Uber comes under investigation in the United States. The US Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into the transportation app, accusing it of using it illegal software to avoid controls in cities where he was not licensed to run private taxi service.
The news of the investigation bounces on all the Anglo-Saxon media, which cite anonymous sources close to the dossier, but the investigators' activity is only at the beginning, so it seems that no crime hypothesis has yet been formulated.
Some weeks ago the New York Times had already talked about suspicious software. The American authorities call it "Greyball” and would allow drivers to find out if the calls are coming from police officers. Once the danger has been identified, the app would deceive the person who sent the request, making them believe that the taxi is about to arrive even if it never arrives. The software was originally designed to reject requests from users who violated the terms, but has since been exploited by drivers to bypass checks.
Uber had banned the use of "Greyball" after the scoop from the American newspaper, according to which the software was also used in some European countries, Italy included.
Previously Uber had some problems due to another program capable of track users, which continued to work even when uninstalled from the iPhone. For this reason, in early 2015 Apple had threatened to exclude Uber from its application store, the Apple Store.
