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How to find your Uber passenger rating

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Re: How to find your Uber passenger rating

#62
post #37

This is a lot easier than the Charles MITM proxy I used to intercept the Uber iPhone API calls to determine mine. I feel kind of silly now that I didnt bother checking the web API. I also made a web scraper to get my uber trip details (incl. route driven), save it to JSON and map the trips all at once. http://i.imgur.com/Q1W59rD.jpg . Here's a quick dump of the code https://github.com/joshhunt/uber . It's pretty roug…

doesn't seem that strange to me. in the old SOAP days it was easier to run everything through a set of filters and just have what server code specified by a field. in this case it is pretty clear they sped up requests by returning some generic data every request needed to update the app all at once as well. that's a pretty common requirement. netflix even allows client code to upload server code to pack responses int…

> in the old SOAP days

What I thought was strange is that we're not in the 'old SOAP days' any more.

I get what they wanted to do - speed things up by including common data in every request, and avoid state in apps. What I found strange was the way they solved it, esp. given they're (apparently) using Python and Node.js - writing a middleware to insert the common data would be far easier than implementing their own routing layer or whatever they've done.

Of course I'm making a lot of assumptions about what kind of stack exactly they're using (assuming they're using a web framework that we've heard of)

Re: How to find your Uber passenger rating

#63
post #46

I don't get why this is included in the window.Uber pingData. It seems as though your rating is something that isn't necessary and shouldn't be surfaced client-side. Anyone have some insight into why this data is there in the first place? Is this an accidental leak, some sort of optimization or something else?

No reason to hide it until it becomes a problem. I suspect now that someone's gone to the trouble to surface it, they'll patch it out, but really, it doesn't matter if a tiny percentage of uber-users know what their score is.

It's an optimization for their developers. They probably don't want to write a bunch of "if user.driver?"'s in their API responses, so just return all the data all the time and let their clients decide what to show.

Re: How to find your Uber passenger rating

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Drivers rating the passenger is a defence against passengers rating the drivers low I don't see how this it the case, assuming that drivers don't know what passengers rated them before rating the passenger.

Reciprocal bad ratings from several drivers could indicate a bad passenger who is being fussy etc and trying to take it out on drivers.

But as I say in the GP, I am assuming that the drivers don't know that they are given a low rating prior to giving the passenger a rating.

Re: How to find your Uber passenger rating

#67
post #54
post #44

I somehow have a 4, the lowest in this thread (that I've seen so far). I wonder what I did, I generally try to be polite to the drivers and I rarely use the service, so I suspect I got one extremely poor rating? I can't imagine when though. Anyway, looks like you can go and pull the token out of the page and just do curl https://m.uber.com/cn --data '{"messageType":"PingClient","token":"xxxxx","app":"client"}' | jq .…

Yeah no idea.. Im at 4.5 at the moment, am always standing on the curb for pickup and polite. I've also always ranked drivers as 5 stars. surprising

Lol. I always give them 5 too, and tip them additional cash even, and I have a 4.8. Jeezz though crowd. ;-)

Re: How to find your Uber passenger rating

#68
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you talk more about the extortion? Given that Uber apparently drops drivers that get below a 4.5 or something, I wouldn't expect much trouble from them...

Just guessing what he meant: The black cars in NYC with an iPhone on the dashboard running the Uber app aren't necessarily getting 100% of their fairs via Uber. If they see you as a potential client, they'll still try to pick you up off-network. If you already hailed an Uber, an unscrupulous driver may potentially tell you "Yeah, I'm from Uber". Although I'm not sure how they'd convince you to pay cash.

I had a similar experience in Palo Alto. Once I realized I was not in the right car, I just got out at the first red light.

Re: How to find your Uber passenger rating

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means nothing to you but remember that you're not supposed to see these - a 4.8 probably means something to the driver.

For what it's worth, drivers with a rating of less than 4.3 or so are booted from the service. I've heard of people in my city having trouble and getting a driver to accept, most probably due to him having a low rating (whereas I never have trouble finding a driver)

Low ratings are not the only reason that could happen. Uber drivers run businesses. They are not universal service taxis (which often flout the universal service rule, to be true).

Your request for service includes several non-price elements to it, one of which is your perceived likelihood to be a hassle (and reflected in your star rating), one is the amount of unpaid travel required to get to you, and one is what the driver perceives as likely to be your destination. All else being equal, drivers would prefer to end up in portions of the city with a high density of quality fares (say, an airport, the startup district(s) in SF, etc) as opposed to portions of the city with a low density of quality fares (say, the outer edge of the service area).

If drivers make a habit out of taking "bad" trips, their Uber business gets meaningfully less lucrative. Accordingly, expect them to actively avoid "bad" trips. If one's travel patterns routinely result in drivers perceiving you to require "bad" trips, one is going to have a far different experience with Uber relative to a high-frequency no-hassle business traveler.

Re: How to find your Uber passenger rating

#70
My twitter stream is now full of people, some of whom I am sure do not have the skill to evaluate if something is a JavaScript security threat or not, who have copied and pasted a random script they read on the internet into the developer console. Granted, this one is pretty simple and easier to evaluate than most, but still… you really get why Facebook hacked the console to warn people not to do that.

edit: This tweet said exactly what I was thinking when I saw all of this. https://twitter.com/s_m_i/status/493609377958723584

"Also this uber thing shows folks will copy and paste commands they don’t understand without a second thought if the incentives are right"

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