That struck me too. A normal company might do this, but they'd at least pretend it was meant to deter criminals or catch abusers or whatever. Instead their statement says:

"This program denies ride requests to users who are violating our terms of service — whether that’s people aiming to physically harm drivers, competitors looking to disrupt our operations, or opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers."

It's rather blatant. I assume they think that last part makes them look good and "officials" look bad, but to me it just says "we built this to avoid getting caught breaking the law."

Both things can be correct if you believe the law in question is bad. The Jefferson quote comes to mind:

"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so."

That's from Saint Augustine (famously quoted by ML King Jr in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"), not Thomas Jefferson.

This. I know this country is unique. It's a country born from rebellion to begin with.

>> law in question is bad

>> If a law is unjust

To me those seem like very different things. I'd bet Jefferson was talking about laws that severely impact people's lives (slavery, torture, things we would consider human rights breaches) and not pretty innocuous things like taxi regulations.

You'd think they would mention that the law was bad if that was their justification here.

And the word 'entrap' is disingenuous. Entrapment is used to describe situations where law enforcement induces someone to break a law they would have been otherwise unlikely to commit.

In this case, the drivers were already breaking the law (opinions on the righteousness of the law notwithstanding), and law enforcement was seeking to apprehend, not entrap.

Maybe not. That might tie their hands in court. It might leave "have the court declare the law invalid" as their only way to win. Limiting your options that way tends to be bad legal strategy (whether or not it would be the moral high ground).

Disclaimer: IANAL.

It seems to me that saying "we did this so we can violate the law without getting caught" is already an extremely bad legal strategy. If their statement was aimed at limiting their legal exposure it wouldn't have included that part at all. If it was aimed at showing that they're morally in the right, they would have said that the laws were bad. I can't see anything that justifies what they said, aside from thinking everyone sees the law the same way they do so it goes without saying.

They probably underestimated the number of people who believe that not all regulations benefit consumers necessarily.

> It also seems similar to VW's Diesel engine "Defeat Device". The future of technology will probably include ever more shady uses of programming to mislead regulators and the like.

As a FOSS enthusiast, I hope this becomes a good push to require those types of software to become FOSS.

>It also seems similar to VW's Diesel engine "Defeat Device".

I see this as the market routing around the defect that is regulation.