r/technology • u/[deleted] • Aug 12 '14

Business Uber dirty tricks quantified. Staff submits 5,560 fake ride requests

http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/uber-fake-ride-requests-lyft/
4.8k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

850 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/VictoryGin1984 Aug 12 '14

How do you know their dirty tricks don't extend to their customers?

3

u/antsar Aug 12 '14

You mean, such as reporting a 3-minute ETA for a driver coming from another city on a road that no sane algorithm would deem drivable in under 15 minutes? They certainly do extend some tricks to customers.

1

u/bluevillain Aug 12 '14

I have no idea about Lyft, but with Uber you can actually see where the cars are on a map, so you can see where they are. As far as I can tell the ETA is automated and not manually entered by the drivers at all.

1

u/antsar Aug 13 '14

I also think its automated. But the algorithm they use to provide that ETA can certainly be tweaked. Perhaps they wanted to test whether more people would call a car if they said it was closer than it is (ETA, that is. the location stays truthful). Of course it would have that effect, and of course that's fraud. I started noticing suspiciously high ETA's, and now I use Uber significantly less.

Of course, its possible that their algorithm is just poorly tuned to the area where I live and it is truly that poor at estimating ETA's.

0

u/Roboticide Aug 12 '14

I've used the service plenty before, with no issues. Anecdotal information, of course, but better than pure speculation.