<story><title>Uber CEO Plays with Fire</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sgustard</author><text>&amp;gt;If it&amp;#x27;s free for you, you&amp;#x27;re the product.&lt;p&gt;So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information?&lt;p&gt;Since the answer is obviously no (and in fact, purchasing behavior is the juiciest stuff to sell, be it Comcast, Target, etc), then this tired trope is meaningless.</text></item><item><author>rosser</author><text>From their own site: &amp;quot;Unroll.Me is a &lt;i&gt;free service&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;, emphasis added.&lt;p&gt;If it&amp;#x27;s free for you, &lt;i&gt;you&amp;#x27;re&lt;/i&gt; the product.</text></item><item><author>cocktailpeanuts</author><text>Wow I think this unroll.me thing is the real scandal here.&lt;p&gt;I am an unroll.me user, but had no idea they sell user data to companies this way.&lt;p&gt;Their whole value proposition is to help people control their own privacy and now I kind of feel betrayed..</text></item><item><author>ErikAugust</author><text>Buried lede here:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;They spent much of their energy one-upping rivals like Lyft. Uber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft’s business. (Lyft, too, operates a competitive intelligence team.)&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>goflyapig</author><text>&lt;i&gt;So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;No. A statement&amp;#x27;s truth doesn&amp;#x27;t imply its inverse [1].&lt;p&gt;It simply means if a company has employees, and they&amp;#x27;re receiving paychecks, and the money is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; coming from you, then it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; coming from someone else.&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; giving them money, it doesn&amp;#x27;t mean they&amp;#x27;re not also getting money from somewhere else. But they&amp;#x27;re less likely to &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; to do that, especially if it would upset their paying customers.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Denying_the_antecedent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Denying_the_antecedent&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Uber CEO Plays with Fire</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sgustard</author><text>&amp;gt;If it&amp;#x27;s free for you, you&amp;#x27;re the product.&lt;p&gt;So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information?&lt;p&gt;Since the answer is obviously no (and in fact, purchasing behavior is the juiciest stuff to sell, be it Comcast, Target, etc), then this tired trope is meaningless.</text></item><item><author>rosser</author><text>From their own site: &amp;quot;Unroll.Me is a &lt;i&gt;free service&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;, emphasis added.&lt;p&gt;If it&amp;#x27;s free for you, &lt;i&gt;you&amp;#x27;re&lt;/i&gt; the product.</text></item><item><author>cocktailpeanuts</author><text>Wow I think this unroll.me thing is the real scandal here.&lt;p&gt;I am an unroll.me user, but had no idea they sell user data to companies this way.&lt;p&gt;Their whole value proposition is to help people control their own privacy and now I kind of feel betrayed..</text></item><item><author>ErikAugust</author><text>Buried lede here:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;They spent much of their energy one-upping rivals like Lyft. Uber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft’s business. (Lyft, too, operates a competitive intelligence team.)&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gdulli</author><text>If X then Y doesn&amp;#x27;t imply anything about not-X, but that doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it&amp;#x27;s less useful for describing X.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s moot anyway because the answer is out there publicly and no heuristic is needed to resolve it.</text></comment>