- Uber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft’s business. (Lyft, too, operates a competitive intelligence team.)
Slice confirmed that it sells anonymized data (meaning that customers’ names are not attached) based on ride receipts from Uber and Lyft, but declined to disclose who buys the information.
Holy shit. Is there anything at all that Uber does that is not illegal, immoral or just up and up fucked? Don't worry though, the CEO of Unroll.me is Heartbroken over the whole thing where they sold your data to the same mailing lists that you were unsubbing from. In other news..... HAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH
Pando had an even snarkier take. And here’s a way to do better: Don’t start a company that reads users’ email and sells details of their private behavior to the highest bidder. That’s a horrible way to spend your short life on this earth. Stop doing it. Do something better.Here’s a good rule of thumb: If the New York Times reporting on what your business does -- not something bad it did, just the actual thing it does to make money -- triggers a wave of outrage from users, then your business is horrible.