A recent report has surfaced that back in 2015, Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, travelled all the way to Apple’s headquarters for a dreaded meeting with Tim Cook, who is the CEO of Apple.
Like a child who knew that he had knocked the mum’s favourite vase, the Uber CEO knew what he was about to receive. For months, the Uber team has been hiding certain parts of the Uber app from Apple’s engineers in order to secretly identify and tag iPhones even after users deleted the Uber app from their devices. This violates Apple’s privacy guidelines.
Then again, you wouldn’t try to fool the engineers of one of the largest tech company because the team eventually found out and when the Uber CEO arrived for the meeting with Tim Cook, Mr Cook demanded that Uber fix their ways and app or he would eventually ban the Uber app from Apple’s App Store. Doing so would prove detrimental to millions of customers so Uber decided to back down and remove those violations.
The whole story from the New York Times shows an intriguing side of Travis Kalanick and how time and again he has been pushing through rules and regulations as his standard operating procedure.
The source of all of this happened when Uber was trying to grow their customer base by offering incentive rewards to drivers to pick up more fares. In certain countries, including Malaysia, drivers found multiple loopholes in the system such as creating fake aliases and email addresses to pick up phantom rides and collecting the rewards but it didn’t help Uber in terms of growing their user base. When Uber found out, they wiped out the accounts but drivers would then just wipe out their iPhones and start all over again.
This prompted Uber to create a certain digital fingerprint to stick to a particular device and in doing so violated Apple’s privacy guidelines. They even went as far as hiding the code from the Apple Headquarters and certain locations by geofencing the code. Basically Uber programmed their app to hide that piece of code from anyone who accesses the application from around the region where Apple’s headquarters are located.
