Ondrej Holzman Uber, which mediates transportation by passenger cars via a mobile application as a competitor to established taxi services, has not been doing well in recent months. The company solves several public scandals and now it has leaked information that it circumvented Apple's strict rules with its iPhone app.
In his extensive text The New York Times they write about the approach and life of Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and CEO of Uber, and above all, they reveal details about the previously undisclosed meeting between Kalanick and the head of Apple, Tim Cook. The latter had Kalanick called into his office because Apple found out that Uber's iOS application fundamentally violates the rules of the App Store.
The whole thing is quite complicated and it's still not entirely clear what exactly Uber's mobile app was doing, but more generally it's that the developers put a secret code into Uber's iOS app that they were able to tag individual iPhones with in order to prevent fraud. Especially in China, drivers bought stolen iPhones, created fake accounts with Uber, ordered rides through them and thus increased their rewards.
The mentioned code, thanks to which Uber tagged individual phones in order to track them (it is not yet clear exactly to what extent the tracking took place and if we can even talk about tracking as such), whether there is an abuse of its system, or whether this whole behavior violated the rules App Store. Because of this, Tim Cook even had to threaten Kalanick that if Uber does not fix everything, he will remove his app from its store.
Such a step would understandably be almost liquidating for the increasingly popular service for transporting people in selected cities, since its entire business model is built on mobile applications. Kalanick - given that Uber is still in the App Store, and the aforementioned meeting was supposed to take place already at the beginning of 2015 - has settled all the problems with Apple, but unfortunately for him and his company, the message is still not coming The New York Times at the right moment.
Unroll.me makes money from users' emails
It turns out that Kalanick is willing to do practically anything for the success and victory of Uber, and this means not only self-sacrifice, but also often acting on the edges of the law and other rules. After all, there is another issue related to this, which NYT uncovered. So it is not illegal, but at the same time it is not very kosher either.
We are talking about the Unroll.me service, which apparently has nothing to do with Uber, but the opposite is true. We have already presented Unroll.me at Jablíčkář, as a handy helper for order in newsletters, just as we mentioned that the service is completely free. As it now turns out, free Unroll.me actually worked because the value was not money, but user data, which many of them don't like.
However, in order to put the mentioned connection with Uber into context, it is necessary to look at the fight of this company with the competition. Travis Kalanick makes no secret that he wants to make Uber the absolute number one on the market, and practically nothing stops him in the fight against the competition, and he is not afraid to use anything that helps him. This is also the case with the Unroll.me service, which belongs to the analysis company Slice Intelligence. It is from her that Uber buys data, which it uses not only in the competitive struggle.
One of Uber's biggest competitors is Lyft, which operates on a similar principle, and thus it was extremely valuable for Uber to obtain account emails from Lyft, from which it then obtained a lot of valuable and otherwise unavailable data about its competition. There was no other way to access these emails than through Slice Intelligence and the Unroll.me service, which by the nature of its operation has access to the email inbox of every logged-in user.
It should be emphasized that Slice sells both Uber and Lyft receipt data strictly anonymized, so it is not linked to the user's personal data in any way, but this is still not acceptable to many users. That is also why many of them spoke up after these discovered facts.
Unroll.me was founded in 2011, and after the acquisition of Slice in 2014, it found a profitable business, which consists of the aforementioned sale of various data about users to third parties, which, however, Slice refuses to disclose. But it was far from just emails about Uber or Lyft receipts.
Due to the negative publicity, Unroll.me CEO Jojo Hedaya immediately responded with a response in a remarkable statement entitled "We Can Do Better", instead of explaining how it actually handles its users' data, accused everyone of not reading the Unroll.me terms and conditions they agreed to when signing up, so they shouldn't be more or less surprised by such activity.
Hedaya admitted that he certainly did not like to see such a reaction from customers and that Unroll.me evidently did not adequately explain what it does with user data, which he said he intends to improve. At the same time, however, he did not state that the company's behavior – selling anonymized data to third parties – should change. Hedaya only emphasized that in doing so, Unroll.me clearly takes care not to reveal your personal data to anyone.
How do I log out of Unroll.me?
More experienced or knowledgeable users can certainly argue here that just giving some service access to your e-mail box is - especially in today's world - very risky. And it is true. On the other hand, Unroll.me is indeed a very effective service that has saved many people the time and effort of annoying newsletters. In addition, although the company had to somehow monetize its free service, it was not at all obvious that Unroll.me makes money from the sale of its users' data, since there are many monetization options.
If you have been using Unroll.me until now and, like many other customers, the current disclosure means a breach of trust (among other things about privacy) and you want to leave the service, we have a guide for you to do so quickly (via Owen scott):
- Log in to your account in Unroll.me, click on your email in the upper right corner and select from the menu Settings.
- Scroll down and click on Delete my account.
- Select the reason for account cancellation and click again Delete my account.
If you were logged in to Unroll.me via a Google account, it's a good idea to delete the mutual link directly in Gmail:
- Click on the profile icon in the upper right corner and select My account.
- In the tab Login and security click on Affiliate Apps and Sites.
- In the section Apps linked to your account click on Manage applications.
- Find and click the Unroll.me app, select it Remove and confirm OK.
After these steps, all previously processed messages via Unroll.me will remain in the "Unroll.me" folder, however, it is not clear what the service will do with messages already stored on its servers. Its terms don't even say whether it stores all or just some of the e-mails you send or receive.
Very nice :-). As you can see, an email is simply an email and you can't let anyone/any service into it. It's quite funny that you are completely overwhelmed by email, where do you need to go for statements, payslips, private emails, other people's contacts, etc....
Again, it turns out that free services simply do not work.