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Uber Gets Sued Over Alleged 'Hell' Program To Track Lyft Drivers (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the hell-of-a-ride dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Uber has another lawsuit on its hands. This time, it's about Uber's alleged use of a program called "Hell." The plaintiff, Michael Gonzales, drove for Lyft during the time Uber allegedly used the software. He's seeking $5 million in a class action lawsuit. As the story goes, Uber allegedly tracked Lyft drivers using a secret software program internally referred to as "Hell." It allegedly let Uber see how many Lyft drivers were available to give rides, and what their prices were. Hell could allegedly also determine if people were driving for both Uber and Lyft. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges Uber broadly invaded the privacy of the Lyft drivers, specifically violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act and Federal Wiretap Act and engaged in unfair competition. Uber has not confirmed nor outright denied the claims.

5 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Corporate espionage by gweihir · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While older economic branches usually have found a modus to do without this (as it ultimately harms everybody), these "young savages" do not know what it means to be civilized and will apparently do anything for a short-term gain.

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    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  2. How is this even illegal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    As much as I hate to defend Uber for absolutely anything, how's this different from a supermarket sending someone to walk through a competitor's store to see what their prices are? They posed as normal customers, collected publicly available data, and used it to improve their own business.

    1. Re:How is this even illegal? by Elfich47 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Lyft drivers were not anonymized. The driver numbers that Lyft assigned were not anonymized and could be used to track drivers over multiple sessions (or weeks). Uber would determine if someone was a Lyft driver in addition to an Uber driver by actively tracking the locations of the Lyft drivers and then correlating it to the locations of the Uber drivers. Also Uber could track which drivers were driving, when they were driving and where they were driving. I wouldn't be surprised if Uber built profiles on all the drivers they were tracking.

      Uber changed its compensation package if drivers were also Lyft drivers. Uber would offer better fares to Lyft drivers as an inducement to quit Lyft.

      It also means that Uber was tracking Lyft drivers (all Lyft drivers in range) without Lyft's permission and without the driver's permission. While the Lyft drivers may have given permission to Lyft for tracking, they did not give permission to Uber to track them. I expect this to be the crux of the argument.

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      Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
    2. Re:How is this even illegal? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 3, Insightful

      > It's not. And as a Lyft driver,

      You seem quite confident. Theft of trade secrets, even through an unwitting proxy to those trade secrets, is still theft. Much would depend on the details of the contract with Uber, and much would depend on whether the software committed acts which the Uber drivers had _not_ agreed to in their contracts. The drivers working for Lyft might not even be empowered, by their Lyft contract, to share that information with Uber, in which case they could not agree to share that data.

    3. Re:How is this even illegal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Any software engineer that cares about their career should not want Uber in their history.

      Depends upon what you want. If money is your game and you're not ethically particular, having Uber on the resume might be a good way to advertise that. Believe it or not there are corporations and investors out there looking for just such mercenary programmers to work on their projects and having a programmer who builds to spec and doesn't ask the wrong questions is a plus for these organizations.