Uber Drivers Have A Really Sneaky Way Of Increasing The Prices Of Rides

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The rate in which technology is evolving, becoming more readily accessible and useful in our day-to-day lives is phenomenal.

Yet with the breakneck speed of technological advancement, we’re left wondering how we ever lived before these recent developments. It wasn’t that long ago that smartphones weren’t prolific, and we couldn’t check Google Maps or take photos with a few quick swipes. While GPS is undoubtedly useful, a new development that is fresher in the mind is the advent of transportation networks such as Uber and Lyft. Despite the fact that these apps have been around for a few years now, I’ve only recently started using them, and now can’t imagine living without them. Being able to find your way home from anywhere in the city within such a short space of time is beginning to feel essential to a lot of city-dwellers’ way of life. Yet it definitely has its downsides. The price of these lifts can suddenly spike in peak hours, and sometimes you can see that an Uber at 2am is pretty cheap in advance, but see an entirely different price once the time comes to actually book one. According to some recent academic research, this isn’t just a coincidence, as some drivers are exploiting the system to get more money for their time. Warwick Business School, in association with New York University, has carried out research into the habits of Uber drivers, as reported by The Times. The research team interviewed Uber drivers in New York and London, as well as analysing over 1,000 posts on the independent site Uberpeople.net; and as it turns out, the drivers seem to be playing with the company’s algorithms to charge more for their services. Their method is for a group of drivers in one area to agree to all log off the app at the same time. When they disappear, Uber thinks there has been a huge drop in drivers in the area, so demand is higher than the availability. The rates surge upwards, and drivers make more money when they log back on to the app. On the site Uberpeople, various drivers were found to be taking part in this behaviour. One London driver apparently said “Guys, stay off until surge,” and when someone asked why, he was told: “Less supply high demand = surge”. Another driver chimed in to warn them that Uber will find out that their system is being manipulated. The original poster replied: “They already know cos it happens every week”. Uber is known to use a “management by algorithm” system, wherein drivers don’t have to interact with their bosses at all, but maybe this is a mistake. “Drivers have developed practices to regain control, even gaming the system,” Dr.Mareike Mhlmann of Warwick Business School said, “It shows that the algorithmic management that Uber uses may not only be ethically questionable but may also hurt the company itself”. Uber has responded to these revelations, claiming that the conversations were not based in any fact. A spokesperson for the company stated that “This behaviour is neither widespread or permissible on the Uber app, and we have a number of technical safeguards in place to prevent it from happening.” Regardless of how widespread the behaviour it is, the research shows that at least some drivers are taking part in the activity. But drivers aren’t the only ones to be using the system to their own advantage. Did you know thatlawyers have been using Uber data to prove affairs during divorce cases?

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Uber Drivers Have A Really Sneaky Way Of Increasing The Prices Of Rides was originally posted by Viral News Feed 14