Image Credit... Minh Uong/The New York Times

In the real world, your personal life is a private space. But in tech, your personal data is a ripe resource for businesses to harvest in their own interests.

That was the broad takeaway from last week’s New York Times profile on Uber, the car-summoning service, and its chief executive, Travis Kalanick. Among other revelations, the report illuminated that to stay competitive, Uber bought information about its main American ride-hailing competitor, Lyft, from Unroll.me, a free email digest service.

How did Unroll.me get data about Lyft? While people could use the service free of charge to unsubscribe from marketing emails, Unroll.me made money by scanning the contents of its users’ inboxes and selling anonymized data, information that did not have individuals’ names attached to it (in this case, emailed Lyft receipts), to other companies, including marketers. Many consumers found Unroll.me’s practices misleading.

In addition, Uber was involved in some deception of its own: It participated in fingerprinting, a process in which iPhones were tagged with permanent identities that were detectable even after the Uber app was erased from the devices. The practice violated Apple’s terms of service, which could have resulted in Uber’s being banned from the App Store. Uber eventually revised the app to remove the fingerprinting code.