Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tell me why | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tell me why

107 pointsfigassis122 comments

Until 2019, I used uber everytime I traveled abroad. Then one day, suddenly I login and it logs me out, says my account is blocked. There was no way for me to reach support or figure out why. We've been using my wife's account since then. I'm just account to travel again, for the first time since 2019, and tried to login to uber, still blocked. I fill the support form, and get an email saying they won't send my request to a support rep until I verify my email. So I click the link and verify.

One day later I get an email from a rep saying "I'm contacting them from my second uber account". I had no idea you could have 2 accounts with same email. And if that is the case, it's clearly an accident and I have no idea which account they refer to. And they won't help, no way to reach a human. I don't get how a ride hailing company thinks is't cool to behave like a bank. Any tips on how I can resolve this?

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If it makes you feel any better: the same thing happened to my wife's account. Ironic that I used to work at Uber for ~4 years. Still, there's no way for me to resolve this for me unless I would escalate to someone working at Uber, bypassing customer support - which I'm not doing as it's a lot of work, a lot of annoying people I don't know and it might still not work. Customer support won't fix it, and there's no other way to resolve this.

It all goes down to either an ML system making a decision, or a flag was added to your account by some other if-then-else rule. When I was inside Uber, I could escalate tickets, internally, but this is no longer an option.

I wrote a longer summary on why such banning happens [1] and why - sadly - as a customer, we cannot do anything about it, until Big Tech prioritizes sorting out these edge cases, or there's regulation passed for them to do so.

And if you think Lyft is better: The New York Times ran an article Help! I Was Banned From Lyft and No One Will Tell Me Why [2] where they heavily quoted everything I wrote about why Uber - and Big Tech customer support, in general - works like they do. Lyft is pretty much the same.

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/scaling-customer-support/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/travel/tripped-up-banned-...

... and this is why I'm so glad that the EU is seriously planning an AI law which will grant consumers the right to appeal against an AI decision and request a human to explain the decision.

And if you use an AI for high-stakes decisions and you can't explain why it decided a certain way, you'll get sued into the ground similar to how the GDPR made it conveniently easy to force international megacorps to delete your data and stop spamming you.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...

IANAL...but how does an "AI" law help, if (say) Uber is blocking accounts based on something far too simple to call an "AI"?

   if( ( Coefficient1*RiskFactor1 + Coefficient2*RiskFactor2 + ... ) / ProfitPotential3 ) > CutoffNumber )
      BanAccount = true;

It's still an automated decision, so I would assume the new law to grant you a right to discuss this with a human who will explain what the risk factors were.

What a terrible company with terrible processes. I'm glad i stayed away from them. On the other hand taking advantage of that sweet investor money would have been something.

I would argue, it's not just Uber.

Any big tech company that deals with millions of customers has the same problem. Automated banning processes and automated "customer support" which mean... good luck.

I would agree with this.

Our work Adsense account got suspended with no reason given. Tried emailing or contacting anyone, no luck whatsoever. After 1 month we finally just gave up and created a new account (we do have a business to run, contrary to Google’s beliefs).

I think there should be a law that requires minimum response times when any form of money is exchanged for services, with mandatory access to an ombudsman to resolve ongoing issues/conflicts.

do you have a good reason to not reach out to your network to help your wife? seems odd to not help your SO over something rather helpful for quality of life

@treme most of my former team no longer works at Uber so I don't have direct contacts. Both of us can keep using the app, sharing an account. I am also not a fan of using my network when it's the system that is broken. I might be able to sort this by annoying people working at Uber I don't even know, but it's not a good use of my time, and even then it might not work (when I got similar escalations inside Uber, about a third of them went anywhere).

Maybe his wife doesn't need Uber and it's not a big deal. I haven't used Uber since 2018

Uber has turned into garbage and I’ve stopped using them. Ironically they’ve increasingly become the transport option with a terrible customer experience, which is what they set out to change in the first place.

The final straw is when I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup. When I finally had enough I canceled the ride and then was charged a “cancelation charge” for canceling. The fact that I only canceled after multiple drivers canceled on ME leaving me waiting for 30 minutes was lost on Uber. Since then I’ve sent all my business elsewhere. Per the OP trying to get a human at Uber to apply basic logic to a situation is essentially impossible.

I enabled 2FA on my account and then lost my phone and couldn't find where I saved the backup codes. I tried to contact their support to see what my options were but that was completely useless. Bots and canned responses. No humans whatsoever. After many, many emails I finally got (what I think) was an actual human to reply and all they sent me was their support article on how to change my password. I tried to explain why that doesn't work but they had no idea what I was talking about and they just sent me the same support article again. Uber accounts are tied to your phone number, so I pretty much lost access to Uber completely unless I feel like changing my phone number. Maybe I'll try my old Grand Central/Google Voice number but I doubt that will work since they probably think it's a bot number.

I bet if I include words like "attack" or "sexual assault" in the email then I'll get past their first-line bot response filter. But I don't care about it that much. Fuck 'em.

In any case, I use Lyft exclusively now. Which is fine because I've found that pretty much every Uber driver is also a Lyft driver.

Yeah, I knew this whole space was a race to the bottom the first time when a driver turned up with two phones with one running Uber and the other Lyft. When I asked them how they choose they just said which ever wants to fight harder for their business today and pay them the most. The drivers have zero loyalty to these companies.

Which is exactly how much loyalty the drivers owe the companies!

Wait, who is it a race to the bottom for?

The drivers were sold that they are contractors who make their own hours and don't have a boss.

It makes perfect sense that they are trying to get the best rate, anything else would be leaving money on the table right?

>The drivers were sold that they are contractors who make their own hours and don't have a boss.

Which was total BS from the start - when they do choose to work, they’re told (by a boss) when/where they do their work. Hardly “own hours and own boss”.

Oh, I completely agree. Whenever I look at the *-share economy, it looks like the idea is "We take the dollar and share the pennies with you".

This is exactly what contractors are supposed to do. The whole point of contracting is that it is a market for labor. The only bad part of the story is that the guy needed two phones, he should have been able to do it all on a single phone.

>> The drivers have zero loyalty to these companies.

Good for them. As the saying goes in boxing - if you want loyalty, buy a dog.

How is this a bad thing?

Then again, in case of 2FA maybe you wouldn't want there to exist ways around it, or someone could impersonate you to get your credentials?

nah. We live in the real world where people make mistakes and need help to fix them. I would be fine with some kind of a KYC process to recover the account, but they have no such thing. Or I wasn't able to get to it at least.

Your credit card company is the entity you can expect to apply basic logic.

In the short term, that logic will be to refund your money to keep your annual spend, but not to bother Uber. In the long term, this could raise the fees Uber pays for credit card services.

Long before Uber, a JAX airport auto rental was improperly tacking an $8 fee onto every "paid in full" Hotwire reservation. This can add up over a year. When challenged, they lied and claimed it was an upgrade. American Express of course made no effort to protest this, they just refunded my $8. Not very satisfying, but still my best course of action.

A credit card chargeback should be used as the last resort, and for good reason: many service providers will permanently suspend your account if you do one.

There's typically a thread or two per year where some poor sap gets double charged by Google or similar company, uses a chargeback and then gets their entire account suspended. Poof, all your mails are now permanently gone.

So yeah, only do it if you're OK with never using Uber again.

Uber drivers want to make more money. Uber wants to be profitable. It turns out the two may not be reconcilable. The cancellation behavior you noticed is a direct result of this. The way it works is that Uber is trying to force drivers to accept rides if they’re available. There are many rides drivers do not want, usually because they can’t actually be delivered profitably at Uber’s published price. What the drivers really want are the premium rides, but Uber will send them plenty of chaff to go along with that wheat. So the drivers game the system and cancel after accepting.

There are scenarios where this is highly predictable. Airports at rush hour will inevitably get this behavior in most places I fly. (Note: I only use Uber internationally, domestically I use Lyft. I do not know how Uber works within the US anymore.)

The solution, if you want to use it, is to pay for the up-market rides. You magically will suddenly stop being canceled. Then Uber goes back to being the way it used to work (the drivers are also more pleasant when they’re actually making money to shuffle you from point A to point B). Or you can do what I’ve taken to doing now that I’m traveling again, and try public transit. Since I mostly travel to major European cities these days, this is usually quite reasonable, and often faster than a car anyway.

> I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup

I had that exact same experience. Some of them even messaged me encouraging me to please cancel for them so that they would not incur a penalty. (I refused.)

I've been using yellow cabs in cities again. Simple & straightforward.

I haven't used Uber much since the early days when it was honestly a bit of a revelation. Before that your options for getting home from central London after nightclubs closed were terrible (usually standing in a queue for some dodgy taxi company where half the time it was an unlicenced taxi).

It worked really well for me in those early years. To the point I'd take an Uber home from work if the weather sucked or I was otherwise not in the mood to walk.

The only time I ever had an issue was trying to take a taxi to an airport hotel from the train station nearby. Apparently all of the taxis were waiting in a queue at the airport and noone was going to lose their place in the queue over a 5 minute journey.

>they’ve increasingly become the transport option with a terrible customer experience, which is what they set out to change in the first place.

That's not what they set out to change at all. Their goal from the very beginning was exclusively to change who gets all the money for terrible customer service.

Fair enough :-)

I had the same thing happen in my city. After I had been waiting for 20-30 minutes, I was attacked by a stranger and left unconscious and bloody in a nearby alleyway. After explaining this to Uber, they informed me that the 'no-show' fee I was charged would stand. It wasn't their fault I was attacked, but I will never use Uber again.

> I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup. When I finally had enough I canceled the ride and then was charged a “cancelation charge” for canceling.

I've had the exact some scenario with Bolt.

I think they started to allow drivers to cancel rides so they can claim they are not employees. So now drivers cancel the rides that are no very profitable.

In Australia they have become more expensive than alternatives. It's better to grab a traditional cab these days.

I wonder if this is a symptom of there being too few competitors in most markets.

In a very competitive market, having a long-term customer is an incredibly valuable thing. You should want to invest heavily in customer support so that you can avoid losing customers.

But in a market with only two competitors (Lyft and Uber) there isn't a need. There's only one other competitor, so how much do you really need to invest in customer support? Spend that money on marketing to steal customers from the other competitor- you'll get a better ROI in terms of number of customers.

The same applies to Google of course. What are you going to do, use Bing? Switch your gmail account to someone else? I guess you could get an iPhone instead of Android?

As a counter-example, Amazon had to win customer trust early on because nobody trusted online shopping. They invested heavily in customer support. They kept investing in it, as a means to keep customers from switching to new competitors. For a long time, that helped them stay on top.

But in the end, we need more diverse markets with more competitors. And at this point, the government ought to be stepping in to make that happen.

> Any tips on how I can resolve this?

Use Lyft instead and don't support a company that treats you like garbage.

I did the same when they charged me $9.99 USD and then refunded me $9.99 CAD. (CAD is worth ~27% less at the moment)

Came here to past just that. Also since the advent of Uber, local taxi services got a fire lit under them, and now many have their own app with up front pricing and route planning.

Here in London (obviously YMMV) black cabs have an app, but they're also still routinely doing things like pretending their card machine isn't working. Not saying that people should user Uber / Lyft etc, just that all private transport is a bit shady.

> pretending their card machine isn't working

"Bummer, I don't carry cash" tends to fix this quickly.

Not really. Some drivers will insist on driving you to an ATM.

At which point you file a complaint with TFL.

I've had that experience of "broken credit card machine" in multiple countries including US, France, and Italy. That's why I use Uber when I can. I don't want to feel kidnapped by a taxi driver who insists in driving to an ATM.

This happened to me, but the ATM wasn't working. Suddenly their credit card machine started working again.

Do you think that Lyft would not do this?

OP wrote:

> I don't get how a ride hailing company thinks [it's] cool to behave like a bank.

Rather than "bank," they could have written "global corporation" without sacrificing accuracy. When you have billions of customers, each worth a small amount, problems with fraud that cost a much larger amount, and an algorithmic moderation toolset... the logical, financially-obvious outcome is treating individual customers who are inadvertently harmed by that automatic moderation like garbage.

I actually had to uninstall Lyft after they kept sending me marketing push notifications that couldn't be turned off. It's not reasonable to disable notifications for Lyft, so the whole app had to go.

Uber does this as well. I only install it when I need a ride somewhere.

on android there's usually categories of notifications

Agreed, it's not like we don't have alternatives.

UberEATS didn't honor a buy 1 get 1 free promo and I ditched them (after I spoke with customer service) along with Uber ride.

We don't always have alternatives. Lyft is not present in a lot of places, a lot of places don't have good apps for taxis, etc.

These aggregators are a plague.

Due to their scale and attacks from abusers, they won't disclose anything if you contact support.

So you're just abandoned on the wayside...

Perhaps just go back to a traditional taxi then? It might cost more, but if you need support, you call their number and get a real person rather than a robot that's sole job is to get you to give up.

> It might cost more, but if you need support, you call their number and get a real person rather than a robot that's sole job is to get you to give up.

It's been a few years, but my last experience with a taxi dispatcher was them saying "well, what am I supposed to do about it?" when mine was 45 minutes late for my pre-scheduled ride to the airport. Reaching a human isn't a guarantee of non-robotic support.

Lyft has unfortunately no where near the global presence that Uber has. In fact, I'm not even sure they operate anywhere outside of North America.

Indeed they don't.

https://www.lyft.com/rider/cities

This makes me think that if it works one way, it might also work the other way. I.e. find a way to pay them in CAD and then refund in USD.

Daily warning that not everyone lives in the USA and sometimes there are no alternatives to Uber in certain countries.

How did people move around in those countries before 2010?

By taxis that got deprecated by Uber because taxi costs more, and you are not certain which price will it be in the end, and for convenience. Now if you want to get a car to get you somewhere you have to get an Uber; otherwise you will be waiting for quite a while. It is not a reality I like, but it is a reality in some countries.

How did people move around in those countries before 2010?

Taxis. But those were put out of business by Uber.

Former Uber engineer - had friend who got "randomly" banned in ~2016/17 and I investigated.

Sadly, it's likely the same story as back then, and same story as you see with other large tech companies - false positive fraud detection algo.

This doesn't help you much, but just wanted to try and help explain the "why".

They probably don't even know why :) Some machine learning decided to ban him.

Edit: "Abroad" relative to what though? If to Europe from US, there are other options than Uber. May vary depending on country. Bolt should be present here and there. The Lyft service that someone mentioned doesn't seem to be available in Europe.

In what world do software companies let AI make decisions in a black box without spitting out logs or some code that maps to the action it made?

My job involves working with the Facebook API, and it's very clear they have various "computer says no" systems they can't debug effectively. There are tickets in their developer support system that've been around for years now with stuff like "posts with a dollar sign to a Facebook Group fail in the API" (which is almost certainly a bug with their "should this be a Marketplace listing?" detector).

Every month or so we get a notification from their bug system that there's an "update on your ticket", which turns out to be an automated "there's no update, sorry" notification.

Ours.

Perhaps you have missed all the posts here on HN where some company or other locks up someone's account without the user being told why and without the possibility of having a human review the ban?

Most are Google but they're not the only guilty party.

Is this legal in Europe? https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

>Yes, individuals should not be subject to a decision that is based solely on automated processing (such as algorithms) and that is legally binding or which significantly affects them.

I suppose being banned from Uber can very well be something that significantly affects you, especially if you live in a city where it's the primary form of taxi-like transport.

In practice, legality depends on someone willing to investigate the offence and enforce the law. When it comes to the GDPR, that's not happening even for the biggest, blatant offences (Google and Facebook are still around despite breaching the regulation for 4+ years), so do you really think someone is going to bother investigating this?

It depends, enforcementtracker.com shows that the authorities have been willing to chase after a rather diverse mix of violators.

But indeed, leaving GDPR enforcement to government authorities was a huge mistake. Anyone should be able to sue over GDPR violations impacting them.

The deniability of decision leading to action is a feature, not a bug. Especially as the world tries to move to automated killing devices as weapons of war.

Pretty much everywhere

Because you don't need to.

The next big push will be audible AI.

>Because you don't need to.

But GDPR indeed requires it for many kinds of decisionmaking, no?

No, it requires the ability to appeal an automated decision to a human.

(Who will likely consult the computer and say no again, a month or two later.)

This EU commission page suggests that a human review should be conducted before a client is informed of the decision, not only in the case of an appeal.

https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

"and that is legally binding or which significantly affects them" is important there, and only going to apply to some decisions.

It sounds like banning an Uber account would qualify

> In addition, processing can significantly affect an individual if it influences their personal circumstances, their behaviour or their choices (for example an automatic processing may lead to the refusal of an online credit application).

Audible means: you can query the AI ( or see the logs) and see why it came to the conclusion.

Right now, I don't know any AI system doing that.

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34063521

> In practice, legality depends on someone willing to investigate the offence and enforce the law. When it comes to the GDPR, that's not happening even for the biggest, blatant offences (Google and Facebook are still around despite breaching the regulation for 4+ years), so do you really think someone is going to bother investigating this?

Since when have tech companies cared about pesky little issues like laws and regulations?

Two bad experiences with Uber support - I don't use them unless there is no other option. I have an Uber account with my email id(gmail) with a '.' in it. It so happened that someone else created a driver account with the same email-id without the '.' in it. I am not sure how that account got verified by Uber, I never clicked any link to verify that account. So I keep getting emails of that driver's account, tried talking to an Uber support person, they don't understand the problem with '.' and simply shut me out saying if this is not your account we are not talking to you about it.

I get this ALL. THE. TIME.

I usually take over & lock / delete the account or alert their fraud department, along with the Google Answers link about how the dots work.

LinkedIn scraper spam without the dot? "Hi thanks for wanting to hire me, I don't reward scrapers"

Ironically enough I didn't put in this dot-removal logic in the app I maintain at work. For one, it makes creating test accounts really easy - the second is that most of our customers have their own domain, so @gmail is very rare.

I've had something like this with a Spanish-language Netflix account. Kept getting email in Spanish for it. Tried contacting Netflix in lots of ways, and nothing worked. Eventually, I used a password reset to take control of the account and just disabled it. I assume whoever created the account didn't have access to it.

Can't you just reset the password on account without the dot it in? Lock them out.

That's true, but that's really on google.

anecdote:

I got an email one day to me (first and last name) for the receipt of a small medical purchase that definitely wasn't mine. At first I thought was getting scammed.

Then I realized, the only thing that was correct was my first and last name. Address, last 4 of PAN, state, everything was incorrect.

Upon opening the eml directly I realized it was actually sent to firstnamelastname@gmail.com, whereas my email address is firstname.lastname@gmail.com (note the period).

Did some googling, there was in fact someone with my first and last name in the area of the address.

I called the phone number given, it was indeed a man with the same first and last name. Explained what happened and forwarded the email.

So while, yes, Uber absolutely should be doing better, so should google.

I'm guessing someone is going to tell me that's correct behavior according to the spec, and if so, the spec is wrong, full stop. Those are not the same email addresses.

But, they are the same, because google treats them as the same?

Are you saying that there is someone registered with exactly the same account name on gmail, except with an added period?

yes, I can't speak to the specific algorithm google uses for account lookup, but if an email comes in for firstnamelastname@gmail.com and it doesn't exist but firstname.lastname@gmail.com DOES exist, google will send it to that mailbox.

Yes, but google also prevents someone with registering an account with the same name, and ignores periods when doing that check. But your post implied that they actually had the same email address, with the periods stripped?

So, it seems likely the other person still wrote their email address down wrong - but it wasn’t the periods that they got wrong. If this is the case, then I can’t see how there is anything google could do to fix this situation.

FWIW I have <first initial><surname>@gmail.com and get loads of email intended for <first initial><their middle initial><surname>@gmail.com, apparently they just keep writing it wrong.

The service that sent that receipt was one of those 3rd party services for small vendors. You go to a bakery and they are able to magically email you a receipt, that sort of thing.

So I very much doubt the person put their email in incorrectly, but I understand your point.

The exact mechanics of how it happened I don't know, but I very much disagree with firstname.lastname@gmail.com and firstnamelastname@gmail.com resolving to the same address.

the "algorithm" in this case is very simple. Periods are stripped entirely.

m.y.n.a.m.e@gmail.com and myname@gmail.com and my.name@gmail.com all canonicalize to the same account.

My partner was "shadow banned" from Uber for what we suspect was a payments related reason. No matter what card she put in Uber, she would see "payment declined", even when the card was well below the limit, and she would not see any attempted transaction on the bank website. Uber customer support was non-existent.

She eventually got a new phone, made a new account, and gave them a CC number they'd never seen before. Things just magically started working.

This keeps me awake at night. Where I live, Uber is the only ride service, but my account is in a sketchy limbo that is still working for now. Years ago I wanted to drive for one night to try it out, so now my account is stuck as a “partner.” I can’t change my phone number or anything in the app because it tells me to go to the partner site. I can’t log into that for some reason, and I can’t reset my password because it claims my personal info (SSN) is already in use by another account. Of course support is robots that tell me to do the obvious.

One day I’m sure my account is going to get roboflagged as an anomaly and I’ll be screwed on the side of the road.

Public service announcement:

SSN's are not unique, and were never intended to be. They are assigned using an allocation scheme that ensures people of similar age will not have the same SSN, and that allows localities to independently allocate them at birth without creating collisions.

I don't think any of your claims are true.

https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomization.html

SSNs are not unique for a whole lot of reasons. https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your...

OK, so the one claim about not being unique has some truth to it. Yes, they are mis-used (either mistakenly or maliciously) to some extent by people they were not assigned to, but they were never intended to be non-unique, which was the primary claim I was responding to, along with the other ones.

[edit] There is a related claim (not made above) that is correct, which is SSNs were never intended to be a secret.

The link you provided explains the algorithm they used to use to assign SSNs, and gives enough information to let you reason that SSNs were not unique prior to the change.

In the past, it was actually illegal to demand someone's SSN for non-official use. The social security administration seems to encourage SSN harvesting now. I'm not sure what changed. Probably scope creep / financial incentives leading to increasing privacy violations.

I've barely used any ride sharing apps but I definitely did not cough up my SSN. Can you just start over with a new account and no SSN, maybe a new CC?

I had to fill out a W-9 (I think) when I signed up to drive. Since my account is stuck as a “partner” it wants me to submit information to recover access to it, even though my “rider” access via my phone number works.

I think we've reached the point where we need legislation to force companies to:

- Clearly explain all bans and suspensions (which exact rule you broke, which evidence do they have, who made the call)

- Provide a clear resolution/complain mechanism with escalation outside the company

Apparently competition is not enough for this.

Maybe because you have "ass" as part of your nickname and perhaps email address too?

If your username there is similar to your username here, that seems likely; "fig" and "ass" together tripped the Scunthorpe filter, but not right away.

It blocked me in 2018, because I went on extended business trip to US, and tried to convert my personal account to a business one (to get proper invoces for expensing). My activity became suspicious, and now Uber wants scan of my credit card and government-issued ID, which I'm not willing to give it.

Good luck. I have a similar problem, and filling out a support request doesn't even result in an acknowledgement email and nobody can tell me why. I did find a live support option once by accident and I've been looking for that again, but am unable to retrace my steps to get that back open. I didn't get much further with that either, they didn't seem interested in helping.

I've just moved over to Lyft. Not worth my time to fight with Uber when there are other options.

This happened to me with Airbnb. Despite contacting friends who worked at the company to unban me, I always always re-banned.

I resolved it by using a different email address. Something about my primary email was on Airbnb’s shit list and there was apparently no easy way to resolve it. Never had a single issue with the new email.

The same thing happened to me with Tinder. I guess… because they would never tell me why I was banned, even though my profile is boring and tame and so are all my chats.

Could dual sim be an easy solution? (i.e. sign up to uber with a secondary phone number). I don't know if this would work. Quick explainer of dual sim on iPhone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lnEQLVOsH4

Same thing happened to me years ago when I traveled to India. Used my american uber account there but got flagged for fraud and suspended. I was told at the time that it was done by an automated system and cannot be reversed.

Haven't used uber ever since. Thank god lyft exists.

Either don't use it...

Or, if you do want to use it, sign up again with a new email address, phone number and payment card. As a bonus, you probably get your first ride free. I sign up again for every ride for exactly this reason. Great for privacy too.

They had even blocked my account and its pretty shit. They don't even give any reason.One of many reasons I vote for decentralization.

TBF Uber is now crap, I order UberXL and it was a run down, piece of shit 90s Ford Explorer with a broken shock absorber.

Another Uber, the driver tried to convert me to some hardcore conspiracy shit.

Uber is trash now, Lyft is slightly better, at least everytime I’ve taken Lyft the cars have been relatively nice.

The only time I take them is with XLs to get to the airport though so I’m really only comparing the SUVs

Customer service costs scale linearly with the number of users. This is not a mode of business supported by tech-companies.

Slightly off-topic: Are there countries that have such good local public transit that I don't have to depend on Uber?

Lots. Large parts of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan looks manageable too, etc. It all depends on destination and area of course, but in countries with decent public transport any part where you can't get to by bus or train or ferry tends to have decent local taxi companies to fill in the gaps.

I base my travel around public transport almost exclusively. I've never even used Uber or any other service like that. (And obviously, I don't need a car (or ride hailing service) living in a medium sized city in the Netherlands either.)

I might be wrong, but you will surely get their attention by having a lawyer writing them about your case. You might not solve anything, but at least someone in power will read about your case.

The idea that this is normalized as the way a bank behaves is profoundly scary.

Are you European? Could ask them to delete all your data/account, and then they’d have to find it and probably figure it out.

This happened to me too. I opened a new account with a different email address, credit card and phone number (used google voice).

I think the interesting question is, is uber aware of it? Like okay, that happens the false positive rate is under 0.001% percent and we try to improve. Maybe if we add this "edge case" the true positive rate would go worse. Then I can undestand it.

On the other hand if they are not investigating and do not try to improve, then it is really bad.

ok, but why post here and why now after all these years?

Because when it happened the first time, I was too busy having a vacation that I did not want to bother myself dealing with Uber, and just thought, must be a mistake, I'll sort it out soon. Didn't get to travel again until now.

It's in the post:

> for the first time since 2019, and tried to login to uber, still blocked

I read that, it didn't answer what I sought to know.

Presumably because the last bit just happened.

With all those rules around regulation and GDPR that hardly anyone actually benefits, why aren't there rules that prevent banning users from platforms without a good excuse?

GDPR is not enforced strongly enough to matter.

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