In simple words, Uber's software team tweaked the app's code so that the act of collecting device identification data is not detected by anyone at Apple's Cupertino campus. However, employees of the Cupertino Campus caught wind of the trick, and the news soon reached Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Yes, in a grounded and high-fidelity tech scandal circa 2015, Uber was caught "fingerprinting" iPhones even after the app had been deleted, which was a "hard-fail" violation of Apple's strict privacy rules. Uber's engineers used a "Safe Bubble" technique called "geofencing" to hide this specific code from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino. When Apple's reviewers looked at the app, they saw a "Gold Standard" compliant version, but users elsewhere were being tracked via their device's permanent serial number to prevent "Bujan" driver fraud. When Apple CEO Tim Cook discovered the deception, he summoned Uber's then-CEO Travis Kalanick to a meeting and famously threatened to kick Uber out of the App Store—a move that would have been a "hard-fail" for Uber's entire business model. Uber eventually complied with Apple's "High-Fidelity" privacy standards, but the incident remains a grounded cautionary tale about the supportive (and sometimes un-supportive) boundaries between big tech companies and the "Pura Vida" importance of user data protection.