<story><title>Uber Using Driver Phones as a Backup Datacenter</title><url>http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/9/21/uber-goes-unconventional-using-driver-phones-as-a-backup-dat.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lemevi</author><text>&amp;gt; Have to assume driver phones can be compromised which means the data must be made tamper proof. So all the data is encrypted on the phone.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In the background the Replication Service encrypts the data and sends it to the Messaging Service.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The Messenger Service sends the backup to the phone.&lt;p&gt;As long as the phone can&amp;#x27;t ever read the encrypted data this is probably secure, but shifting costs onto the driver through using their bandwidth to store encrypted backup blobs seems unethical. The uber app on the phone isn&amp;#x27;t using this data to the benefit of the user, it can&amp;#x27;t as it is encrypted.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think you should use a person&amp;#x27;s device for anything other than serving that person. This is the kind of thing though I would totally expect from Uber. Based on what the media has reported in the past, the whole company&amp;#x27;s culture seems toxic and dishonest from top to bottom.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aquark</author><text>But the driver is served by this -- the driver wants the Uber platform to be scalable, available and ensure the &amp;#x27;successfully customer experience&amp;#x27; the article refers to, so that they can continue to get paid for providing the rides.&lt;p&gt;Now, if Uber were offering a free &amp;#x27;lol cats apps&amp;#x27; on the app store that surreptitiously ran this protocol in the background of unsuspecting  users I think it would be a different case, but running technology that supports the goal of the main app doesn&amp;#x27;t feel out of bounds to me.</text></comment>
<story><title>Uber Using Driver Phones as a Backup Datacenter</title><url>http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/9/21/uber-goes-unconventional-using-driver-phones-as-a-backup-dat.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lemevi</author><text>&amp;gt; Have to assume driver phones can be compromised which means the data must be made tamper proof. So all the data is encrypted on the phone.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In the background the Replication Service encrypts the data and sends it to the Messaging Service.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The Messenger Service sends the backup to the phone.&lt;p&gt;As long as the phone can&amp;#x27;t ever read the encrypted data this is probably secure, but shifting costs onto the driver through using their bandwidth to store encrypted backup blobs seems unethical. The uber app on the phone isn&amp;#x27;t using this data to the benefit of the user, it can&amp;#x27;t as it is encrypted.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think you should use a person&amp;#x27;s device for anything other than serving that person. This is the kind of thing though I would totally expect from Uber. Based on what the media has reported in the past, the whole company&amp;#x27;s culture seems toxic and dishonest from top to bottom.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>detaro</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think you should use a person&amp;#x27;s device for anything other than serving that person. &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I might have missed something to the contrary, but to me the article only describes how they use a drivers phone to store information about the trips he is making. Which the phone is involved in anyways.&lt;p&gt;Similar to storing stuff in the session cookie of a web app.</text></comment>