Early last year, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was called to Apple's head office to be rapped over the knuckles by Apple CEO Tim Cook, a new report reveals.
The iPhone manufacturer had found out the e-hailing taxi service had contravened its App Store rules and was tracking users even after they had deleted the app.
This encounter was revealed in a profile published by The New York Times on Sunday.
Uber had been collecting hardware data, such as serial numbers, on almost every iPhone that installed the app.
Reportedly, to circumvent Apple finding out about it, Kalanick told his engineers to not collect the data from anyone at Apple's headquarters. However, the team was still able to discover the trickery and this was when Cook told Kalanick his app would be pulled from the Apple App Store if it were not rectified.
Uber told Cook it was not using the data for nefarious purposes, but rather to combat driver fraud. Drivers on the platform would sign-up for various Uber accounts using the same iPhone and then request fake rides from themselves.
This would inflate their numbers and revenue, as the driver still earns a small amount of money when a passenger cancels their request after a certain amount of time.
An Uber spokesperson told Ars Technica the company is now using fingerprinting methods to track fraud, but this time it complies with Apple's terms and conditions.
"I can't share all the details about the signals we use or it gives fraudsters a heads-up on circumventing those controls, but Apple's policy does not prohibit device fingerprinting completely. It merely stipulates which identifiers can be collected from the device, which are used by our team in combination with non-device signals to detect fraudulent activity and suspicious logins.
"The meeting referenced in the NYT story happened before we hired our first chief security officer in mid-2015 and centralised all security activity into a single organisation. Under this leadership, we've been compliant with Apple's policy for quite some time," the spokesperson said.
In March, Kalanick said the firm is looking for a chief operating officer to help run the company, which has been battered by a series of damning revelations about its culture and business tactics.
Reuters reported that a series of events (including reports of sexual harassment) has brought Uber's practices and Kalanick's leadership into doubt, fuelling customer backlash and raising investor concern.
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