Tool helped Uber deceive officials
Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive authorities in markets where its lowcost ride-hailing service was being resisted by law enforcement, or in some instances, had been outright banned.
The program, which involves a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from Uber’s app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials. Uber used these to evade authorities in cities such as Paris, Boston and Las Vegas, and in countries including Australia, China, South Korea and Italy.
Greyball was part of a broader program called “violation of terms of service,” which Uber created to root out people it thought were using or targeting its service improperly. The program, including the Greyball tool, began as early as 2014 and remains in use today, predominantly outside the United States. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team.
Greyball and the broader program were described to the New York Times by four current and former Uber employees, who also provided documents. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the tools and their use are confidential and because of fear of retaliation from the company.
Uber’s use of Greyball was recorded on video in late 2014, when Erich England, a code enforcement inspector for Portland, Ore., tried to catch an Uber car downtown as part of a sting operation against the company.
Uber had just started its ride-hailing service in Portland without seeking permission from the city, which later declared the service illegal. To build a case against the company, officers like England posed as riders, opening the Uber app to hail a car and watching as the miniature vehicles on the screen wound their way toward him.
But unknown to England and other authorities, some of the digital cars they saw in their Uber apps were never there at all. The Uber drivers they were able to hail also quickly canceled. That was because Uber had tagged England and his colleagues — essentially Greyballing them as city officials — based on data collected from its app and through other techniques. Uber then served up a fake version of its app that was populated with ghost cars, to evade capture.
“This program denies ride requests to users who are violating our terms of service,” Uber said, “whether that’s people aiming to physically harm drivers, competitors looking to disrupt our operations, or opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers.”
Uber, which lets people hail rides from a smartphone app, operates several kinds of services, including a luxury Black Car one in which drivers are commercially licensed. But one Uber service that many regulators have had problems with is the company’s lower-cost service, known as UberX in the United States.
People who have passed a cursory background check and vehicle inspection can become an UberX driver quickly. Many cities declared the service illegal.
That’s because the ability to summon a noncommercial driver — which is how UberX drivers who use their private vehicles are typically categorized — often had no regulation. When Uber barreled into new markets, it capitalized on the lack of rules to quickly enlist UberX drivers, who were not commercially licensed, and put them to work before regulators could prohibit them from doing so.
After authorities caught up, the company and officials generally clashed — Uber has run into legal hurdles with UberX in Austin, Texas; Tampa, Fla.; and Philadelphia as well as internationally. Eventually, the two sides would come to an agreement, and regulators would develop a legal framework for the low-cost service.
That approach has been costly. Law enforcement officials in some cities have impounded cars or ticketed UberX drivers. Uber would generally pick up those costs, and has estimated thousands of dollars in lost revenue for every vehicle impounded and ticket dispensed.
This is where Greyball came in. When Uber moved into a new city, it appointed a general manager, who would try to identify enforcement officers.
One method involved drawing a perimeter around authorities’ offices on a digital map of the city that Uber monitored. The company watched which people frequently opened and closed the app around that location, which signified that the user might be associated with city agencies.
There were a dozen or so signifiers that Uber employees could use to assess whether users were new riders or very likely city officials.
If those clues were not enough to confirm a user’s identity, Uber employees would search social media profiles and other information online. Once a user was identified as law enforcement, the rider was tagged with a small piece of code.
When a tagged officer called a car, Uber could scramble a set of ghost cars inside a fake version of the app, or show no cars available at all. If a driver accidentally picked up an officer, Uber occasionally called the driver with instructions to end the ride.
Employees said the practices and tools were partly born out of safety measures for drivers. In France, Kenya and India, for instance, taxi companies and workers targeted and attacked new Uber drivers.
Greyball was used initially to scramble the locations of UberX drivers to prevent competitors from finding them. Uber said that remains the primary use of the tool today.
But as Uber moved into new markets, its engineers saw that those same techniques and tools could also be used for evading law enforcement. The engineers created a list of tactics and distributed it to general managers in more than a dozen countries across five continents.
At least 50 to 60 people at Uber knew about Greyball, and some had qualms about whether it was ethical or legal. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team, headed by Salle Yoo, the general counsel. Ryan Graves, a senior vice president and board member, was also aware of the program.
Yoo and Graves did not respond to a request for comment.
Greyball could be considered a violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or possibly intentional obstruction of justice, depending on local laws and jurisdictions, said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University who also writes for the New York Times.