[techreporter]

Wow. The fact that this is being done in other cities, with two other competitors, and that they have names for this tactic shows that this is a company wide pattern at Uber rather than something the entire Uber New York team just thought up one day.

It is hard for something this unethical, and almost certainly illegal, to happen at several major Uber offices against at least three different competitors, and have its own name -without it being the company culture.

[eridius]

Really? This seems to be a pretty obvious tactic, I have no difficulty at all believing that the New York and Boston offices independently came up with it. And what does the number of competitors have to do with anything at all? If you're going to pull this tactic against one, you may as well pull it against all of them.

New user (green name), named "techreporter", posting an intentionally inflamatory accusation ("directive from the top") about Uber. What's your game?

[techreporter]

I am a reporter as the username suggests and quite open about it. Every comment you have posted defends Uber and not just on this issue but others as well. What's yours?

Having worked for a few years doing what I do, I have learned that people don't make up amusing names for unethical practices and share them in humorous conversations with acquaintances unless it's the company culture.

Having said that, you are right. Company culture doesn't ALWAYS come as a directive from the top, even though other comments by Uber's founder in the past point in that direction. So I have edited my comment.

[eridius]

> Every comment you have posted defends Uber and not just on this issue but others as well

Every comment on this thread. This thread about Uber. So yeah, every comment's gonna be about Uber. And as a long-term commenter and bystander with no skin in the game, I don't have to have a game. But, as you've pointed out, you're a tech reporter, so you presumably are angling for something, probably some story hook. In any case, I'm defending Uber because I think a lot of things are being said that are not fair or accurate. You'll note that I have not tried to defend the actual practice of harvesting phone numbers from Gett. I think that's pretty bad, as well as whatever the Boston office is doing with their cute names. But people in this thread are rather intent on talking about other things, such as the new years eve accident (wherein Uber behaved acceptably as far as I can tell).

As for company culture, the cute names were from the Boston office. pain_perdu did not say these names are used across the entire company. It's certainly possible, but from that one anecdote all I can say is that some people (heck, maybe even just the one person that pain_perdu knows) uses these names. There's nothing to indicate there's a company-wide culture of this sort of thing.

Although, to be honest, given what I've read about the CEO of Uber, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the names are used elsewhere. But I don't see why we need to excoriate Uber over an assumption that hasn't been verified. I prefer to assume the best and not the worst.