{"id":7709,"date":"2017-03-09T13:00:08","date_gmt":"2017-03-09T18:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7709"},"modified":"2017-03-15T10:46:39","modified_gmt":"2017-03-15T14:46:39","slug":"ubers-ghost-map-or-the-meaning-of-greyballing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7709","title":{"rendered":"Uber’s ghost map and the meaning of greyballing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Uber is not only a scofflaw, but, as Mike Isaac of the New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reported<\/a> last week, the company\u00a0has been running an elaborate program to deceive and evade cops\u00a0and other local officials in cities where its car service has been banned or lacks authorization\u00a0to operate. The centerpiece of the scheme\u00a0is a piece of software called Greyball, which uses a variety of data, including\u00a0credit-card records, to identify\u00a0what Uber calls<\/a> “opponents.” When an\u00a0opponent hails a car using the Uber app,\u00a0the app presents the opponent\u00a0with a fake map, filled with “ghost cars” that don’t actually exist. The\u00a0map overlays a fictional story, intended to mislead, on a representation of actual city streets. Beyond the ethical and legal questions it raises, Greyball\u00a0sheds important\u00a0light on the\u00a0digital representations of reality that we increasingly rely on to live our lives. These representations do more than mediate reality; they manufacture reality.<\/p>\n

Traditional cartographers knew that they\u00a0were creating mere representations of the world, but their goal was to achieve representational accuracy. They strove to provide map users\u00a0with an objectively true, if necessarily incomplete, rendering of reality. As\u00a0the semantician Alfred Korzybski<\/a> wrote\u00a0in his 1933 book\u00a0Science and Sanity,<\/em>\u00a0“A map\u00a0is not\u00a0the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a\u00a0similar structure\u00a0to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” There were times when mapmakers were pulled\u00a0into propaganda campaigns, made\u00a0to produce distorted\u00a0maps to trick\u00a0people for\u00a0political ends, but those episodes were exceptions to the rule. The cartographic ideal\u00a0was always to produce “correct” representations of the world that people could rely on\u00a0for navigational or educational purposes. The mapmaker served the interests of the map user.<\/p>\n

The digital maps that we see\u00a0on our phones are different. They are\u00a0created primarily for marketing rather than cartographic purposes. The interests they\u00a0ultimately serve are those of the companies that create\u00a0them\u00a0and incorporate them\u00a0into broader products or services. While a digital map can\u00a0be\u00a0useful to the user, its usefulness no longer derives from its accuracy or correctness in representing territory. In a digital map, the traditional map becomes a substrate on which a new, and fictionalized, representation of the world is presented. The digital map that appears on phones and other\u00a0screens is at least twice removed from reality. What it\u00a0tells us\u00a0is that we need to refine and extend Korzybski’s famous distinction. It is no longer enough to say that the map is not the territory. What we have to say\u00a0now is this:\u00a0the map is not the map.<\/p>\n

Uber’s ghost map provides a particularly stark example of the way a digital representation of the actual world can be manipulated, surreptitiously,\u00a0to create a digital representation of a fictional world. As Uber itself has admitted<\/a>, Greyball has been\u00a0used in many different circumstances in order\u00a0“to hide the standard city app view for individual riders, enabling Uber to show that same rider a different version.” In addition to deceiving authorities, the software has been used, the company says, for\u00a0such purposes as\u00a0“the testing of new features by employees; marketing promotions; fraud prevention; to protect our partners from physical harm; and to deter riders using the app in violation of our terms of service.” That sounds like a\u00a0pretty much\u00a0unbounded portfolio of potential uses. Have you been greyballed? It’s impossible to say.<\/p>\n

But even\u00a0Uber’s “standard city app view” presents a fictionalized picture of the world, at once useful and seductive:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Uber map is a media production. It presents\u00a0a little, animated entertainment in which you, the user, play the starring role. You are\u00a0placed at the very center of things, wherever you happen to be, and you are\u00a0surrounded by\u00a0a pantomime of oversized automobiles poised\u00a0to fulfill your\u00a0desires, to respond immediately to your beckoning. It’s hard not to feel flattered by the illusion of power\u00a0that\u00a0the Uber map grants\u00a0you. Every time you open the app, you become a miniature superhero on a city street. You send out a bat signal, and the batmobile speeds\u00a0your way. By comparison, taking a bus or a subway, or just hoofing it, feels\u00a0almost insulting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a similar way, a\u00a0Google map also sets you in a fictionalized story about a place, whether you use the map\u00a0for navigation or for searching. You are given a prominent position\u00a0on\u00a0the map, usually, again, at its very center, and around you a city personalized to your desires takes shape. Certain business establishments and landmarks are highlighted, while other ones are not. Certain blocks\u00a0are highlighted as “areas of interest<\/a>“; others are not.\u00a0Sometimes the highlights are paid for, as advertising; other times they reflect Google’s assessment of you and your preferences. You’re not allowed to know precisely why your map looks the way it does. The script is written in secret.<\/p>\n

It’s not only maps. The news and message feeds presented to you by Facebook, or Apple or Google\u00a0or Twitter,\u00a0are also stories about the world, fictional representations manufactured both to appeal to your desires and biases and to provide a compelling context for advertising. Mark Zuckerberg\u00a0may wring his\u00a0hands<\/a> over “fake news,” but fake news is to the usual\u00a0Facebook feed what the Greyball map is to the usual\u00a0Uber map: an extreme example of the norm.<\/p>\n

When I talk about “you,” I don’t really mean you. The “you” around which the map or the news feed or any other digitized\u00a0representation of the world coalesces\u00a0is itself\u00a0a representation. As John Cheney-Lippold explains in his forthcoming book We\u00a0Are Data<\/em><\/a>, companies like Facebook and Google create digital versions of their users\u00a0derived\u00a0through an algorithmic analysis of\u00a0the data they collect about their users. The companies rely on\u00a0these necessarily fictionalized representations for both technical reasons (human beings can’t be computed; to be rendered computable, you have to be turned into a digital representation) and commercial reasons (a digital representation of a person can be bought and sold).\u00a0The “you” on the Uber map or in the Facebook feed is a fake \u2014 a character in a story \u2014 but\u00a0it’s a useful and a flattering fake, so you\u00a0accept it as an accurate portrayal of yourself: an “I” for an I.<\/p>\n

Greyballing is not an aberration of the virtual\u00a0world. Greyballing\u00a0is the essence of virtuality.<\/p>\n

Images: Uber.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Uber is not only a scofflaw, but, as Mike Isaac of the New York Times\u00a0reported last week, the company\u00a0has been running an elaborate program to deceive and evade cops\u00a0and other local officials in cities where its car service has been banned or lacks authorization\u00a0to operate. The centerpiece of the scheme\u00a0is a piece of software called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7709"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7757,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7709\/revisions\/7757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}