How Uber Deceived Apple
The trailer for Showtime's limited series Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber is currently making waves, but more than being just another Silicon Valley-based show, it has again brought back memories of how Uber did Apple dirty with a shady 'iPhone fingerprinting' maneuver. Once the world's most valuable startup, Uber entered the Chinese market in 2013 with huge ambitions and a ton of money for expansion plans. But the dreams of dominating the lucrative Asian market were met with massive disappointment. And at one point, Uber was losing a billion dollars each year in China alone.
2016 marked Uber's exit from the market, but in that brief tenure, Uber came face-to-face with a scam that forced it to do something sketchy that Apple didn't like. Uber saw widespread fraud in markets like China, where its driver-partners bought cheap iPhones, signed up for new accounts, and booked bogus rides from those extra phones to earn incentives. So Uber started collecting unique hardware identification numbers for each iPhone and tagged them to combat the problem. And the status quo remained so even if the Uber app was deleted or the phone was factory reset. Uber did it all to contain the fraud, but Apple doesn't allow such a tactic as it violates its policies.
Related: Massive Security Hole Lets Anyone Send Emails From Uber's Official Domain
And that's when Uber tried to pull a fast one. Of course, Uber knew that pulling a device's hardware data was against Apple's policies. But rather than seeking a solution with Apple's assistance, Uber blindsided the company. To avoid detection, Uber geofenced Apple's Cupertino campus. In simple words, Uber's software team tweaked the app's code so that the act of collecting device identification data
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