever progress they made towards you. While the policy varies by city, typically an UberX or UberBLACK vehicle can be cancelled for free within 2 minutes. UberPOOL rides typically get billed cancellations immediately, because the canceling rider may have also added to the ETA of an Uber rider already in the vehicle. Uber will occasionally waive the cancellation fee when the ETA of a POOL pickup is significantly higher than the prediction given pre-booking. If you believe you may be eligible for a refund, you can contact Uber support. Read more here: https://help.uber.com/h/24e75a3b-cf44-44e4-abae-8c2dce3b07a3 https://help.uber.com/h/24e75a3b-cf44-44e4-abae-8c2dce3b07a3
  - vkou 9y ago
    > Without cancellation fees, drivers would have to eat the cost of whatever progress they made towards you. No, without it, Uber would have to eat the cost of whatever progress drivers made towards the rider. You tell the drivers to go somewhere (And punish them when they don't) - it's on Uber to pay them.
    - WaxProlix 9y ago
      Hilarious that there's not even a consideration that glorious Uber eats the cost. It's just that the driver would have to - obviously, who else? At some point it stops being spin and becomes some kind of ideology.
      - 9y ago
sschueller 9y ago
Is there any possibly that Travis will face jail time?

258 points by WisNorCan 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ArchReaper 9y ago

Non-paywall link?

BoringCode 9y ago
WSJ will show the full article if your referer header is set to twitter.com. You can do a search on Google like so: "https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-faces-fbi-probe-overprogram-targeting-rival-lyft-1504872001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-faces-fbi-probe-overprogra... site:twitter.com" https://twitter.com/binarybits/status/906145108277559296 https://twitter.com/binarybits/status/906145108277559296
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

soheil 9y ago

Paste the link in Twitter and click the first result for a non-paywall version.

Accacin 9y ago
Same thing basically, but there's a "Web" link underneath the title that will somewhat automate that for you. Edit: Ok. I realised this doesn't really work for WSJ. My bad.
striking 9y ago
Facebook version: http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fuber-faces-fbi-probe-overprogram-targeting-rival-lyft-1504872001 http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farti...

TaylorGood 9y ago

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/uber-is-apparently-facing-a-third-federal-criminal-investigation/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/uber-is-apparent...

rashkin 9y ago

There is definitely a fierce competition between ride hailing companies for the bigger market share in the industry. Uber has already damaged its reputation by how it does business in the past. Now the new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has more problems to solve and FBI probe on Uber is just an additional one.

fortythirteen 9y ago

Seriously, do we need any more incidents to prove that Uber is simply one of the most overtly grimey companies to ever exist?

brd 9y ago

Interesting to compare this to the recent LinkedIn case that favored web scrapers. Similar techniques, only difference is Uber's approach likely had a material impact on Lyft's service and cost. I think I'm okay with this trajectory of scraping being legally acceptable so long as no meaningful harm is done to the entity being scraped.

_jal 9y ago
This is generally how I've thought about it, too. Intent clearly also matters, and is easy to infer in many cases - scraping information looks quite a bit different than feeding a competitor's dispatch database with garbage events. Although I would love to hear a creative lawyer's story about how that was actually benign. If you're scraping data, make sure you go out of your way to be nice to their servers. With some fragile sites, it is easier than you think to knock them over, and you really want it to appear that you're going out of your way to not cause problems. (Also, look for another role - maintaining scrapers is miserable.)

mabbo 9y ago

Well, good. It's an investigation, not a definite thing. The FBI isn't charging anyone with anything, they just are saying "let's have a good look here and see if something illegal has gone on". There's lots of reasons to think they might be right, but I leave it to them to make the call. We should want investigations into possible crimes, especially when the overall victims are consumers who will have less competition for their money.

whipoodle 9y ago
I'm not saying I have a problem with this, but I'm not sure I'd agree with that characterization of FBI investigations.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  Exactly. FBI investigations are not a "first point of contact" when a complaint has been made or someone has a question. Some law enforcement agency has already determined that there is something worth investigating, but they don't have all the tools required to investigate it fully, so it has escalated to the FBI. For law enforcement an FBI investigation is at least the equivalent in development terms of a priority ticket with Managers subscribing and asking for daily updates.
  - blackguardx 9y ago
    You are partially incorrect. The FBI only investigates federal crimes. They act as the initial point of contact for those crimes all the time. In fact, you can go to their office in San Francisco (and others I'm sure) and file a complaint in person.
Broken_Hippo 9y ago
We should want investigations into possible crimes,... Of course. That said, though, I wish they'd keep this sort of thing private so that there is more chance folks are actually innocent until proven guilty instead of having public opinion labeling you as such before the trial.

bko 9y ago

Serious question, Who gets the proceeds of an eventual settlement? It appears that Lyft was hurt or Lyft investors and uber was committing essentially fraud. But I feel like these settlements are normally used to line the pockets of the regulatory and persecutory bodies.

matt4077 9y ago
These are two different things... For a criminal probe such as this, any possible fines generally go into the administration's coffers. I know many people like to believe that prosecutors may be motivated by that money, the people making decisions on prosecution (US attorneys in this case) are so far removed from the general budget of the federal government that it's an absurd idea. The amounts are also negligible in the scheme of things. Then, there are class action lawsuits, where the settlement is usually divided among a large number of citizen that were actually harmed, and a rather big chunk goes to the lawyer. Note that the latter is also kinda how the system is supposed to work: almost by definition, class action lawsuits are used in cases where each individual was harmed only slightly, making an individual lawsuit too much of a hassle. The lawyers take on most of the risk of the trial. In both cases, it's more important where the money is coming from than where it's going: the preventative effects of such costs far outstrips the importance of healing the actual harm that occurred.
- bko 9y ago
  Im not 100% convinced authorities are not motivated by settlement funds. In ny, the mayor used bank settlement funds to buy iPads for police. It was a significant amount of money. http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/490-14/mayor-de-blasio-commissioner-bratton-district-attorney-vance-major-initiative-to#/0 http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/490-14/mayor-de... Mortgage settlements were large and went to various administrative entities including prosecutors office. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/business/dealbook/24mortgagelist.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/business/dealbook/24mortg...
  - wavefunction 9y ago

asdfologist 9y ago

At this point, it would be more newsworthy to see what Uber is not being investigated for.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Crontab 9y ago
Making a profit?

motardo 9y ago

If Papa John's calls in thousands of fake pizza delivery orders to Donimos, are they doing research on response times and how many drivers their competitor has, or are they committing a crime?

cgb223 9y ago
That depends, did Domino's pay for each pizza in full or cancel them when they made it 90% of the way there?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sjg007 9y ago
  They'd probably still be charged. Also dominos and papa johns and even Pizza Hut don't compete in delivery zones (unless there is so much demand for pizza that it doesn't matter). The losers are the local shops. Prices are nationwide which is where the competition is. They really just want people to order a pizza delivery. Unless your are in New York but I guess that local pizza wins. Maybe a few downtown areas as well.
michael_storm 9y ago
That's exactly what we have a court system to answer.
dsacco 9y ago
The interesting thing about this example is that literally both of those specific companies (and other QSRs with online ordering) are actively researched by hedge funds this way. You can uncover a truly magnificent amount of data by doing this with, say, their mobile apps' private APIs. I have no idea if they do it to each other though. I'd guess not. To make this comment even more meta: I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how you can use this technique on Uber to get competitive intelligence about, for example, how many total restaurants are currently signed up for UberEats, how many have ever signed up and the rate at which more are signing up in each region. The UberEats mobile APIs offer a way to do this, though individual restaurants use non-sequential UUIDs; do this every day, break it out into a timeseries, and compare it to GrubHub. Voila, you've turned their game against them.

wbharding 9y ago

This probably explains why Uber charged me $2 last time I canceled a ride with them. They need a billing paradigm that prevents them from being taken advantage of by strategies like those that they employ against their competitors. Nevermind that the ride I canceled was 10+ minutes away, and was canceled immediately upon being booked. Advantage: Lyft.

jamesmishra 9y ago
Hey William, the reason Uber charges a cancellation fee is to compensate the driver for driving towards you. Without cancellation fees, drivers would have to eat the cost of whatever progress they made towards you. While the policy varies by city, typically an UberX or UberBLACK vehicle can be cancelled for free within 2 minutes. UberPOOL rides typically get billed cancellations immediately, because the canceling rider may have also added to the ETA of an Uber rider already in the vehicle. Uber will occasionally waive the cancellation fee when the ETA of a POOL pickup is significantly higher than the prediction given pre-booking. If you believe you may be eligible for a refund, you can contact Uber support. Read more here: https://help.uber.com/h/24e75a3b-cf44-44e4-abae-8c2dce3b07a3 https://help.uber.com/h/24e75a3b-cf44-44e4-abae-8c2dce3b07a3
- vkou 9y ago
  > Without cancellation fees, drivers would have to eat the cost of whatever progress they made towards you. No, without it, Uber would have to eat the cost of whatever progress drivers made towards the rider. You tell the drivers to go somewhere (And punish them when they don't) - it's on Uber to pay them.
  - WaxProlix 9y ago
    Hilarious that there's not even a consideration that glorious Uber eats the cost. It's just that the driver would have to - obviously, who else? At some point it stops being spin and becomes some kind of ideology.
    - 9y ago

sschueller 9y ago

Is there any possibly that Travis will face jail time?