Slashdot Mirror
Uber's Terrifying 'Ghost Drivers' Are Freaking Out Passengers in China (qz.com)
Several Chinese publications are reporting that "ghost drivers" are frightening Uber passengers into paying for trips they didn't take. Passengers in Tianjin, Qingdao, Chengdu, Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou have been canceling Uber rides after seeing creepy driver profile pictures pop up in the app. Quartz reports: Passengers using the ride-hailing app in several Chinese cities have reported seeing their requests picked up by drivers with creepy profile photos of zombie faces. According to Chinese news site Sixth Tone, the point of these ghostly profiles is to scare passengers into canceling the trip, so they are fined for a few yuan (less than a dollar), which goes to the driver. Other passengers have reported seeing their rides accepted, but then their trips were "started" by the driver on the app before they even get to the car. These "ghost rides" last less than a minute, with the driver charging customers between 8 and 15 yuan (about 1 to 2 dollars) for a ride that never happened. Calls to the drivers in these cases are never picked up, according to The Paper, a state-owned media. Passengers can however eventually be reimbursed by Uber China if they lodge a complaint.
I thought one of the selling points of Uber was that customers could review the drivers, and so you knew in advance you were getting someone you could trust?
to the "ghost rides".
Modify the Uber app so that the rider has to confirm the start of the ride on their mobile device.
Reporting of "scary" profile pics should be simple as well - simple snapshot and forward - If proven - the driver takes a hit on their next 5 drives - say $1-2 per drive.
Problem solved.
Don't any decent people live over there?
No.
Or do all the decent ones simply say "screw this" and leave, because the Chinese people I meet locally are great people.
Yes.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
People find they can abuse a system for personal monetary gain, so they do.
There will be solutions to these existing abuses but I suspect that the drivers will be able to devise new ones faster than the Uber developers can mitigate against them.
They sure are enterprising.
[I say this as someone who is Chinese; irony disclaimers apply]
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Article makes it sound like they are getting spooked because of monsters or something, but they are really just deciding they don't want to ride with a weirdo.
You don't think it would be the same here if we didn't have regulations on everything?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Traditional taxi drivers don't pay for the "commercial use" of public roadways either. Unless you mean that they pay off the local politicians to maintain their hold on the market?
I sure hope they will lodge the complaint up someone's ass.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
You can cancel a driver immediately without penalty. If you get a driver you've had before and didn't like or it's a driver with a POS car or a driver with a poor rating that's your opportunity to cancel.
The ghost drivers that plague me, in a non-US location, are drivers who are faking their locations so the appear to be close but actually aren't. I think they are being ghosts for a different reason, fear that the taxi mafia in this country in cooperation with the corrupt police harass Uber drivers and in some cases attack them. Every Uber driver insists that I ride up front and if pulled over pretend the driver is just my friend driving me around.
The taxi mafia here has good reason to fear Uber, it cuts into their revenue from ripping off people with everything from lying about the fare to pulling a counterfeit currency switcheroo when you pay.
Not sure about that
Table-ized A.I.
Sorry about that; I forgot my makeup and to shave.
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah, a car without any driver won't seem like a ghost to anyone.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Hahahahahahh.
It's hard to imagine how you could be more wrong. Chinese only have deep respect for family . They have zero respect for the community around them and they treat service workers like they are less than shit. Ask any stewardess / hostess in asia.
comparable? Every time I have used uber it has always been at least 40% cheaper than a cab and a much nicer experience.
make 10 fake uber driver profiles with "scary" pictures, collect from all the fake rides you didnt do, count on cultural fear of ghosts to not get complaints.
China is full of entrepreneurs like that.
Another example: Shenzhen police started a program rewarding traffic violation recordings from dash cams with straight up cash (something like $5?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
there are tutorials on chinese social media how to make good money inciting other people to brake traffic laws.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Exactly. Nanking is another. Honor my ass. Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack. They have no honor.
Japanese honor is real, although not universally applied. The last war basically run by samurai, the Russo-Japanese war, was fought very honorably. Inside the Japanese caste system, honor in wartime is pretty much limited to warriors, and arming the lower classes has typically led to atrocities. I hope they've changed that.
Japan did not rape and pillage any part of Asia except Japan for centuries, although you could argue decades in the case of Korea and Okinawa (and while Japanese treatment of them wasn't good, I don't know if it warrants the "rape and pillage" descriptor). Japan was very isolationist until the US and Russia opened up commerce by force in the mid-1800s, and it hasn't been "centuries" since then.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I learned that Samurais were basically taught to transition the unsheathing of their swords directly into a slashing attack. For some reason, they saw that as honorable.
I found that it helped me understand Pearl Harbor from the JP view.
--
"Know your enemy" - Homer
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain