Uber used Greyball fake app to evade police across Europe, leak reveals

theguardian.com:

It was a trick as audacious as it was ingenious. When police or regulators opened the Uber app, they would see exactly what the public saw: dozens of cars crawling around the city, waiting to be summoned.

But there was one crucial difference: these cars were fake.

Uber had built a dummy version of its own app, a secret tool known as Greyball, designed to throw regulators off the scent and help its unlicensed cab drivers evade the law.

While the existence of the tool was later revealed amid great controversy, the precise way in which it was used and the list of countries where Uber deployed it to fool the authorities, alongside other techniques – has remained a closely held secret. Uber said it stopped using the tool in 2017.

Now the Uber files, a cache of confidential documents leaked to the Guardian, can reveal how Uber monitored, outwitted and evaded police and regulators across Europe – with the full knowledge of executives including Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, who now runs the company’s food delivery service, Uber Eats.

The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian by Mark MacGann, Uber's former chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant's most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.

The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, duped police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world.

To facilitate a global investigation in