What Uber Did

Do you remember your first Uber ride? Mine was New Year’s Eve 2012; one of my best friends booked an Escalade for 10 people. At that time, the two-year-old company was mostly just a fancy online way to rent a limo. When we all jumped out of the massive luxury SUV in downtown Philadelphia, it felt like an incredibly ostentatious performance, one that I remember thinking that I would only use for special occasions. There was no way this would become a normal way of getting around a city.

Just about two years later, in late 2014, Uber’s cheaper UberX program came to the Philly region. This service looked like the smartphone-hailed rides in everyday cars we know today. Sensing a threat to taxis, the Philadelphia Parking Authority tried to crack down, banning Uber from the city and threatening to impound vehicles. But Uber had a trick up its sleeve: a program called Greyball, which used all kinds of data to identify police and city officials trying to catch drivers operating illegally and show them a different version of the app, which populated maps with fake cars that never came. They did the same thing in Portland, Oregon, that year.