We learned yesterday that Tim Cook almost pulled Uber from the App Store over the way it was tracking iPhones and tricking Apple engineers. Uber had seemingly found a way to ‘fingerprint’ individual iPhones even after the app was removed, and had taken steps to try to hide this behavior from Apple – one of many questionable business practices the ride hailing firm has made in recent years.
Mr. Kalanick told his engineers to “geofence” Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., a way to digitally identify people reviewing Uber’s software in a specific location. Uber would then obfuscate its code from people within that geofenced area.
The original NYT piece suggested that Uber was somehow able to track iPhones even after they had been erased, but well-connected John Guber has come up with what seems like a more probable description of what the company was and wasn’t doing …
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