UBER UPDATE INTL
RIDECHECK SAFETY FEATURE ROLLED OUT
A new feature called RideCheck was rolled out to Uber users in the US last month with more countries earmarked to receive it soon. RideCheck was first mentioned in 2018 as a way to use the sensors in a smartphone to determine whether a rider has been in an acci- dent. Hypertext reports that the sensors Uber is making use of include the GPS, the accelerometer and gyroscope among others. The feature will alert both the rider and driver should RideCheck detect an anomaly. Both users will receive a notification to check whether everything is okay along with a list of emergency services numbers. However it seems that the rider will still need to make the call to emergency services but Uber safety operators can reach out to determine if the rider is safe. The report goes on to reveal that RideCheck is able to deal with false positives such as when you drop your phone during a ride. “This technology will continue to evolve, and we are working to add additional scenarios to RideCheck. Helping keep millions of riders and drivers around the world safe is a huge responsibility with unique challenges. While I’m proud of the progress we’ve made, when it comes to safety, we know our work is never done,” said Uber’s head of safety products, Sachin Kansal in a blog post. As mentioned RideCheck will be headed to other countries soon although Uber hasn’t outlined a timeline for this.
UBER’S $1-PER-RIDE ‘SAFE RIDES FEE’ HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH SAFETY
Uber imposed a $1-per-ride surcharge it called a “Safe Rides Fee” in 2014, but it was a just a play for profit, reports Verge. The money collected by the company from the fee - estimated at around $500 million - was never earmarked specifically for safety and was “devised primarily to add $1 of pure margin to each trip,” according to an excerpt from New York Times reporter Mike Isaac’s new book Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber. According to the Verge, at the time, Uber was facing rising costs from insurance and background checks, so the company came up with the idea of imposing a safety fee to help boost its margins. Meanwhile, its actual safety programme consisted of little more than a short video course for drivers. It wasn’t until years later that Uber began adding safety features to its app, such as an emergency button to call 911. Safe ride fees varied from market to market, but they generally amounted to a dollar and some change. In San Francisco, riders were charged $1.35 per trip. Philadelphians paid $1.25, while riders in Los Angeles paid $1.65. Uber said the fee was meant to pay for operational costs associated with safety, such as marketing, driver screening, incident response, and technology upgrades. The com- pany claimed it needed to charge riders a separate fee to prevent it from being affected by surge pricing. But according to Isaac’s book, that was all hokum. “We boosted our margins saying our rides were safer,” one former employee told him. “It was obscene.” (A spokesperson for Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Riders quickly caught on. In 2016, two class action lawsuits were filed against Uber alleging the ride-hail company improperly mar- keted its safety record to passengers. The suits were eventually settled for $28.5 million - a fraction of the amount that The New York Times estimates Uber was able to rake in.
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As part of the settlement, Uber agreed to avoid using certain lan- guage when marketing itself, such as “safest ride on the road” and “gold standard in safety”. It also was required to change the name of the surcharge from “safe ride fee” to “booking fee”. That fee remains on every passenger’s bill today.
YOU CAN NOW BOOK AN UBER RIDE WITHOUT A PHONE FOR THE FIRST TIME
For the first ten years, Uber was more or less useless to those without a phone. But that’s finally starting to change. Business Insider re-ports that last month, the ride- hailing giant rolled out a kiosk at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport that allows passengers to to book a ride without a smartphone. The compa- ny says it’s designed to create greater access for travellers who might have a difficult time using the app because of language or tech issues. Much of the technology in the kiosk is similar to what’s used in “greenlight” hubs, where the company onboards drivers, one of the designers of the Toronto kiosk said on Twitter. Those same kiosks have also been used in malls in the San Francisco area. There’s no word yet on what locations might be next, but the com- pany says it hopes to use them to increase access at high-volume venues.
EX-GOOGLE ENGINEER CHARGED WITH STEALING SELF-DRIVING CAR SECRETS
A former Google engineer was charged last month with stealing closely guarded secrets that he later sold to Uber as the ride-hailing service scrambled to catch up in the high-stakes race to build robotic vehicles. The indictment filed by the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Jose, Cali- fornia, is an offshoot of a lawsuit filed in 2017 by Waymo, a self-driving car pioneer spun off from Google. Uber agreed to pay Waymo $245 million to settle the case, but the federal judge over- seeing the lawsuit made an unusual recommendation to open a criminal probe. According to Time, Anthony Levandowski, a pioneer in robotic vehi- cles, was charged with 33 counts of trade secrets theft. He could be sentenced for up to ten years and fined $250,000 per count, $8.25 million altogether. Prosecutors say the probe is ongoing, but they wouldn’t say whether Uber and former CEO Travis Kalanick are tar- gets. Prosecutors say Google and Uber cooperated in the investigation. Levandowski was accused of stealing years of top-secret informa- tion from Google, which prosecutors called the crown jewels of the company. That included Google’s breakthroughs in LIDAR, a key piece of technology that enables self-driving cars to detect what’s around them. In a statement, Levandowski’s attorneys maintained his innocence. “He didn’t steal anything, from anyone,” the state- ment said. “This case rehashes claims already discredited in a civil case that settled more than a year ago.”
OCTOBER 2019
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