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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

#31

Post by caseysoftware »

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.

As these systems become monopolies - or at least defacto standards - these blanket bans without insight into the process, appeal, or even notification is getting ugly.

Right now, it's "only" a frustration in most cases but what happens when Amazon bans you while PillPack is how you receive your meds?

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

#32

Post by gabereiser »

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.

The “Does your business run on GCP?” needs to be understood by every VP out there. If you are a software company, and a _cough_ security company, that’s all in on GCP, you don’t know what you are doing.

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

#33

Post by mdoms »

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.

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

#34

Post by staticautomatic »

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.

I quit using Uber a few years ago when I was overcharged a higher surge multiplier than I agreed to and support was adamant that it couldn’t have been a bug.

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

#35

Post by mdoms »

fouc wrote: post #7
petee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Thanks for bringing this to our attention, @TheSofaaa . We believe this is due to a technical bug, which we are actively investigating. We apologize to you and any other drivers who may be impacted, all of whom will be fully refunded." But the OP also has a screenshot(1) of Uber's fare review saying they were in fact charged correctly. So the review process is broken as well? ^1 https://mobile.twitter.com/TheSofaaa/…

the fare review probably triggered the same bug

That's not a review.

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

#36

Post by sen »

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.

My wife’s Uber account (for both rides and food) is banned for life because she had a sleazy driver aggressively come on to her and when she went to get out of the car he said “I know where you live now” and drove off. She complained to Uber, they did nothing other than say “the driver left negative feedback on your ride” and her account got instantly banned. Follow up calls to them just said she “broke terms and conditions and there’s nothing they can do”.

For perspective, she had a similar sleazy taxi driver years ago, who she complained about to the taxi company. He was fired immediately and the taxi company offered to help my wife with going to the police if she wanted to (and offered the in-car video).

Thankfully we still have taxis locally, but the drivers have told me their numbers have dropped and Uber is winning.

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

#37

Post by Analemma_ »

derefr wrote: post #28
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…

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.

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

#38

Post by pixl97 »

malwarebytess wrote: post #21
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.

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.

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

#39

Post by duncan-donuts »

savant_penguin wrote: post #10
sp332 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The verbiage specifically says "your fare was within our estimates", but wouldn't negative fares at least be flagged as out of range?

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.

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

#40

Post by zaroth »

Another Uber bug I ran into a couple weeks ago.

I had a long trip which I updated after departing to be a short trip. After getting out of the Uber I clicked to pay a 20% tip, and it paid it on the original (much higher) amount. Worked out to be almost a 100% tip.

I called support, walked the very nice woman through what happened, she filed a bug report and reset the tip to a normal amount.

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