“Heaven and Hell” were just the beginning. Those programs fell under the umbrella of “competitive intelligence”—a friendlier phrase than corporate surveillance—which was shortened to an even more genial acronym, COIN. Everyone in the Valley had a version of COIN, in one way or another. The most widely used form involved scraping competitor data from websites, apps, and other publicly available repositories. “Scraping” was computer-speak for automating the collection of information through written programs and coded scripts. Uber’s most useful tool scraped information on pricing changes within
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