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Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

So Uber updates the app, requires the user to take a photo of their seat in the car when they exit the vehicle, gets the driver to acknowledge the picture in order to close out the transaction.

Dunno whats so hard about this?

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How often does this happen? How about Uber eat the cost if driver and rider don’t agree on the facts. If a driver reports statistically more denied vomit, cut zhim off from any benefits. Isn’t this how, eg, other types of fraud prevention work?

I dunno why the app can't just be updated to make this smooth.

Not for every ride, but for spills/stains: require proof of these kinds of incidents to be recorded as a video (or series of pictures) within the app, including exterior & license plate of the registered car. Log timestamp and GPS data during recording. Could cut fraud substantially just like that.

Then again, these incidents are probably only occurring on something like 0.05% of rides, so this may not really be the top priority to fix.

Uber GPS is complete garbage. Most drivers don't use it, as a rider I don't depend on it. I assume it would just use your phone's API, but apparently they managed to add a variable that significantly degraded it.

Funny you should mention that. They wrote an article on it: https://eng.uber.com/rethinking-gps/

I expect they already do this, and also have a system for cutting off suspected fraudulent passengers. And it probably works pretty well (they have some smart statisticians there, and the right incentives), but it's statistically based and every so often they have a false positive and cut off an honest customer or an honest driver. It would be unacceptable for a government body, or a utility with a government-granted monopoly, to do this without an appeals process, but it doesn't sound so bad for a private company that has competition.

The problem is that Uber doesn't care. I've had a driver say they picked me up, and I can see them driving away on the app while I'm standing on the sidewalk. I cancelled the trip and Uber still charged me for a partial trip even though my phone was reporting I wasn't in the car.

It was on the door. Or back of the passenger seat. Now you got to take like 2-3 photos every-time you exit. Super hassle.

Small price to pay for a smooth ride. I dunno, a lot of this reeks of entitlement. There's a liability to using someone else's possessions to increase ones quality of life: maintaining it in good order. Seems obvious to me: I'll take a pic/small video of entering and exiting the vehicle. Quality win, all around.

It doesn't sound like you've thought about this too well. This add serious friction to the experience Uber is trying to provide with their service.

Not to mention the fact that now driver and passenger are taking photos, presumably with people in them, and sending them to Uber.

I def don’t want random photos of me sent to Uber!

You take a picture of an empty seat.

You sit in that seat, and complete your ride.

You get out of the car, take another picture of the empty seat, and off you go.

Those pictures of the seats before/after condition don't have any personal details in them. No humans. And they're only shared with Uber for verification in cases where claims are made.

So, I don't see the problem.

I dunno, there is already friction: rating the experience.

This just makes the ratings honest.

Strange reaction from the downvote crew: okay, lets just live with fraud then. Its not like technological solutions to fraudulence are un-intersting, or?

> Its not like technological solutions to fraudulence are un-intersting, or?

What you're proposing, however, isn't a technological solution, at least not primarily. It's a solution based in modified human behavior.

A technological solution would be something closer to requiring full-time multi-camera video surveillance of each ride (as was recently on HN with the driver in Missouri live streaming to Twitch). Of course, it would raise all sorts of issues.

What you are proposing is personal irresponsibility.

But I propose that this is just your desire for personal irresponsibility.

As a user, I'd be quite happy to take a before/after picture of the car seat to ensure that both myself, and the driver, are satisfied as to the state of things during my ride. I see absolutely no issue with this - other than the fact that I have to take responsibility for the seat and the condition, no matter what.

But you seem to propose that riders shouldn't be held responsible for the condition of the car seat after they've used it. I don't think that's particularly ethical, nor great, nor does it improve the quality of service as a whole for all of Ubers riders.

No. If 99.9% of rides don't involve this kind of problem, the additional time people (users + drivers) are unnecessarily spending taking and approving pictures is going to exceed the costs from incidents like this.

That, and it's degraded UX and it'll drive a few percent of users to a competitor.

To be fair, after reading about this, I might have to start taking photos of the interior of my uber after a trip - and not rating for a number of days so that if this happens, I can give a 1 star rating. Too many of those and the driver gets kicked off the platform.

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