Once the world’s most valuable startup, Uber fingerprinted iPhones to stop frauds but kept Apple in the dark and even tried to trick its systems.
The trailer for Showtime’s limited series Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber is currently making waves, but more than being just another Silicon Valley-based show, it has again brought back memories of how Uber did Apple dirty with a shady ‘iPhone fingerprinting’ maneuver. Once the world’s most valuable startup, Uber entered the Chinese market in 2013 with huge ambitions and a ton of money for expansion plans. But the dreams of dominating the lucrative Asian market were met with massive disappointment. And at one point, Uber was losing a billion dollars each year in China alone.
2016 marked Uber’s exit from the market, but in that brief tenure, Uber came face-to-face with a scam that forced it to do something sketchy that Apple didn’t like. Uber saw widespread fraud in markets like China, where its driver-partners bought cheap iPhones, signed up for new accounts, and booked bogus rides from those extra phones to earn incentives. So Uber started collecting unique hardware identification numbers for each iPhone and tagged them to combat the problem. And the status quo remained so even if the Uber app was deleted or the phone was factory reset. Uber did it all to contain the fraud, but Apple doesn’t allow such a tactic as it violates its policies.
And that’s when Uber tried to pull a fast one. Of course, Uber knew that pulling a device’s hardware data was against Apple’s policies. But rather than seeking a solution with Apple’s assistance, Uber blindsided the company. To avoid detection, Uber geofenced Apple’s Cupertino campus. In simple words, Uber’s software team tweaked the app’s code so that the act of collecting device identification data is not detected by anyone at Apple’s Cupertino campus. However, employees of the Cupertino Campus caught wind of the trick, and the news soon reached Apple CEO Tim Cook. Per a report from The New York Times, Uber’s mercurial chief Travis Kalanick was summoned to meet Cook at his office, and it wasn’t a pleasant conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNn8YJYAyEo
Apple Wasn’t Pleased, At All
“Mr. Kalanick was shaken by Mr. Cook’s scolding, according to a person who saw him after the meeting,” says the report. At the meeting, Kalanick was given two options — stop the iPhone fingerprinting, or get the ride-hailing service’s app kicked off the App Store. Uber couldn’t afford to lose easy access to millions of iPhone users. Kalanick accepted the first option. However, Uber never revealed what data it was sneakily collecting from iPhones. The meeting with Cook happened in 2015, and in 2017, Kalanick resigned as Uber’s CEO. Two years later, Kalanick stepped down from the company’s board he started alongside Garrett Camp in 2019.
It also didn’t help that his headstrong attitude rubbed off the wrong way with investors, a toxic culture that prevailed under his leadership, and the whole history of sketchy decisions coming from high-ranking executives. Following Kalanick’s departure, nothing thorny has transpired between the two companies, except for the ride-hailing giant’s name popping up as an example regarding the in-app payment system dispute during the Epic vs. Apple court drama. Earlier this month, it was reported that an Uber cab could no longer be booked using an Apple Watch. However, the reason is far less sinister this time around, as Uber has simply ended support for the watchOS app.
As for Showtime’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber series, it premieres on Feb. 27 and has Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing the role of Uber’s disgraced founder and former chief.
Source: The New York Times
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