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

Re:Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tel... by gregdoesit on Monday December 19, 2022 @09:01AM (#34052099)
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-...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tel... by Tepix on Monday December 19, 2022 @09:31AM (#34052433)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tel... by le_vision on Monday December 19, 2022 @10:12AM (#34052964)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tel... by sebastien_b on Monday December 19, 2022 @11:15AM (#34053776)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tel... by treme on Monday December 19, 2022 @09:07AM (#34052157)
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
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tel... by gregdoesit on Monday December 19, 2022 @09:11AM (#34052200)
@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).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tel... by zoklet-enjoyer on Monday December 19, 2022 @09:46AM (#34052612)
Maybe his wife doesn't need Uber and it's not a big deal. I haven't used Uber since 2018
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tel... by fxtentacle on Monday December 19, 2022 @11:16AM (#34053796)
... 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...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tel... by bell-cot on Monday December 19, 2022 @12:02PM (#34054450)
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;
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tel... by fxtentacle on Monday December 19, 2022 @12:47PM (#34055049)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]