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Nobody Likes Uber Anymore, Recent Reviews and Ratings On App Store Suggest (qz.com)

Posted by msmash on from the commotion dept.

Alison Griswold, writing for Quartz: The public is not happy with Uber. Incensed by allegations of sexism and harassment in the company's corporate halls, people are once again #deleting Uber, while one-star ratings and withering critiques of its service are piling up in Apple's iOS App Store. From Jan. 1 through Feb. 22, Uber accumulated 4,479 one-star reviews from US users in the iOS App Store, according to data from analytics firm App Annie (the highest possible rating is five stars). Several of the most recent reviews cite the horrifying and explosive account of sexual harassment published by former Uber engineer Susan Fowler over the weekend. "Was harassed and scammed by an Uber driver for two hours in the car," reviewer "Jorwl" wrote on Feb. 20. But far more reviewers have another gripe: Uber's apparent disregard for user privacy. The monthly volume of one-star ratings for Uber in the App Store first spiked last November, after the company redesigned its app and infringed on user privacy by eliminating an iOS setting that let users grant Uber access to their location only "while using" the app. Users are now forced to choose between letting Uber track their location "always" and "never".

1 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Right by doom · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    CS geeks like to ask CS trivia questions to make sure no one with the "wrong" background gets in the door. ("No, I don't know how to write a binary sort algorithm off of the top of my head, I use existing code for solved problems.")

    Affinity biases abound.

    This Google-inflicted problem is a huge improvement over the old Microsoft dominated days when "the cult of the puzzle" loomed ("A priest, a vampire and Richard Stallman all need to cross a river, but they have only one wind surfer, the vampire can not ride with the priest, and the priest is a Windows user, so...")

    The only job interview-style that I actually like is "Get out your laptop, here, can you write code to do this?"

    Even that has drawbacks though-- you could exclude a competent programmer that doesn't own a laptop, for whatever reason...