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.
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.
Most people are just stupid, nothing new here.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Do you have a pointer to more on this? Naive searching doesn't seem to turn up anything for me.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously the capability to do shady shit exists.
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/