How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
It took me about 8 paragraphs in to figure out what Greyball is, so to save you the time: Uber used various data sources to identify which people are likely government officials who are trying to collect incriminating data on them, and then blocks them from the service so they can&#x27;t be caught in sting operations.<p>But there&#x27;s a lot in the article that doesn&#x27;t make sense:<p>&gt;Other techniques included looking at the user’s credit card information and whether that card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union.<p>I couldn&#x27;t find a good source, but it doesn&#x27;t seem like that&#x27;s something a CC merchant would have access to. Do they really get to see that?[2]<p>Also, how were they able to do it so accurately <i>without</i> disrupting their service?  Most city employees and police aren&#x27;t going to be involved in sting operations against car services, so their customer support will have to deal with a <i>torrent</i> of very confused government employees [1] who keep getting mysterious rejections when they try to use they app, and which support can&#x27;t give a truthful answer on.<p>Plus, this seemed to require <i>significant</i> on-the-ground intel and human intervention:<p>&gt;If those clues were not enough to confirm a user’s identity, Uber employees would search social media profiles and other available information online. Once a user was identified as law enforcement, Uber Greyballed him or her, tagging the user with a small piece of code that read Greyball followed by a string of numbers.<p>So, I&#x27;m surprised it worked at all.<p>[1] identified by the fact of that person having more-than-usual activity inside something recognized as a government building<p>[2] EDIT: Okay, I get it -- you can look up banks from the CC number. Can we not have further comments just to point this out?