At least when Travis can avoid one of his little tantrums; you don’t generally accuse Uber of being sloppy; it’s just that the things apply themselves to executing that makes people nervous.
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I have to wonder if somebody munged ‘IMEIs’/‘model names/numbers’/‘other phone-identifying information’ during the course of the reporting.
Unless your spook is actively shoulder surfing as every customer activates(or you just skip the private investigator stuff and have the salesperson doing the activating tip you off; or buy the ‘customer proprietary network information’ that every telco ever appears to be falling over itself to get your ‘consent’ to monetize; you have options), getting phone numbers could be a little tricky; but also not terribly important.
What matters is what flavor of burners a given market hosts; and that is something that having somebody do a sweep through the shitty-handsets section of appropriate stores would be more than adequate for. And, since the first 8 digits of an IMEI are the TAC, once you know what models are the local burner of choice; your app’s access to IMEI should make them quite trivial to identify(and, if the mobile OS vendors actually start giving a damn about customers and block IMEI access, there is a wealth of work on ‘fingerprinting’ to draw on from the wonderful people in ad-tech an consumer analytics; which would be more ugly heuristics, but would get the job done).
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I can do so because people say that they have individual identities. But of course, they are programmed to. What happens to a drop of water in a river does matter, but this does not change that none of them exist as truly distinct entities from each other. The true boundaries emerge spontaneously, while any individual self is an arbitrary, idealized boundary - a static snapshot of a complex network in flux. I can recognize and respect that people insist upon their individuality, even if the evidence appears to contradict this. There are lots of weird artefacts to human perceptual processes.
For me, its perfectly fine if the authorities in my state investigate them. Can’t happen soon enough.
Did you run into a problem with Uber?
They could get the International Mobile Equipment Identity from the burner phones. That won’t change even with a different SIM card. (Alternately, the Bluetooth address and Wifi MAC address.)
When their app sends the user’s IMEI back to the mothership, they can match it against their DB of burner phones.
but how do we get them into business, in the _policing of businesse_s, sense?
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I was more concerned by the implication that in those cities, if you can only afford a basic low-end smartphone (or your main phone is in the repair shop), you’re never going to be able to find an uber car, and the app will dick you around for ever.
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But then how do you define “true boundaries” by which to define exploitation? Is the cell exploiting the vacuole in which carbohydrates are contained? Is the human being exploiting the food that contains the carbohydrates? Or is the restaurant that sells the food exploiting the human or the carbohydrates? Or is the corporation that sells the food supplies exploiting the restaurant?
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I don’t see how they could keep their list of burner phones up to date. Around here, the cheapest phone is whatever Factory Direct has on special this week.
And what about the geofencing? Someone tries to get an an Uber cab from a police station, is their phone grey-listed?
I’m still wondering what “hijacking their own phones” means. Activate the camera and take a picture of the user, or just rummage through the contact list?
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They seemed tin think they could make it work - possibly in combination with the other steps, kinda ‘securityduplicity in depth’?
That one had occurred to me - don’t get a parking ban (or towed) and want an uber.
Maybe both? If the general build of the app does any of this client-side, it’s effectively a Trojan, anyway. It’d be difficult to do some of this without.
Hmm. Wonder how this gets past Apple’s vaunted app vetting procedures?
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The precise OS revision would give you the phone model.
No but even in our highly regulated state, taxi drivers are a problem for me as a bike commuter. They see bikes as competition, and take steps against them. At the same time I know of one person new to the country who wants to drive for Uber because he can’t get another job. Its the sort of environment where frustration will build up fast because they are losing money on an expensive car and not making it up on income.
I know that taxis (plus uber, etc) are on the way out, like newspaper deliveries, and cheaper, less capable people will take over the driving as they start to compete head to head with robots.
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Exactly!
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Exactly what? Because if your intent is to prevent a privileged class from exploiting others, then how can you support the consumption of food, if all of those examples are seen as “exactly” your definition of exploitation?
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Found the ancap, confirmed. It is delusional to think that humans would voluntarily impose limits on themselves with no structure for accountability. That structure exists. It is either a fool or a shill who advocates for the removal of that structure… I hope it is the former, as a fool can be informed.
Marx knew that human society cannot function without laws. He advocated for workers owning the means of production, but as a journalist he was also aware that ownership is only possible under rule of law. To eliminate law is to invite chaos; the largest dick with a gun would be free to impose their Randian malfeasance on others, morality be damned. Melamine in baby formula pales in comparison to things produced by unrestricted capitalists just over one hundred years ago in this very nation.
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At least they have the tech to make sure the drivers who took loans out from them are getting enough fares (and those fares are high enough) to cover their loans.
Bit of a company store, I look forward to futher expose’s of a service I haven’t ever used, as I prefer licensed hacks.
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Ish. Always gotta be sublties, right? 
Prepaids are generally assign a block of numbers that they can get. Technically they wouldn’t have to be contiguous, but in practice they are.
So you get a few prepaid burners, note their numbers, and +/-1000 you know the incoming call is from a prepaid.
There are also burner apps, but those numbers are even easier to trace. You’d need to spoof calls from some real hardware–which isn’t all that hard, but harder than walking into a walgreens–to evade trivial detection.
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They may have the tech to, but I’m not sure their business ethos would allow the empathy to actually do that. 
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That seems like it should be completely illegal. Not that it necessarily registers in the long list of terrible things Uber has done – however, it does have the feature that it is poor/illegal treatment of their customers apparently explicitly ordered by Uber, so their non-defense of “we aren’t responsible for what our independent contractors do” can’t be applied.
Also, seems dumb. If I were an undercover cop investigating Uber, and halfway through the ride, skynet decided I wasn’t wanted and the driver stopped the car and tried to kick me out and strand me on a freeway offramp, I can say that I would do my best to arrest him on the spot. Likewise, if I were an alleged taxi union thug who was going to rough up the driver, yet for some reason didn’t do so immediately when he showed up, being kicked out of the car is not going to help your situation any.
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Curious, does Uber prohibit you from telling your Uber customers to use Lyft? I mean, if they are trying to claim you are independent contractors and they aren’t responsible for your actions, it seems like you should be able to suggest your customers try an alternative platform to contract you.
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