Uber prices seem to increase when phone battery is low
twitter.com
twitter.com
They point out that these rideshare apps can detect what your phone's battery % is, and the TOS says they may access that info.
To test the allegation, they used two phones with different battery levels and compared the prices (at the same time, & with same destination), but did not find pricing differences.
They reached out to Uber who made a statement:
> Uber does not use personalized pricing nor is battery life a factor in determining fares. Pricing is optimized for the network as a whole, not any one individual rider or driver. [1]
Here is the reference Uber provided which describes how prices are set, and how other marketplace functionality works. [2]
[1] https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/verify/verify-does-uber-ch...
I think this is an obvious case of someone attributing market-rate fluctuations to the only metric they can personally see with their own eyes: Their battery level. They can’t see Uber’s network of available drivers and other factors that influence the rate, so they overweight the only data point they can see.
This is similar to the phenomenon where people have a verbal discussion about a topic and then coincidentally see an ad for that product in an app later. When we see 10s or 100s of ads per day, it’s inevitable they we’ll randomly see an ad for something we’ve been discussing. Yet some people see these coincidences and wrongly conclude that their phones are listening to their every word, using AI to parse it out (without draining their battery), and then sending those keywords to an ad server for targeting. It has been debunked many times over but it’s still a commonly held belief that all of your phone apps are listening to your conversations.
It can be difficult to convince some people that coincidences are really just coincidences. Especially in this era where Big Tech has an incredible evil reputation in the journalism and media we consume.
Most people are just stupid, nothing new here.
This is the same phenomenon as driving with other people and suddenly asking out loud "Hey let's find such or such type of car". Whatever the make (within reason), you'll probably start finding out a bunch of them. That's because you start paying attention, of course, not because there's suddenly a surge of people driving them at the exact time you're looking for them.
If someone could come up with proof of this, they'd probably be set for life in one way or another. Perhaps they could monetize the information by collaborating with short-sellers, or simply kickstart a career using the massive media attention.
It's possible to do business without scanning your customer's faces, tracing their contacts, selling details of their transactions to aggregators, etc ... where does the line get drawn?
And that doesn't even address data that is "accidentally" collected.
Humans are good at pattern matching to notice trends but non-technical people always tend to blame something higher up in the stack, like the device in their hand. Or jump to something more malicious by the all-knowing powerful big tech companies.
He was making a comment about wrongly thinking causation from the situation
Surge price for Mon office commute, triple than normal?
The post goes on to talk about how and why many changes and behaviours can go unnoticed, and I think the whole episode disproves the parent posters initial point.
1. Audio streaming is expensive and requires lots of storage, even if ephemeral, to be done widely.
2. Natural Language Parsing and transcription is fraught with errors. Go read your visual voicemail sometime.
This, to me, is enough to close the book on this theory.
What is entirely possible is this:
Two individuals have a discussion. This discussion results is one of the individuals searching for a product in a store or online (some stores, like a famous hardware store) can detect proximity to certain items. If they can correlate interest based on a linked (or brokered) profile then they have ascertained that person A is engaged with said item. Targeted advertising is such that it is possible for you to be shown items based on your own interests, but it's also possible you're part of a larger network. Again, all a hypothesis and one hard to prove at that.
VW during dieselgate had the ability to detect the testbench. I might build this here if I were concerned about getting caught. Uber built a remote kill switch for their tax docs in canada, this isn't unprecedented for them.
also nobody denies location is used to personalize pricing, so wtf are they talking about. customizing the user's experience based on location is 100% personalization?
the problem here is less the accusation than the total lack of price transparency + accountability on these markets
Do you have a pointer to more on this? Naive searching doesn't seem to turn up anything for me.
Why would anyone be surprised that location is a factor for a ride service? Location and availability of drivers are basically the two main inputs.
The service wouldn’t make much sense if they didn’t consider location of your start and finish points when pricing rides. This isn’t some nefarious scheme.
I don't like it either but it's kind of silly to spend most of your professional life trying to help companies maximize revenue then get upset when as a customer you can see that you're helping companies maximize revenue.
n=2 is only very slightly better than n=1, and still nothing close to a "debunking". Neither the original claim in the tweet nor the alleged debunking provide anything substantial, and nobody should be claiming anything until they do something at least semi-rigorous (n>10, control group, actual sampling of Uber prices and then statistical analysis).
I couldn't do this, as none of the people in my friend circle have the Uber app, but I'm not in SV - seems like there should be a few HN denizens who could pull off something like this relatively easily and put the question to rest.
Couldn't agree more - right now all we have is very weak and inconclusive evidence. If someone is able to confirm this allegation, it would make for a big story and potential lawsuit, especially since Uber has been publicly and categorically denying the claim for at least 5 years.
step 2) plug phone into charger
step 3) wait until surge pricing ends
Seems easy enough to explain.
Obviously the capability to do shady shit exists.
That is different than what is being alleged here, where it is different battery levels on one phone.
Apples & oranges.
The proper test would have been to fake the battery level with debug settings.
Realistically I think it'd be pretty difficult to test this from the outside and get definitive answers. If they implemented something this scummy they'd surely implement some safeguards to make it harder to prove they're doing it, similar to the VW Diesel Emissions scandal.
iOS: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidevice/162...
Android: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/BatteryMa...
(Seems like many others do too!)
However, in this case, the phone has a battery meter and provides its own low battery warnings. I imagine you could have more sophisticated battery use tracking apps than Apple provides but, in general, not sure why you would legitimately need this info.
I think this results in a much better experience for everyone on the call.
Let's use the location services example.
So some communications app asks me for permission. Do I grant it? Well, as an unsophisticated user, maybe it wants this info to optimize the quality of my connection in some way. So maybe I ought to give it permission?
Instead, maybe it's going to broadcast my coordinates to everyone else on the call which is not OK in general.
Then, depending on what your app does, you can act on a few things to reduce, or not, battery usage when it gets below some thresholds: reduce GPS precision, remove some animations, limit framerate, make less networking requests, ... It could be limited by the system, but it would probably not be as wise regarding to what is important in the context of one app vs another.
We have numerous cases where we adapt to the battery level so the user can get the best of our apps and not empty their battery while they still need it.
Delaying maintenance can help too, and that also helps reduce occurances of power failed during complex data operation and the resulting difficulties of resuming from a partial operation when the state may not have been fully persisted at any point, because filesystems and abrupt power loss don't tend to go so well together.
There's a lot of reasons why an app might want to know the battery status, and most of them are for the user's benefit.
For what it’s worth, I was able to simulate prices ranges of $50-130 for the same ride with a few friends when we were all standing next to each other. Any new phone shows a low price first, if you search again the price goes up nearly 50%.
So simulating the evidence here might be hard based on other algorithms Uber uses
it's not. You need help from an insider to figure out and/or force the accounts that you're using to be opted in to the same A/B tests experiments that surely are used to check the impact of a change like using battery information to determine fares.
Stated as a rule, price discrimination becomes unlawful under federal antitrust law only when it threatens to undermine competitive processes in an affected market. I.e. offering a lower price to one party who then goes on to outcompete the other party who you charge a higher price.
Also the US tends to leave a lot more to the market and companies policies are more defined by the legal consequences more than the laws that prevent them to operate in certain manners in the first place.
It would be far too easy for people to confirm that it was happening, and the PR hit - even to Uber - would be way more damaging than any financial benefit they would get from implementing this.
But this is a cultural flaw that so many companies make. It’s good to be smarter than others. Life is a competitive resource fight sometimes. But you have to turn off that mindset with customers 100% to be successful in the long-term with them. The customer in the limit is always right. And it’s so much harder to regain customer trust once it’s lost.
I find a LOT more concerning the allegations regarding racism and charging blacks more -- and down that chain there is a pic of two phones side-by-side with one black and one white hand, and prices of $57.80 vs $32.58 for the same ride [1], along with other mentions of the same phenomena in the thread. Another one [2] showed $48.91 vs $33.67, but only screenshots. Obviously it is possible that this is somehow manipulated, but, this kind of "personalization" is definitely possible.
What is almost more surprising is that Uber evidently doesn't detect these tests and ensure that two quotes to the same destination from the same location at the same minute aren't shown the same price. If they want to "personalize" according to race, battery level, or whatever, you'd think they'd at least be as good as VW at avoiding scrutiny (after all, Uber is supposedly a 'tech' company, vs VW being merely a car company).
[1] https://twitter.com/_Adam_Bomb_/status/1427007434166579210 [2] https://twitter.com/tmhaem/status/1427344296965918735
"True accounting of the last quarter has Uber losing 38 cents on every dollar it took in." [0]
Which is ironic, as Uber sold their self-driving unit and doesn’t have skin in that game anymore.
If somebody wants to prove it though, they should take a video of the whole process, preferably using 1 phone and 1 account, and show it happening 4-5 times in a row within the space of an hour, and that would be definitive proof.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2016/05/25/uber-lo...
While this does great things for Uber's short term revenue, it will absolutely destroy it long-term. If the drive to the restaurant is only $10, but the ride back is $40, people will remember this and just drive themselves the next time.
Are you sure this isn't confounded by riding into and out of dense or commercial areas?
Uber haven't just used flowery language to evade the question, they've denied in the strongest possible terms:
> It is categorically not the case that the battery level on your phone affects the price of a fare
Hey YC. Are you proud of your progeny?
When MBAs say "don't leave money on the table" everybody else should hear "the MBAs are going to gouge us at every possible opportunity".