A major piece from Gizmodo:
For years, Uber systemically scraped data from competing ride-hailing
companies all over the world, harvesting information about their
technology, drivers, and executives. Uber gathered information from
these firms using automated collection systems that ran constantly,
amassing millions of records, and sometimes conducted physical
surveillance to complement its data collection.
Uber’s scraping efforts were spearheaded by the company’s Marketplace
Analytics team, while the Strategic Services Group gathered information
for security purposes, Gizmodo learned from three people familiar with
the operations of these teams, from court testimony, and from internal
Uber documents. Until Uber’s data scraping was discontinued this
September in the face of mounting litigation and multiple federal
investigations, Marketplace Analytics gathered information on Uber’s
overseas competitors in an attempt to advance Uber’s position in those
markets. SSG’s mission was to protect employees, executives, and drivers
from violence, which sometimes involved tracking protesters and other
groups that were considered threatening to Uber. An Uber spokesperson
declined to comment for this story.
It’s
possible Uber’s data gathering did not violate any laws—much of it
occurred internationally, and the data was often collected from
publicly-available websites and apps—but the work of Marketplace
Analytics and SSG has attracted the attention of federal investigators
and the judge presiding over ongoing civil litigation against Uber for
theft of trade secrets.
Marketplace Analytics and SSG’s work was
dragged into the sunlight in recent weeks as part of Waymo’s lawsuit
against Uber, which alleges Uber stole trade secrets from the
self-driving car company for use in its own autonomous vehicles. In a
pair of letters written earlier this year, Richard Jacobs, a former Uber
employee, accused the company of using its competitive intelligence
teams to steal trade secrets from Waymo and other companies; those
letters became central in Waymo’s lawsuit after they were disclosed to
Waymo in late November.
The trial, initially scheduled to
begin this month, has been postponed until February to allow Waymo to
investigate the claims included in the letters—that members of the
Marketplace Analytics and SSG teams used secret servers, devices that
couldn’t be traced to Uber, ephemeral messaging services, and physical
surveillance to extract secrets from other ride-hailing companies and
keep the information hidden from the prying eyes of competitors and the
courts.
Uber’s intelligence agency
The
Marketplace Analytics team traces its roots to a previous group within
Uber that was known as Competitive Intelligence, or COIN. COIN also set
up non-attributable servers to store information on competitors, and
oversaw Hell, a program Uber used to track the location of Lyft drivers
and offer them deals to switch to Uber. By scraping data from Lyft’s
app, Uber was able to collect driver ID numbers and therefore track Lyft
drivers’ locations. The existence of Hell, and COIN’s role in deploying
it, were first reported in April by The Information....
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