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posted by
on Sunday February 12 2017, @08:28AM
from the can't-get-caught-if-you're-not-cheating dept.
from the can't-get-caught-if-you're-not-cheating dept.
A French businessman is suing Uber for 45 million euros, for destroying his marriage.
It seems that he installed the Uber app on his wife's phone, used it once, and then logged out. Later, when using the app on his own phone to arrange tête-à-têtes with his mistress, his wife received Uber notifications, and figured out what was going on. Uber attributes this to a bug in their software specifically related to an older version of iOS.
What do soylentils think generally about the liability of tech companies for bugs in their software? Some say liability is needed to force some responsibility; others say it would be the death of the software industry as we know it.
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Everything you know is wrong!
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Sunday February 12 2017, @12:51PM
Some say liability is needed to force some responsibility; others say it would be the death of the software industry as we know it.
Yes, and yes. Like most things in life, this is a balance that has to be struck, not an either/or choice.
There is already some liability - AFAIK all those liability waivers you click through don't actually offer much defence. After all, Uber are being sued for this, and will face some costs (or, at least, bad publicity) even if the case is thrown out.
In this case, it does look like Uber may have quite a serious security flaw if they're sending push notifications detailing a user's whereabouts to a device on the basis that, once upon a time, the user logged in from this device. No sympathy for this guy, who seems to think that Uber should foot the entire bill for his inability to keep things in his trousers, but imagine, for instance, someone finding out the hard way that their travel itinerary was being sent to their abusive ex-partner...
And, Uber, the answer isn't to fix the specific bug, it isn't 'point out the checkbox that the user missed' it is don't send bloody offline push notifications in the first place unless the user specifically enables them*. I've already got two perfectly good push notification systems - email and text messaging - I don't need a parallel notification system for every bloody app I install.
(* specifically enables them as in going to the menu and choosing "Enable push messages" or suchlike, not by misreading a click-through box that popped up when I was trying to do something else)