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Comment by criticaltinker | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical but, one source says this was "debunked" in Sep 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yyJiz4K9gY

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...

[2] https://www.uber.com/us/en/marketplace/

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If Uber was tripling prices when the battery level fell below 20% (like this Tweet) then more people would have noticed it by now.

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.

This is similar to the incredibly common meme that Instagram and other social media apps are secretly using the microphone to spy on you for advertising purposes.

Most people are just stupid, nothing new here.

And yet after a whatsapp call I'll be advertised things I'd never mentioned by any other medium. It is striking.

Nah. You think that you have never mentioned or searched those things, but in reality you're just starting to recognize them as soon as your call ends because your brain has been primed to pay more attention.

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.

WhatsApp call are end-to-end encrypted. Do you think they aren’t? (All, only yours?)

There are other ways to accomplish that without a microphone. Hint: there was another party on your call other than yourself, and their behavior (on the web for example, where you may be linked as friends on the same social media sites) can provide signals you are unaware of, that suggest things about their friends including you.

This should be easy to prove by reverse engineering the WhatsApp application.

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.

I don't think it's that people are stupid. Blindly trusting these apps to not take advantage or mishandle their access to personal data is also naive.

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.

People may not be stupid but they are extremely gullible and they also love hating on some perceived bad guy or corporation.

I was in this exact situation last weekend. 3% battery, lost a couple drivers to cancellation (going Marina to Marin), and thought I was done for. Would’ve paid any price, but what they were quoting me felt incredibly reasonable the entire time, and around bar closing time on a Friday, no less. ($60 to San Anselmo)

Almost sounds like you’re trying to get stranded in the city. Out at bar close and needing a ride to San Anselmo? Good luck next time.

I' in SA too.

Low battery is correlated to lateness of time of day, which is correlated to barhoppers needing cabs and driver unavailability.

Time of day is also correlated with time of day, why would Uber use the battery level?

I think you're agreeing with OP, namely that it's not battery usage that is causing the price hike, it's time of day that's causing it and the battery life is correlated.

I've heard so many people say they think iPhones are 'listening to them talk' because they'll talk about some product then go on Instagram/Google and see an advertisement for that type of product. Obviously they were just targeted really well and missed some other data connection.

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.

they don't. I think you are just misunderstanding the comment. The poster was saying people might assume its related to battery level since it is correlated to time of day, which does have an effect on prices.

He was making a comment about wrongly thinking causation from the situation

The screenshot indicates it was around 5PM, and on Mon (based upon the tweet).

Surge price for Mon office commute, triple than normal?

A thread from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28204948

A thread about Dungeon crawl eh? Maybe you meant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28217897

No, that's what I meant to link. Melee damage was accidentally doubled for 2 whole weeks and not and nobody noticed. Those players play extremely close attention to stats and such.

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.

My theory is different from yours but only slightly. Companies have no use for recording your voice.

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.

If they did it even with a 0.001% chance of it happening that would still be enough to earn them extra profit. They aren't going to be stupid enough to do it every single time.

I mean they were greyballing city employees in some cities -- I don't know if that's 'personal pricing' but it's certainly an adversarial personalization feature

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

> Uber built a remote kill switch for their tax docs in canada, this isn't unprecedented for them.

Do you have a pointer to more on this? Naive searching doesn't seem to turn up anything for me.

it's their 'ripley' system

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/11/uber-deve...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-12/uber-l...

Thanks!

> also nobody denies location is used to personalize pricing

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.

There is an undercurrent online, even on HN, of something generally approaching "price discrimination is totally fine so long as it results me paying a lower price." As soon as more "fair" price discrimination schemes end up with the user paying 2, 3, 4x more than others (or than what they've paid previously) it's a great social injustice.

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.

if you look at the message I'm replying to you'll see uber is denying personalizing prices

> To test the allegation, they used two phones with different battery levels

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.

> 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)

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.

Then how do you explain this? https://twitter.com/eightyknots/status/1428251471087169536

"taken 10 minutes apart" - a rigorous proof of the claim would need to evaluate pricing at the same moment in time for two different battery percentages.

Unfortunately, the technology to instantly charge your phone within milliseconds does not exist yet.

step 1) wait for surge pricing

step 2) plug phone into charger

step 3) wait until surge pricing ends

Seems easy enough to explain.

It isn't beneath them to use dark patterns, they already do that in real life with their wages/practices.

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.

> they used two phones

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.

Wasn’t Uber the company that would manipulate pricing if you were looking for a ride in front of the local government taxing authority?

Obviously the capability to do shady shit exists.

Thanks for your excellent comment!

And it was at that time they got the idea to actually do it! :D

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