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FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

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Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#191

Post by mehlmao »

ryandrake wrote: post #167
teeray wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst thing is that you can't even do a chargeback, otherwise you get banned. There is no recourse for the consumer. If this is their solution for fighting chargebacks, they should get banned from accepting Visa / MC / AMEX.

If you are at the point where your only option left is a chargeback, that is a “burning the bridges” moment anyway. Why would you want to continue doing business with a company that treats you like that? I would be grateful to be banned: it means I don’t have to go to the trouble of canceling my account. I’ve had to do a handful of chargebacks and I don’t know or care whether they banned me: I would never voluntarily…

One reason you might still want to use them is that they used anticompetitive blitzscaling strategies and ran at a loss to prevent competitors from taking off.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#194

Post by xerox13ster »

greenchair wrote: post #140
teeray wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst thing is that you can't even do a chargeback, otherwise you get banned. There is no recourse for the consumer. If this is their solution for fighting chargebacks, they should get banned from accepting Visa / MC / AMEX.

I didn't know what a chargeback was till last few years when it became popular almost meme like. Probably lots of fraud there.

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Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#195

Post by steveBK123 »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #181
steveBK123 wrote: post #171

Uber is an interesting company in that they were always shady, but initially in ways that customers liked (somewhat illegal taxis ripping off their drivers, for below cost, subsidized lifestyle by VC). They then flipped the "make a profit" switch and are now shady in ways customers dislike (ripping you the customer off).

> They then flipped the "make a profit" switch This is literally the business model of most VC and public companies.

I’m old enough when the VC model was “I dunno, ads?”, followed by “SaaS/cloud”, then “Uber for X” all of which proceeded “crypto” and “AI”.

A lot of it stacks now with “AI for X” running in the cloud funded by SaaS and/or ads. Just increasingly adversarial revenue models to turn customers into product (data) and/or hooked on forever recurring increasingly monthly spend.

Long gone the days of funding a piece of software customers purchase and use as long and as much as they wish.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#196

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

NoTeslaThrow wrote: post #176
paxys wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going by pure economic theory "dynamic pricing" actually benefits both buyers and sellers in a marketplace. There are plenty of cases where it makes sense – lunch menus at restaurants, grocery store coupons, retail bargain bins, dollar menus, happy hour deals, senior/youth/student discounts, even surge pricing in Uber & Lyft. Of course like with every aspect of economics how something is implemented matters a lot mor…

Well that's certainly AN economic theory, but it feels a little polyannish/unreasonably hopeful. Like most of american macroeconomic discourse.

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Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#197

Post by mcmcmc »

NoTeslaThrow wrote: post #176
paxys wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going by pure economic theory "dynamic pricing" actually benefits both buyers and sellers in a marketplace. There are plenty of cases where it makes sense – lunch menus at restaurants, grocery store coupons, retail bargain bins, dollar menus, happy hour deals, senior/youth/student discounts, even surge pricing in Uber & Lyft. Of course like with every aspect of economics how something is implemented matters a lot mor…

Well that's certainly AN economic theory, but it feels a little polyannish/unreasonably hopeful. Like most of american macroeconomic discourse.

Where exactly does macro come into play here?

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#198

Post by arrosenberg »

cameldrv wrote: post #81
NoTeslaThrow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention they don't refund you you when they fail to deliver the car on expected arrival.

This is my biggest aggravation. They consistently underreport estimated pickup times. Dropoff times are essentially universally significantly later than the estimate before booking. It's things like this that make agents potentially exciting. So much of enshittification is wrapping an essentially good service in a crappy and misleading UI to drive extra revenue. If you can replace the lying UI with a more honest one,…

They're just going to replace the engineers, analysts and designers. The same greedy MBAs and VCs are still going to be running it and the agents they deploy will reflect that. This is not a competitive market by any definition - huge information asymmetries and extremely low competition. We need to go back to either government sponsored monopoly with the appropriate regulatory models or we need to declare it a utility and set prices.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#199

Post by mcmcmc »

cameldrv wrote: post #81
NoTeslaThrow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention they don't refund you you when they fail to deliver the car on expected arrival.

This is my biggest aggravation. They consistently underreport estimated pickup times. Dropoff times are essentially universally significantly later than the estimate before booking. It's things like this that make agents potentially exciting. So much of enshittification is wrapping an essentially good service in a crappy and misleading UI to drive extra revenue. If you can replace the lying UI with a more honest one,…

I’d be way more excited about a functional consumer protection agency or actual antitrust enforcement than trying to beat a dark pattern with more dark patterns. Just wait til AI agent service providers get in on the regulatory capture game, politicians are cheap to buy these days.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#200

Post by arrosenberg »

gruez wrote: post #17
laweijfmvo wrote: post #5

> Users can be forced to navigate as many as 23 screens and take as many as 32 actions to cancel. I complain about dark patterns _a_lot_ but this one takes the cake!

I'd take that with a grain of salt. I've went through the process to cancel an uber one trial recently, and I would say it's not anywhere near "23 screens". Maybe the user in question got unlucky and got hit with all the A/B trials, and they're being super generous with what counts as a "screen", but the process was relatively painless.

Might be because of your location. Some governments like California have regulated these types of things with a law that says you must be allowed to cancel in the same manner you signed up.
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