This is why Apple’s Tim Cook wanted to delete Uber from the App Store

Apple CEO Tim Cook had reportedly warned Uber CEO Travis Kalanick as it was secretly recording data from the owner’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted.

According to the New York Times, Travis Kalanick visited Apple’s headquarters in early 2015 to meet with Tim Cook as the company was not following the App Store guidelines and practiced a process called ‘fingerprinting’  which violated Apple’s privacy. The report notes, “For months, Mr Kalanick had pulled a fast one on Apple by directing his employees to help camouflage the ride-hailing app from Apple’s engineers. The reason? So Apple would not find out that Uber had been secretly identifying and tagging iPhones even after its app had been deleted and the devices erased — a fraud detection maneuver that violated Apple’s privacy guidelines.”

Cook reportedly stated, “So, I’ve heard you’ve been breaking some of our rules.” He said to stop the ‘trickery’ or Uber’s app would be kicked out of Apple’s App Store. This can be quite stressful for Uber as the company would lose access to millions of iPhone customers.

However, in conversation with TechCrunch, an Uber spokesperson said that it still uses a form of device fingerprinting in order to detect fraudulent behavior. If a device has been associated with fraud in the past, a new sign-up from that device should raise a red flag. Uber suggested that the practice of fingerprinting was modified to comply with Apple’s rules rather than discontinued altogether.