Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare
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My wife is banned for life from Uber because after she was overcharged by a driver by $80 (for a five minute ride), and after Uber denied her dispute of the fraudulent charge, she flagged the fraudulent charge with the credit card company and got refunded via that route. I don't think a human was in the loop for any step of this process on Uber's end.
There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.
https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...
Right now, it's "only" a frustration in most cases but what happens when Amazon bans you while PillPack is how you receive your meds?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/terraria-developer-c...
Really all you need is a mediocre Plan A: don't run afoul of the providers' rules. It's not hard. AWS hosts a lot of content that's even more offensive than Parler, the thing that got Parler in trouble was they weren't able or willing to act on Amazon's demand that they promptly remove content that encouraged or incited violence. So if you're running a platform that hosts content like that, or you're breaking the law or generally breaking the pretty straightforward rules, yeah, have a Plan B, C and D ready to go at a moment's notice. Most of us aren't running things that cater to people who are into political violence or other liability-causing activities so it's not a thing we need to spend a lot of time and money planning for.
Only exception to this rule would be GCP or any other company that's widely known for atrocious service and capricious, random bans.
The merchant is stuck with more than the tab. There's also a chargeback fee, which can range from around $15 to several times that depending on who they use for payment processing.
> Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally.
Sometimes it means that the customer didn't even try to resolve the dispute. At one place I worked we always gave a refund when one was requested, with no hassle. Some customers, though, would not ask. They would go straight to chargeback.
I think that because some companies make it a major hassle to get them to issue a refund, some consumers try to do a chargeback first and only call the merchant if the bank requires them to try to settle the issue directly first.
I was always under the impression that if consumers did this sort of thing too often it would end up hurting them because the CC company would start to flag their account.
Sort of an algorithmic version of "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."
Source - happened to me. Ended up relationship with both the merchant and credit card company. And have $2k less in my wallet.
Often they will side with the consumer and will refund the charges through their various policies, but they also investigate the case and will let the payment go through if there's no actual problem found. There are plenty of cases where consumers didn't even contact the merchant at all and yet still chargeback.
That is actually not true. The credit card company must follow established guidelines and pragmatically look at the available information/user agreement/contract and decide on whether there was a breach of contract. They can not blindly stick the bill to the business.
That's not even remotely true. The merchant absolutely has the ability to dispute chargebacks.
Luck has nothing to do with it. That’s bad planning. Really bad.
Drivers don't charge riders - Uber does.
> Using sensors and GPS data, RideCheck can help detect if a trip goes unusually off-course or a possible crash has occurred. If the app notices such events, we’ll check in on you and offer resources to get help.
Auto-ending rides doesn't even make sense. If the final destination pin happens to be in the middle of a highway off ramp (due to a map error) would you want the app to "autoend" the ride on the offramp (and kick the passenger out on the shoulder), or let the driver do the sensible thing, get off the ramp and pull over to a safer location to let the person off?
This case happens especially often at airports, where the passenger drop off area can literally be represented on the maps as "side of the highway" but in fact, there are traffic loops that the driver needs to navigate in order to comply with traffic rules and routing at airports.
How did this "attack" work, did the driver override the destination somehow?
For perspective, she had a similar sleazy taxi driver years ago, who she complained about to the taxi company. He was fired immediately and the taxi company offered to help my wife with going to the police if she wanted to (and offered the in-car video).
Thankfully we still have taxis locally, but the drivers have told me their numbers have dropped and Uber is winning.
I think location matters lots, the last city I lived in I avoided taxis at all costs because I found them to be more like you're saying... aggressive, clueless, dirty, etc.
> she had a similar sleazy taxi driver years ago, who she complained about to the taxi company. He was fired immediately
This actually scares me more than Uber banning your wife. I'm not saying you or your wife lied, but it's sad how just a complaint by a woman can ruin any man's life. (I'm assuming your wife didn't have any evidence and the taxi company just fired the driver due to her complaint.)
It's past time to nerf these yahoos. Civilize them. Impose tort, fair and impartial judiciary, right to appeal, property rights, and accountability & transparency.
Sometimes they get hailed as a magic wand on consumer-advocate sites, but if you issue a chargeback with your bank, you should be prepared to completely sever relations with the vendor.
"Thanks for bringing this to our attention, @TheSofaaa . We believe this is due to a technical bug, which we are actively investigating. We apologize to you and any other drivers who may be impacted, all of whom will be fully refunded."
It's kind of sad that these days the only way to get real support is to make noise on Twitter. And probably 95% of the time posts don't get that initial snowball to make noise.
I don’t have Twitter, but I have complained to companies via Facebook (which at this point I don’t notably use either, but still have an account) private messages, and have had my problem fixed efficiently after complete failure via multiple other methods of contact. (Those companies being Vodacom South Africa who kept sending me some customer’s invoices, and Uber Eats, which made a complete mess of an order in multiple ways.)
The acquaintance didn't care to do anything about it so I sent e-mails to their property management the next day, and got no response. I then shamed the property management co on their Facebook page in comments with photos of the void and that got a prompt response.
... while illegally operating at a loss without a permit to drive the competition out of the space.
No reason a taxi service couldn't offer the same experience, but you see a lot of scenarios where that's not an option.
Before Covid, I'd go to the head office in the suburbs of Chicago twice a year. The first few times, I took a taxi from the stand and watched powerlessly as the meter ticked up and up, not knowing when it would stop. With Lyft, I could at least see if it would be $25 or 65 before I agreed to summon the vehicle.
In other news, I wish Metra would go straight to and from O'hare.
My card was stolen after taking a ride so I reported it. This prevented a ride charge from going through. Uber locked my account, which then prevented me from paying.
Uber support's assistance was Kafkaesque.
They advised that I could reactivate my account by logging in and paying the balance. I told them I couldn't. Around and around we went.
So I just use Lyft now.
How's that? Drivers don't set the fare, Uber does.
The driver posted more details further down in the thread showing some of the charges: https://twitter.com/TheSofaaa/status/1399070201925312512?s=2... Ironically, the negative balance appears to be due to regulatory fees applied haphazardly. This includes a $5 surcharge from the airport and two charges from the city of Chicago.
It seems like the correct solution would be to pass those charges to the customer, not the driver. I don’t know how they came up with the idea of charging the driver.
That floor should also apply when idling.
https://twitter.com/TheSofaaa/status/1399070201925312512?s=2...
There is a missing $5 they're not explaining
Now I can't confirm this, I'm not on his account, and he hasn't posted it yet. But I would put a nickel on the other 5 bucks being paid directly to Uber. Which again, not uncommon.
Here's an example from a delivery I did the other day, I can get more screenshots if you want. But out of the 22 dollars the customer paid for the delivery, I received 5.61 before tip. The rest went to uber [1]
I am completely ignorant on how this works on the driver’s side, so I could be missing something here:
Those 22 dollars the customer paid include whatever food you were delivering, right?
Now, I’m sure the Food cost/Service cost split changes from country to country (I’m somewhere in the Euro zone)… but interpolating from those numbers, I get the feeling that Uber must be subsidizing the service very heavily.
They don’t charge that much extra money to the customer, so I wonder where the profit is coming from.
I’m having trouble conceptualizing how they are making any actual profit after expenses, and in the meantime they (and their ilk) are pushing the traditional restaurant delivery network away since they cannot compete or price nor convenience.
I don’t have a conclusion for this train of thought, just a bit of shock here in the early morning.
They're not. They aren't profitable. They have never been profitable. They admit that they would not have been profitable even without COVID last year. They do not expect to be profitable until Q4 of this year - if you remove half their costs and their assumptions hold. They do not expect to actually be profitable (even on EBITDA) for even longer.
http://techcrunch.com/2021/02/12/will-ride-hailing-profits-e...
> in the meantime they (and their ilk) are pushing the traditional restaurant delivery network away since they cannot compete or price nor convenience.
I guess if you keep setting OKRs like "5% lower support call volume" for years then at some point your reputational risk goes up because you've made it impossible to contact an actual human being.
I have never used Uber, doordash or anything like these. On purpose. Even when given free Uber eats vouchers at work (covid...). They still seem to be winning.
A bug plus shitty automated support with no human in the loop is an intentional product decision. They could have humans in the loop. They could have human support. They could make bugs like this more easily remediable. But they don't. On purpose. To the extent that their "fare review process" and the app failed. Now it's going to be fixed by some PR person. Because it's still cheaper, apparently, than the alternative design decisions.
This outcome is a result of their intentional product decisions.
One is an emergent consequence — the "banality of evil", a property of the corporation itself. The other is active malfeasance — something that's not so much even about the corporation as about an individual horrible person in a decision-making role, where the correct move for customers/employees is to boycott the decision-maker, rather than the company; and where the correct move for the company is to fire the decision-maker, and distance themselves from them as much as possible. (Unless it keeps happening with different people in the same company, at which point it becomes a thing about the company's culture.)
Companies can be evil on a structural level. But also, companies that aren't evil on a structural level, can be parasitized by evil individuals. Unless the company actively pursues hiring evil individuals, why would you hold the latter against them?
The point of companies having reputations is to predict what they'll do, and thereby trade with companies for which trade with them will predictably be positive-sum, and avoid trade with companies that would predictably be zero-sum or negative-sum.
A company itself being evil on a structural level, predicts that in the future it will do many zero- or negative-sum things, regardless of employee turnover.
A company that is not evil on a structural level, hiring one evil individual, who does an evil thing and then gets fired, doesn't predict any future evil behavior from the company.
It's what would be true for the situation outlined in the root comment of this subthread to pertain: that it was "an intentional product decision."
For that to be true, there would need to be an individual that made that decision, with the thought-process I outlined in my first comment. Such a thought-process wouldn't just be sociopathic (zero-sum), it'd be negative-sum/"evil". It would be a choice to hurt both drivers, and the corporation itself (when people inevitably find out), and oneself (when blame is inevitably pointed at them.) For what? Who knows. Evil. (Industrial sabotage, maybe.)
Obviously, like another commenter said, this wasn't an intentional product decision. (It was maybe an intentional project management decision, but one made in by no one individual.)
But that same commenter rhetorically asked why it mattered whether it was an intentional product decision or not. That's why I explained the difference. Acts of evil individuals that have parasitized good companies shouldn't reflect on those companies (once the evil individual is removed.) Acts of structural evil — acts that are generated from an algorithm the corporation is following as a whole, and would still follow if you replaced every employee ship-of-Theseus style — should reflect on the company itself.
This, of course, is an example of the latter kind of act, one that should reflect on the company itself.
But it's important to distinguish these acts from acts that are, in fact, committed by bad actors that have "infiltrated" the company. For the same reason that we distinguish "terrorism" from "domestic terrorism." The latter — domestic terrorism — can, in some ways, be "a reflection of the culture of the country." When there's a school shooting, we can ask what the country is doing wrong that leads to people like this cropping up. But the former — plain old terrorism — is not, and cannot, reflect on the country. The person who committed the act wasn't even an enculturated citizen of the country, so what would it tell us about the country?
It won't be long before we have a daily post here on HN called Killed by Algorithms, and every story will be different.
It's terrifying because it illustrates the lack of trust that the general public has in tech. Instead of "looks like someone's having a bad day at the Uber office, guess they'll fix it soon," it's a plot trialling a new form of exploitation. Two replies in, someone wants to nationalise the company. That's a lot of lost trust.
In other words, technology is bringing scale and leaving the cost of the rounding errors to the most vulnerable.
I'm not saying it's unexpected, I'm remarking on adverse market conditions that will affect most of HN.
- Some engineer will get paged, look at the incident, and eventually the root cause of the bug will be found.
- The root cause of the bug will be fixed to prevent it from happening on new trips, new fare calc tests will be added, etc.
- Engineers will identify which commit introduced the bug and which dates/trips are possible affected.
- Someone will run a batch job that recalculates fares for all of the trips that might be affected, and payments will be made to any drivers who were underpaid.
A lot of the people in the comments here are reacting negatively to the fact that support tickets are partially automated. However, there are a few things to note.
The first is that fare calculation code is very complicated, it involves lots of geofence calculations (e.g. to detect toll roads or bridges) and in some cases there are other location-dependent rules, various promotions may be running, etc. The only people at Uber who are qualified to determine whether or not there is a fare calculation bug are the engineers who actually work on fare calculation code. Sometimes there are obvious errors (like in this example), but in most cases the fare calculation bugs are subtle enough that support agents wouldn't actually be able to verify if the code is wrong. Even if the support person could tell there was an error (as in this example) the best they could do would be to escalate the issue to engineering and wait for a fare calc engineer to investigate.
Additionally, besides support tickets there are a lot of other monitoring systems that look for abnormal deviations in number of trips happening, fares, etc. If there is a major bug affecting something like fare calculation it will show up in these metrics and someone will investigate.
I don't work at Uber anymore so I don't know the specifics of how this bug was handled. But in general I would say that bugs do happen sometimes, and Uber has policies that seem reasonable (to me) for detecting the problems and correcting any erroneous payments made.
It might be a "bug' from uber's perspective. For we mortals they interfere with basic economic functions. When my grocery store overcharges me for something they can can push a fix to me within seconds. The customer service person doesnt need an engineer to see that potatoes shouldnt cost that much. And they are empowered to correct the error immediately, with cash in hand if necessary. Nobody at uber has such power.
But the OP also has a screenshot(1) of Uber's fare review saying they were in fact charged correctly. So the review process is broken as well?
^1 https://mobile.twitter.com/TheSofaaa/status/1399079166046314...
Maybe they have to use negative fares for some reason?
Something like a small positive number, while still concerning, is harder to calculate and harder to justify a critical alert for. For example, Uber does have a feature for drivers where they can type in where they are going (eg. for a personal errand) and be connected to a rider going the same direction, and the fares on those trips pay fairly small amounts of money.
I had a long trip which I updated after departing to be a short trip. After getting out of the Uber I clicked to pay a 20% tip, and it paid it on the original (much higher) amount. Worked out to be almost a 100% tip.
I called support, walked the very nice woman through what happened, she filed a bug report and reset the tip to a normal amount.
Bugs notwithstanding, if intentional, then that's a pretty scummy thing to do. Not all drivers are given the full details of the offer they are accepting (it's the norm not to have details), but some offers that drivers receive do include things like "guaranteed $X trip". So even if unintentional, someone would be getting screwed there (e.g. Uber, if they were forced to cover the difference to the driver).
The rider isn't guaranteeing a $X trip, if anyone is -- that's a contract Uber is making with the driver, and they should absolutely cover the difference. If they find themselves losing money on that, then they can and will update the guarantee message, right?
Guessing or investigating the internal negotiations between a service provider and their own service providers is not the responsibility of the customer!
No one here is arguing otherwise.
> If they find themselves losing money on that, then they can and will update the guarantee message
What is your conception of "update" here? Someone receives an offer for a given payout. The driver accepts and goes to pick up the passenger. The passenger gets into the car and then changes the destination, nullifying the entire set of conditions that were in play for the original arrangement. Does your "update" involve something magic, like a time machine?
I thought you were, actually:
> someone would be getting screwed there (e.g. Uber, if they were forced to cover the difference to the driver).
This is a little meta, but it seems weird to describe company C getting screwed if they are "forced" to cover their contracts, even while agreeing that they ought to cover their contracts.
> What is your conception of "update" here?
No time travel required; "update" meant as Uber moves into the future and makes adjustments to how they approach new agreements. If riders change destinations in such a way enough, Uber can start lowering guarantees or use language like "expected" instead of "guaranteed", or charge a floor to future riders, or both.
In the specific case of this specific ride, Uber ought to pay out the amount they guaranteed, as you agree above, but there is no obligation of the rider to determine if or how their behavior impacts contractual language between Uber and the driver.
It's not weird to take issue with mendaciousness and pass moral judgment on it. Most of the responses here take the form of an argument that says, essentially, that if something is possible and/or not illegal, then it's okay, which fundamentally recasts the context of the conversation to give that perspective a kind of leverage that it doesn't have in the original, moral context.
This is all moot regarding the specific case, of course, given the reply of the original commenter, who clarified that it was not intentional (and who agrees that it would be scummy if it were intentional). But I find it disturbing the number of people here who were willing to jump in and argue for the "nyah, nyah, I'm not touching you" take, as if that were a serious argument, i.e. in the event that it were taking place in the context they desire.
But on the topic of litigating the point both figuratively and literally, legislatures and courts, not to mention private businesses, do have the power to say, essentially, "We see what you're doing. Knock that shit off." E.g., a law that addresses unfair practices by laying out that something can be a cause for action not only if a person makes an untrue statement of material fact, but also if they fail to state "a material fact necessary to make other statements made not misleading". The responses here are pretty devoid of any kind of indicator of an awareness of this, and instead come off as My First Attempt to Exploit a Legal Loophole.
> No time travel required; "update" meant
Thanks for clearing this up.
> If riders change destinations in such a way enough, Uber can start lowering guarantees or
... or charging those riders a fee that happens to correspond with the delta between the original and the new destination, or firing the rider.
If someone lives in such a place, Uber shouldn’t be allowed to incentivize one trip over another based on destination, so if a passenger circumvents any such incentives, the ethical problem really is not with the passenger.
Any guarantees to the driver are an issue for the company to deal with.
If intentional, lying about the ultimate destination and then changing it after pickup is a scummy thing to do.
The details are kind of irrelevant so I had left them out. I was going home from the airport, with a stop on the way to drop off a friend. I had a 10am call I needed to take in private, and the pickup and first stop took too long, so I re-routed my final destination to a co-working space nearby to be able to take the call.
I didn’t feel bad at all because the new drop-off point is a hugely busy spot for Uber. Driver already had another fare on queue. The original destination was out in the sticks and driver would have had to come back to the city for their next fare. It definitely worked out better for the driver with the change!
I haven't got data, and I'm not an expert in this field, but it feels to me like the latter is what's happening. If this is the case, I wonder what is causing it, and how it can be remediated. I don't remember so many people being depressed when I was young.
Otherwise throw the management in jail.
They might not be the most decent "being", but the fact that this post is trending bothers me