[BearGoesChirp]

>You can’t keep them around and feed them fake intel on drug deals so they waste their time.

Any relevant case law on this? Lying to the police isn't allowed, but lying to some new guy at the bar is legal, regardless of your suspicions of who the new guy is.

[SilasX]

I don't, just basing it on the comments in the previous megathreads [1]. But any kind of prohibition on "lying to the police" is going to be bound up with the issue of the defendant's state of mind. They're guilty if they believed e.g. a particular man was a cop and were deceiving him on that basis. And it looks like that applies here and was what Uber was doing.

Believing that you're merely lying to "the new guy" or "an abusive user" isn't enough, as you note, so that part of the program (send spurious data to likely bots) wasn't illegal.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14269708

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785969