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Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

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Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#41

Post by fnord77 »

pixl97 wrote: post #38
malwarebytess wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it terrifying? It's accurate. A bug plus shitty automated support with no human in the loop is an intentional product decision. They could have humans in the loop. They could have human support. They could make bugs like this more easily remediable. But they don't. On purpose. To the extent that their "fare review process" and the app failed. Now it's going to be fixed by some PR person. Because it's still che…

I believe the term we are looking for is 'terrifying accurate'. It won't be long before we have a daily post here on HN called Killed by Algorithms, and every story will be different.

I'll start it off

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#42

Post by mullingitover »

mdoms wrote: post #33
mullingitover wrote: post #23

Uber's handling of edge cases is...something. My wife is banned for life from Uber because after she was overcharged by a driver by $80 (for a five minute ride), and after Uber denied her dispute of the fraudulent charge, she flagged the fraudulent charge with the credit card company and got refunded via that route. I don't think a human was in the loop for any step of this process on Uber's end.

> she was overcharged by a driver Drivers don't charge riders - Uber does.

When she got out of the Uber, the driver continued driving for a long time before "ending" the ride, and the tab ran the entire time which racked up extra charges.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#43

Post by sp332 »

duncan-donuts wrote: post #39
savant_penguin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that one of the most important parts of the billing system of a billion dollar corporation lacks >0 check is really bizarre Maybe they have to use negative fares for some reason?

Negative fares for what tho? Taxis have a minimum for just getting in the car. Seems like Uber could figure out some minimum so that the driver isn’t being charged to work. Is hostile design with complete disregard for all users.

Yeah I think that usually is how it works. The question is how many of these mistakes have happened.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#44

Post by tharkun__ »

Finnucane wrote: post #30
encryptluks2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaining will do nothing. They will continue this behavior until they're forced to change through regulation.

Not using them is better than complaining.

Maybe it's better than complaining. Is it better than regulation?

I have never used Uber, doordash or anything like these. On purpose. Even when given free Uber eats vouchers at work (covid...). They still seem to be winning.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#45

Post by derefr »

Analemma_ wrote: post #37
derefr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that's still a different thing than "a human sat down and decided that there would be trips that would cost the driver money to run; and that Uber wouldn't announce this change." One is an emergent consequence — the "banality of evil", a property of the corporation itself. The other is active malfeasance — something that's not so much even about the corporation as about an individual horrible person in a dec…

Businesses deliberately plan for and rely on people like you making that distinction, even though you shouldn’t. Why should it matter? The consumer is fucked either way.

For the same reason that if some kind of Cordyceps-like brain-parasite were to infect a person and make them murder people, that wouldn't be that person's fault. Especially if the brain parasite could be removed, reverting their personality to normal. I wouldn't hold that against the person going forward (unless they for some reason actively pursued further brain-parasite infections as a general preference.)

Companies can be evil on a structural level. But also, companies that aren't evil on a structural level, can be parasitized by evil individuals. Unless the company actively pursues hiring evil individuals, why would you hold the latter against them?

The point of companies having reputations is to predict what they'll do, and thereby trade with companies for which trade with them will predictably be positive-sum, and avoid trade with companies that would predictably be zero-sum or negative-sum.

A company itself being evil on a structural level, predicts that in the future it will do many zero- or negative-sum things, regardless of employee turnover.

A company that is not evil on a structural level, hiring one evil individual, who does an evil thing and then gets fired, doesn't predict any future evil behavior from the company.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#46

Post by hyperdimension »

stefan_ wrote: post #26
mullingitover wrote: post #23

Uber's handling of edge cases is...something. My wife is banned for life from Uber because after she was overcharged by a driver by $80 (for a five minute ride), and after Uber denied her dispute of the fraudulent charge, she flagged the fraudulent charge with the credit card company and got refunded via that route. I don't think a human was in the loop for any step of this process on Uber's end.

This is such a big thing nowadays and it needs regulation. Dispute a charge on Steam? Banned for life. Return one too many item according to some neural network on Amazon? Banned for life. Do nothing wrong at all? Random chance to wake up to a banned Google account, no recourse. Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck. There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.

Sounds like the movie Brazil to me. Or Computers Don't Argue.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#47

Post by hyperdimension »

mullingitover wrote: post #42
mdoms wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> she was overcharged by a driver Drivers don't charge riders - Uber does.

When she got out of the Uber, the driver continued driving for a long time before "ending" the ride, and the tab ran the entire time which racked up extra charges.

I thought the ride automatically ended, geo-fenced to the destination. Is that not the case?

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#48

Post by PragmaticPulp »

Obviously, the system shouldn’t be allowing negative fares to occur. Uber needs to eat the cost on those and provide some minimum payout floor for the driver.

The driver posted more details further down in the thread showing some of the charges: https://twitter.com/TheSofaaa/status/1399070201925312512?s=2... Ironically, the negative balance appears to be due to regulatory fees applied haphazardly. This includes a $5 surcharge from the airport and two charges from the city of Chicago.

It seems like the correct solution would be to pass those charges to the customer, not the driver. I don’t know how they came up with the idea of charging the driver.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#49

Post by fedreserved »

mullingitover wrote: post #29
stefan_ wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a big thing nowadays and it needs regulation. Dispute a charge on Steam? Banned for life. Return one too many item according to some neural network on Amazon? Banned for life. Do nothing wrong at all? Random chance to wake up to a banned Google account, no recourse. Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck. There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.

It certainly feels illegal to have the threat of a ban when you make a good faith report of fraudulent charges. A business could have a pattern of deliberate overcharges that they layer in with regular transactions with the knowledge that enough users will just give in and eat the fraudulent charge to avoid losing access to the service. If the business has run the numbers and found that it's a net gain in profits fro…

Rico cases are meant for more then just "criminals". A civil Rico case is one route

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#50

Post by eklitzke »

strken wrote: post #11

It's a bit terrifying that people on twitter seem to think this is an intentional product decision rather than a bug plus shitty automated support with no human in the loop. I guess if you keep setting OKRs like "5% lower support call volume" for years then at some point your reputational risk goes up because you've made it impossible to contact an actual human being.

Bugs like this happen sometimes. I used to work at Uber, here is what happens with bugs like this:

  - Some engineer will get paged, look at the incident, and eventually the root cause of the bug will be found.
  - The root cause of the bug will be fixed to prevent it from happening on new trips, new fare calc tests will be added, etc.
  - Engineers will identify which commit introduced the bug and which dates/trips are possible affected.
  - Someone will run a batch job that recalculates fares for all of the trips that might be affected, and payments will be made to any drivers who were underpaid.
The time this takes from when an engineer is first notified to when all trip fares are recalculated and drivers are paid out varies based on the complexity of the bug, but in most cases this would take no more than a few days. The time it takes for an issue like this to be notified to engineering also varies on the complexity of the bug, it's anywhere from within an hour of when bad code is released to many months for the most subtle bugs.

A lot of the people in the comments here are reacting negatively to the fact that support tickets are partially automated. However, there are a few things to note.

The first is that fare calculation code is very complicated, it involves lots of geofence calculations (e.g. to detect toll roads or bridges) and in some cases there are other location-dependent rules, various promotions may be running, etc. The only people at Uber who are qualified to determine whether or not there is a fare calculation bug are the engineers who actually work on fare calculation code. Sometimes there are obvious errors (like in this example), but in most cases the fare calculation bugs are subtle enough that support agents wouldn't actually be able to verify if the code is wrong. Even if the support person could tell there was an error (as in this example) the best they could do would be to escalate the issue to engineering and wait for a fare calc engineer to investigate.

Additionally, besides support tickets there are a lot of other monitoring systems that look for abnormal deviations in number of trips happening, fares, etc. If there is a major bug affecting something like fare calculation it will show up in these metrics and someone will investigate.

I don't work at Uber anymore so I don't know the specifics of how this bug was handled. But in general I would say that bugs do happen sometimes, and Uber has policies that seem reasonable (to me) for detecting the problems and correcting any erroneous payments made.

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