Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

What England didn’t know was that Uber’s general managers, engineers, and security professionals had developed a sophisticated system, perfected over months, designed to help every city strike team—including the one in Portland—identify would-be regulators, surveil them, and secretly prohibit them from ordering and catching Ubers by deploying a line of code in the app.

Behind the scenes, Uber was hardly innocent. Recruiting ex-CIA, NSA, and FBI employees, the company had amassed a high-functioning corporate espionage force. Uber security personnel spied on government officials, looked deep into their digital lives, and at times followed them to their houses.

But most of all, it is a story about how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong, and a cautionary tale that ends in spectacular disaster.

The entire “X to the x” celebration cost Uber more than $25 million in cash—more than twice the amount of Uber’s Series A round of venture capital funding.

engineer’s idea was to trick Apple by using a technique called “geofencing,” using the GPS and IP address data from the phone to tell Uber where the user was located. A “geofence” acts much like it sounds; if the user is within a specific geographic radius, the app would perform a certain way. In Uber’s case, if the Uber app was used within the Bay Area or near Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, it wouldn’t run the InAuth “library” of code, which asked for the personal data needed to fingerprint phones. What that Uber engineer assumed—incorrectly, as it turned out—was that all of Apple’s App Store code reviewers were located in Cupertino and the San Francisco Bay Area. Eventually, an Apple reviewer who wasn’t based in California stumbled upon the InAuth code library. Uber’s ruse was up.