Uber continues its crusade to be the worst company on the planet, and that was even before this new news dropped about this utterly shitty ability its iOS app had.
It all came about with the help of Apple as the company allowed Uber to use an internal tool that allows them to record a user’s iPhone screen. It doesn’t matter if the app was running in the background, this little bugger could snap away without a care in the world.
This all comes from what is called an “entitlement” –a piece of code that developers can use for pretty much anything they what, it seems. You can set up push notifications, interac with Apple Pay, all sorts of things. Apple says that this “entitlement” is designed to improve memory management with regards to their Apple Watch.
But the strange thing is that researchers found the “entitlement” needs explicit permission from Apple to use, meaning that they gave it to Uber to play around with. Even worse is that researchers can’t seem to find any other apps on the App Store that use this super-special “entitlement”.
This little piece of code sounds pretty scummy, even if it wasn’t meant for snapping photos of users’ home screen’s. Uber says that the tool is no longer in use (how long was it in use?) and will be removed from the app via some sort of update.
Still, researchers and security experts are concerned with this piece of code as it could theoretically allow a hacker who manged to break in Uber’s network to quietly monitor activity on a users home screen. This would allow them to collect all sorts of personal and private information.
Uber has been in trouble before for being absolute dicks about how they function, including that software they had that allowed them to track drivers for the company and the rival Lyft. This means that this “entitlement” could, in theory, be used to spy on users who use Lyft, or another ride sharing company, to track their usage.
Look, that probably isn’t the case, and it’s probably just some old code that was left over from the original launch of the Apple Watch, but this is Uber we are talking about. They seem to continue to one-up themselves in the dick department.
As a lot of commenters online have been saying, and I agree with, Steve Jobs would never have even allowed Uber on the App Store with these sorts of privacy issues. How times have changed.
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