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Uber Knows Exactly When You'll Pay Surge Pricing (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Uber has figured out exactly when you are more likely to pay double or triple the cost of your ride: when your phone battery is low. Uber's head of economic research, Keith Chen, recently told NPR on an episode of The Hidden Brain podcast that people are willing to accept up to 9.9 times surge pricing if their phones are about to go dead. Data about user batteries is collected because the app uses that information to know when to switch into low-power mode. The idea being: If you really need to get where you're going, you'll pay just about anything (or at least 9.9 times anything) to ensure you're getting a ride home and won't be stranded. A person with a more fully charged device has time to wait and see if the surge pricing goes down.The company insists that it won't use this information against you.
A company is promising they wont take advantage of a way to charge you 10x more for their service?
Is there a way to turn off the battery monitoring on their app by any chance?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At least in the US, exploiting that particular style of price optimization quite often breaks the law:
Price gouging is a pejorative term referring to when a seller spikes the prices of goods, services or commodities to a level much higher than is considered reasonable or fair, and is considered exploitative, potentially to an unethical extent.
It doesn't need it and it's YOUR private, personal confidential information that poor software design let Uber steal.
Battery state is now considered private, personal confidential information also? Hey, my battery is at 78% right now, what are you going to do with that information?
This has nothing to do with poor software design. Any application should be notified when the phone is entering a low power state, or a power saving state, so that the application can disable certain high-power features if the programmers decided to add that feature. Maybe Uber doesn't need a constant GPS feed until you're actually ordering, for example, but it's nice to have that position information if your battery is fine.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I would argue NO app needs to know the level of my battery.
this is meta data. should I have to explain that to a smart guy like you?
if I'm powered from battery or ac, that is meta data. it means other things. add it up.
yes, its private and yes, its WRONG to glean that because the os allows it. the os is a piece of shit anyway and that info should not be leaked to apps.
yes, we live in a world where we now need to think and rethink about every bit of info and how it can (and will) be used against us.
this is our info and its being used against us. how is that not a privacy issue, when they used priv'd info to gain an advantage over me?
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
"And why do you think they're going through the effort to keep the prices low?"
To wipe out the competition and then raise prices when there's no more competition. Pretty much what every good capitalist wants to do.
The only competition Uber and Lyft they have at the low end of price spectrum is each other. Of course, they need each other in the same way Intel needs AMD - to demonstrate to regulators that they aren't a monopoly. The competition they need to wipe out is taxis and other TNCs (transportation network company) that pay fair wages and follow the laws. Wiping out taxis is pretty easy, since there have been structural issues with the taxi business for decades. Wiping out the other TNCs is going to be a little harder since the new services are demonstrating that you can run a TNC that follows the law and pays its drivers a reasonable wage.
As Austin will likely demonstrate, the race to the bottom in compliance and wages being run by Uber and Lyft is probably not the real race to provide alternatives to taxis. Business that respect their drivers, communities, and passengers will emerge as the winners here.
-Chris