Greyball Concepts

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac · 2 Sep 2019 · 444pp · 127,259 words

Chapter 22: "ONE VERY, VERY STRANGE YEAR AT UBER..." Chapter 23: ...THE HARDER THEY FALL Chapter 24: NO ONE STEALS FROM LARRY PAGE Chapter 25: GREYBALL Chapter 26: FATAL ERRORS PART Ⅴ Chapter 27: THE HOLDER REPORT Chapter 28: THE SYNDICATE Chapter 29: REVENGE OF THE VENTURE CAPITALISTS Chapter 30: DOWN BUT

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lives, and at times followed them to their houses. After zeroing in on problematic individuals, the company would deploy one of its most effective weapons: Greyball. Greyball was a snippet of code affixed to a user’s Uber account, a tag that identified that person as a threat to the company. It

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could be a police officer, a legislative aide or, in England’s case, a transportation official. Having been Greyballed, England and his fellow officers were served up a fake version of the Uber app, populated with ghost cars. They had no chance of ever

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three years, Uber operated with impunity in Portland. It wasn’t until 2017 when the New York Times broke the story of how Uber used Greyball to evade the authorities that Portland officials fully understood just how Uber had carried out its subterfuge. But by 2017 it was too late. Uber

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a typical Uber employee at the time—and even some supporters years later—and they will tell you they didn’t see it that way. Greyball was consistent with one of Uber’s fourteen company values: Principled Confrontation. Uber was protecting its drivers while confronting what they saw as a “corrupt

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the head.” ¶¶¶¶¶¶¶ One witness to the confrontation between Hazelbaker and Kalanick recalled the communications executive using far more colorful vocabulary during the encounter. Chapter 25 GREYBALL A week after Susan Fowler’s blog post exploded across the Valley and the front pages of newspapers worldwide, I got a telephone call from

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accurate piece I’ve seen that attempted to capture what it was like inside,” he said. “But you only scratched the surface. Does the term ‘Greyball’ mean anything to you?” Bob asked. It didn’t. He suggested we meet to talk about it. The parking lot of the ramshackle pizza joint

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, shrugging. After that, the app showed no Ubers available at all. Eventually, he gives up. “That was no accident,” Bob said. “That was Greyball.” The genesis of Greyball, a software tool Uber used to systematically deceive and evade authorities, occurred in Philadelphia, one of the hardest fought markets Uber ever tried to

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only show the customer the drivers who were delivering ice cream nearby, and hide all other Uber cars on the road. The tool was nicknamed “Greyball,” the idea being engineers were tricking customers—or “greying” over their eyeballs—to obscure or highlight specific vehicles. What if, the engineers thought, they were

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able to “Greyball” the police or other parking enforcement officers who opened the app, hiding from them all UberX cars on the road? Authorities wouldn’t be able

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. The big problem, Bob explained to me, was figuring out how to spot who the authorities were so they would know which customers to start “Greyballing.” If Uber picked the wrong people, they could end up tricking a customer who wouldn’t be able to catch a ride. So Uber engineers

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Uber managers felt confident they had spotted police or parking enforcement, all it took was the addition of a short piece of code—the word “Greyball” and a string of numbers—to blind that account to Uber’s activities. It worked extremely well; the Philadelphia Parking Authority never noticed the deception

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and car impound rates plummeted. Quentin’s fraud team created a new playbook for how city managers should use Greyball. The playbook was called “Violation of Terms of Service”—VTOS for short—and asserted that authorities using the app to fraudulently hail rides were violating

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Uber’s terms of service agreement. That violation gave Uber the right to deploy Greyball. Any employee could find the playbook in Uber’s internal, wiki-like information directory—alongside the dozens of other playbooks the company had created for

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other varied tasks. With Uber facing opposition in almost every market it entered, the VTOS playbook and Greyball seemed like a godsend. In South Korea, for instance, local police were paying civilians to report drivers. A similar bounty program was conducted in Utah

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. The use of Greyball spread so quickly that members of the fraud team had to call a summit—attended by Uber general managers from more than a dozen countries

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pizza parlor, he started to relax. He felt relieved, he said, to finally explain it to someone after keeping it a secret for so long. Greyball might be illegal. Uber was potentially obstructing justice to make its numbers. “I don’t know what you’re going to do with all of

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was restricted or banned,” the alert read. The blowback was swift. Attorneys general across the United States began asking Uber whether or not it used Greyball in their cities. Days after the report, Joe Sullivan, Uber’s security chief, prohibited employees from using the

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Greyball tool to target authorities in the future, and said Uber was reviewing the use of Greyball over Uber’s entire history. The US Department of Justice opened a probe into Uber’s use of

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Greyball and whether or not it was lawful; the inquiry widened to Philadelphia, Portland, and other cities where it had been used. Uber already had the

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would notice. No one did; no one was there. After the offsite incident, the video of Travis berating a driver, and now the use of Greyball inviting federal investigation, Jeff Jones was done—he needed to get the hell out of Uber. The entire reason he was hired was to fix

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26 FATAL ERRORS Starting with #deleteUber in January 2017, and continuing through the Fowler blog post, the Bloomberg video, the Trump council fiasco, and the Greyball revelations, Kalanick’s reputation had plummeted. The Korea story reinforced what the public already suspected: that Travis often turned a blind eye towards Uber’s

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“I want to profoundly apologize”: Travis Kalanick, “A Profound Apology,” Uber Newsroom, March 1, 2017, https://www.uber.com/newsroom/a-profound-apology. Chapter 25: GREYBALL 241 “my name is Bob”: I’ve changed my source’s name and any specific details about their identity to protect their anonymity. 241 A

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called “eyeballing”: Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. 247 “Uber has for years used”: Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide.” 247 Uber’s security chief, prohibited employees: Daisuke

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Wakabayashi, “Uber Seeks to Prevent Use of Greyball to Thwart Regulators,” New York Times, March 8, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/business/uber-regulators-police

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-greyball.html. 247 Department of Justice opened a probe: Mike Isaac, “Uber Faces Federal Inquiry Over Use of Greyball Tool to Evade Authorities,” New York Times, May 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05

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/04/technology/uber-federal-inquiry-software-greyball.html. 247 the inquiry widened to Philadelphia: Mike Isaac, “Justice Department Expands Its Inquiry

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into Uber’s Greyball Tool,” New York Times, May 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/technology/uber

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-greyball-investigation-expands.html. 248 He called it The Rideshare Guy: Harry Campbell, “About the Rideshare Guy: Harry Campbell

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’s first CEO, 55–59 on Uber’s board, 79–80 Great Recession, 33–34, 132 Green, Logan, 85, 86, 120, 186, 187, 188, 189 Greyball, xvii, xviii, 242–53, 254 Greylock Partners, 74 Groupon, 77 Grubhub, 65 Guadalajara, Mexico, 172–74 Guetta, David, 7 Gurgaon, India, 149–50 Gurley, John

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, 208 New York Times, xvii, xix, 24, 55, 131, 199, 202, 332n, 339–40. See also Isaac, Mike on aggressive culture at Uber, 241 on Greyball, 247 infiltrates all-hands meeting, 279–80, 280n on Kalanick’s comments on India rape incident, 261 ouster of Kalanick and, 289, 295, 300, 304

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car

by Anthony M. Townsend · 15 Jun 2020 · 362pp · 97,288 words

will remain the prime beneficiary of this new global traction monopoly’s rise. DURING ITS FIRST DECADE, Uber didn’t play nice with cities. Its Greyball program, which ran from 2014 to 2017, scoured user data to identify accounts being used by taxi regulators for sting operations in cities where the

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ride-hail service was illegal. Once so tagged, Greyball would thwart municipal officials’ attempts at enforcement by spoofing their screens with phantom cabs. But in 2018, the company attempted to turn over a new

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at enforcement: Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. 179“Even if that means paying money”: Dara Khosrowshahi, “The Campaign for Sustainable Mobility,” Uber, September 26, 2018, https://www.uber

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of cities, 181 Careem purchase by, 177 competition with Lyft, 177–78, 179 congestion pricing, 179, 181 dynamic pricing, 181 fatal AV–pedestrian accident, 231 Greyball program, 178 initial public offering, 97, 177, 181 Jump bike-share platform, 202 limited global footprint, 98 market cap, 97 Micromobility Robotics, 67 number of

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future

by Sebastian Mallaby · 1 Feb 2022 · 935pp · 197,338 words

away its demoralized workforce, and in March 2017 the bad news continued. The New York Times broke a story about a hyperaggressive antiregulatory tactic called Greyball. In cities where ride hailing wasn’t authorized, Uber engineers secretly built a shadow version of the app and pushed it to law-enforcement officials

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they handed him a letter from Team Gurley. The letter cited the disasters of that woeful year: the harassment investigation, the lawsuit with Google, the Greyball deception. “The public perception is that Uber fundamentally lacks ethical and moral values,” the letter said. The company had to “change at its core.” To

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TO NOTE REFERENCE 72 Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017. Uber’s general counsel had determined that Greyball could go ahead because there were no specific laws against ride hailing in Philadelphia, where the program was first used. However, when

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Greyball became publicly known, Uber discontinued its use and the Department of Justice opened a criminal probe. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73 Gurley, author interview. BACK

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, 315, 318, 378, 416n Granite Systems, 174, 176 Granovetter, Mark, 95 Graves, Bill, 433n Graves, Ryan, 351–52 Great Depression, 24, 160 Green, Mike, 427n Greyball, 365–66, 369, 459n Greylock Partners, 52, 98, 99, 385, 426n Grinich, Victor, 37, 417n Grinnell College, 56 Gross, Daniel, 221 Groupon, 242, 244, 245

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, 458n, 459n blitzscaling, 357–59, 362, 364, 385, 387 in China, 362–63, 364 Didi Kuaidi, 362, 363, 364, 459n Founders Fund and, 211, 444n Greyball, 365–66, 369, 459n Gurley’s attack and resignation of Kalanick, 366–69 Gurley’s critique of, 361–63, 373 IPO, 372–73 Menlo Ventures

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy

by Jeremias Prassl · 7 May 2018 · 491pp · 77,650 words

the spring of 2017, a series of reports alleged that Uber had modified its soft- ware to nefarious ends: a tool by the name of ‘Greyball’ was designed to defeat law enforcement operatives by rejecting their ride requests; another project, with the cheerful name ‘Hell’, is alleged to have targeted rival

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Lyft. Uber then prioritized sending rides to drivers who used both apps, hoping to persuade drivers to abandon Lyft.’71 The company has suggested that Greyball was used as an important tool in combatting fraudulent ride requests and investigations into Hell are ongoing. If the underlying allegations turn out to be

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worldwide’, The New York Times (3 March 2017), http://www.nytimes. com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-programme-evade-authorities. html?_r=1, archived at https://perma.cc/G48X-RUV7; Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Greyball: how Uber used secret software to dodge the law’, The Guardian (4 March 2017), http://www.theguardian

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.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber- secret-programme-greyball-resignation-ed-baker, archived at https://perma. cc/CVR6-BR3R; Amir Efrati, ‘Uber’s top secret “Hell” program exploited Lyft’s vulnerability’, The Information (12

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45, 48, 98, 106, 115 working conditions 57 US 54–5, 99 Taylor, Frederick 52–3, 72, 158 financial losses 22, 23 tax laws 84 ‘Greyball’ 88, 170 tax obligations 123–4, 129, 131, 132 ‘Hell’ 88, 170 employment taxes and social security loss-making tactics and market share 64 contributions

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction

by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham · 17 Jan 2020 · 207pp · 59,298 words

candidate is Uber and the incumbent is an asshole called “taxi”’ (Kalanick and Swisher, 2014). Another documented tactic is the use of ‘greyballing’ to evade regulation. This involves the ‘greyball’ tool developed by Uber, which take the data collected by the app through its normal operation in order to ‘identify and circumvent

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has been running since at least 2014. For example, in Portland, Oregon, Uber was operating without approval. Uber gathered the details of city officials and ‘greyballed’ them, providing ‘a fake version of the app, populated with ghost cars, to evade capture’, including cancelling any rides they were able to hail. Uber

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, M. (2017) How Uber deceives the authorities worldwide. The New York Times, 3 March. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html 9. See https://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Billionaire-hedge-fund-manager-says-Uber-told-him-6271449.php 10. The

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.org petition 28 data collection 50, 65–6 drivers’ wages 49–50, 77–8 engagement with regulation and transport policy 48 funding 47–8 and ‘greyballing’ 49 in New York 78–9 O’Connor vs Uber Technologies Inc. (2015) 124, 126 power passengers hold over drivers 75–6 public relations and

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work

by Alex Rosenblat · 22 Oct 2018 · 343pp · 91,080 words

of available drivers. Heather’s discovery turned out to be an indicator of a systematic evasion of regulation through a secret tool at Uber termed “Greyball,” which was reported in the New York Times by Mike Isaac.29 Figure 7. This screenshot of phantom cars was sent to the author in

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2015. In the Greyball program, Uber identifies potential law enforcement and municipal actors by various means, such as through the type of phone or credit card they use, and

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operates illegally. When I reported on the presence of phantom cars in the Uber passenger app in 2015,30 two years before the revelations about Greyball, Uber categorically denied my claim.31 But the fact is, Uber can use its interface and technical tools to control and manipulate how drivers and

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-employee-status. 29. Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. 30. Alex Rosenblat, “Uber’s Phantom Cabs,” Motherboard, July 27, 2015, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgbz5a/ubers-phantom

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, 132–33, 206 gratitude logic, 168–69, 171–77 Gray, Mary L., 163 Great Man theory, 81, 82 Great Recession. See recessions, economic Greece, 23 Greyball program. See “phantom cabs” Griswold, Alison, 68, 72, 122, 191 Gurfinkel, Elie, 157 Gurjinder (driver), 170 Hall, Jonathan, 51 Handy, 27, 175, 229n58 Harford, Barney

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, 39, 58, 60, 190; TLC regulation in, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 123 New Yorker, 36 New York Times: on data harvesting, 161, 162; on Greyball program, 100; on rideshare vs. ridehail, 28; on self-driving cars, 177; on technology use in education, 172; on turnover rates, 71, 90–91; on

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle · 18 Jun 2018 · 301pp · 85,263 words

Rides are tracked, without the user’s knowledge, and this God’s-eye view is used to stalk high-profile clients.22 A programme called Greyball is used to deny rides to government employees investigating the company’s numerous transgressions.23 But the thing that seems to bother us most about

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can glimpse modes of resistance to such powerful invisibility. Such resistance requires a technological, networked understanding: it requires turning the system’s logic against itself. Greyball, the programme Uber used to avoid government investigations, was developed when tax inspectors and police started calling in cars to their own offices and stations

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.com. 22.Kashmir Hill, ‘“God View”: Uber Allegedly Stalked Users For Party-Goers’ Viewing Pleasure’, Forbes, October 3, 2014, forbes.com. 23.Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Greyball: how Uber used secret software to dodge the law’, Guardian, March 4, 2017, theguardian.com. 24.Russell Hotten, ‘Volkswagen: The scandal explained’, BBC, December 10

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–7, 42–3 Graves, Robert, 159 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 128 gray zone, 212–4 Great Nōbi Earthquake, 145 Greenland, 57–8 Green Revolution, 53 Greyball programme, 119, 120 guardianship, 251–2 H Hankins, Thomas, 102 Haraway, Donna, 12 Harvard Mark I machine, 30 Hayek, Friedrich, 156–7 The Road to

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, 152 smoking gun, 183–4, 186 Snowden, Edward, 173–5, 178 software about, 82–3 AlphaGo, 149, 156–8 Assistant, 152 AutoAwesome, 152 DeepFace, 140 Greyball programme, 119, 120 Hippo programme, 32 How-Old.net facial recognition programme, 141 Optic Nerve programme, 174 PredPol, 144, 146 Translate, 146 Solnit, Rebecca, 11

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation

by Paris Marx · 4 Jul 2022 · 295pp · 81,861 words

then, Uber still developed tools to evade enforcement. In 2017, New York Times journalist Mike Isaac reported that Uber had been using a tool called Greyball since 2014 that identified authorities using their app and gave them a special designation. The authorities were then shown a different interface where attempts to

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hail a ride failed and the map was filled with fake cars so they could not easily identify ride-hail vehicles. Greyball was used in cities across the United States, Europe, and beyond to evade regulatory enforcement as it broke local laws in order to operate. Isaac

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explained that in Portland, Oregon, Uber had launched without permission of the city before getting banned, but it used Greyball to keep operating and stifle the authorities’ ability to shut it down. While the service was eventually normalized on a regulatory level in cities around

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Challenge, 120–1 graphite, 80 Great Depression, 22–3, 95–6 “green” economy, 77–9 Green New Deal, 225 Greens, 209 Greenwich Village, 26, 27 Greyball, 110 Greyhound, 219 gun deaths, 32 Hackett, Jim, 138 Hall, Peter, 14–5 Harvey, David, 199–200 Hermosillo, Carmen, 56 Herzberg, Elaine, 133–5 Hewlett

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–1 divisions of, 153–4, 184 driver pay for, 103–4, 107 effect on traffic of, 100 employee classification for, 111–2 founding of, 181 Greyball and, 110 growth of, 97, 105–6 industry regulation and, 101–2, 107, 110–1, 112–3, 156, 174, 185 loss of money by, 106

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex

by Yasha Levine · 6 Feb 2018 · 474pp · 130,575 words

overnight, and part in the morning. They know us intimately, even the things that we hide from those closest to us. And, as Uber’s Greyball program so clearly shows, no one escapes—not even the police. In our modern Internet ecosystem, this kind of private surveillance is the norm. It

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Almost $20 from Each US and Canadian User, Compared to under $5 at Its IPO,” Business Insider, February 1, 2017. 87. “Uber’s use of Greyball was recorded on video in late 2014, when Erich England, a code enforcement inspector in Portland, [Oregon,] tried to hail an Uber car downtown in

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vehicles. And the Uber drivers they were able to hail also quickly canceled. That was because Uber had tagged Mr. England and his colleagues—essentially Greyballing them as city officials—based on data collected from the app and in other ways. The company then served up a fake version of the

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher · 9 Oct 2017 · 223pp · 60,909 words

-bedroom apartment rents for more than $5,000 a month. About a mile southwest, at Uber’s headquarters, another scandal is brewing: a tool called “Greyball,” used to systematically mislead authorities in markets where the service was banned or under investigation, has just been reported in the New York Times.4

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-abstract/2604254. 4. Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. 5. Anders Bylund, “Why Twitter, Inc. Fell 10% in February,” Motley Fool, March 3, 2017, https://www.fool.com/investing/2017

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–142, 145 and workforce diversity, 19–20 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, 22–23 Grant, Heidi, 189 Greenshpan, Moshe, 137 Grey, Jacqui, 189 Greyball scandal, 199 Grey’s Anatomy (TV show), 47 Groeger, Lena, 35 the Hacker Way, 170–171 Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo, 187 harassment online, 59