Apple CEO Tim Cook once personally told Uber CEO Travis Kalanick that the Uber app violated Apple's privacy rules, and threatened to remove Uber from Apple's App Store, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
The issue in the reported early-2015 meeting was that Uber had a system to identify iPhones after they had been wiped and the Uber app had been deleted — something Uber was doing to combat driver fraud in China.
Apple didn't like that, and believed it violated its privacy policy for the App Store. “So, I’ve heard you’ve been breaking some of our rules,” Cook reportedly told Kalanick.
If Apple were to stop carrying the Uber app, the multi-billion dollar startup would lose access to millions of its most valuable customers.
In fact, Uber went so far as to write software that ensured that anyone accessing Uber from Apple's headquarters would see a different version of the app without the bits of code that tracked iPhones after they had been wiped, a practice called "geofencing."
But Apple engineers were able to spot that something wasn't right with the Uber app at Apple headquarters, and escalated the issue, which led to the meeting between Kalanick and Cook, according to the Times.
Kalanick was reportedly "shaken" by the meeting with Cook, but the relationship between the two men and companies seems fine today. Cook and Kalanick were spotted mugging for the camera together at last year's Met Ball, for example, and the Uber app is still available on Apple's App Store.
An Uber spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement:
“We absolutely do not track individual users or their location if they’ve deleted the app. As the New York Times story notes towards the very end, this is a typical way to prevent fraudsters from loading Uber onto a stolen phone, putting in a stolen credit card, taking an expensive ride and then wiping the phone—over and over again. Similar techniques are also used for detecting and blocking suspicious logins to protect our users' accounts. Being able to recognize known bad actors when they try to get back onto our network is an important security measure for both Uber and our users.”
The entire profile of Travis Kalanick by the New York Times' Mike Issac is absolutely worth a read.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o8HSoqWeq6Oeu7S1w56pZ5ufonyivM%2BlnGablaR6tbXMZpqop5tiwam%2BxJqrnqaVmXq1vsCvoKxlm5a5orrInKJmp6aav27BwZ6prGWRpb1utc1maWlpZWJ%2FcX2WZms%3D