The Verge

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  • Grubhub is using fake websites to drive up commission fees from real businesses - The Verge
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/28/19154220/grubhub-seamless-fake-restaurant-domain-names-commission-fees

    They also list phone numbers that don’t belong to the actual business Grubhub has been buying tens of thousands of domain names that resemble those of businesses they either work with or are pitching to get on the platform, reports New Food Economy. Those domains, of which Grubhub owns as many as 23,000, are used to resemble a landing page for the official business, complete with an online ordering form, despite the sites being completely unassociated with the restaurants themselves. (...)

    #AllMenus #DoorDash #Eat24 #Grubhub #MenuPages #Postmates #Seamless #manipulation #FoodTech #nourriture (...)

    ##GigEconomy

  • Moscow rolls out live facial recognition system with an app to alert police - The Verge
    https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/30/21115119/moscow-live-facial-recognition-roll-out-ntechlab-deployment

    The new system is the ‘largest in the world,’ says vendor Moscow is the latest major city to introduce live facial recognition cameras to its streets, with Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announcing that the technology is operating “on a mass scale” earlier this month, according to a report from Russian business paper Vedomosti. It follows news earlier this week that London is integrating live facial recognition into daily police activities, with the Metropolitan Police deploying cameras in busy (...)

    #Ntechlab #algorithme #CCTV #biométrie #facial #reconnaissance #vidéo-surveillance #surveillance #criminalité (...)

    ##criminalité ##Vkontakte

  • YouTube moderators are being forced to sign a statement acknowledging the job can give them PTSD - The Verge
    https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/24/21075830/youtube-moderators-ptsd-accenture-statement-lawsuits-mental-health

    Content moderators for YouTube are being ordered to sign a document acknowledging that performing the job can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to interviews with employees and documents obtained by The Verge. Accenture, which operates a moderation site for YouTube in Austin, Texas, distributed the document to workers on December 20th — four days after The Verge published an investigation into PTSD among workers at the facility. “I understand the content I will be (...)

    #Accenture #Cognizant #Facebook #YouTube #modération #santé

    ##santé

  • Automated background checks are deciding who’s fit for a home
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205174/automation-background-check-criminal-records-corelogic

    But advocates say algorithms can’t capture the complexity of criminal records MikhailMikhail Arroyo had made it out of the coma, but he was still frail when his mother, Carmen, tried to move him in with her. The months had been taxing : Mikhail was severely injured in a devastating fall in 2015. He had spent time in the hospital, and by 2016 was in a nursing home where his mother visited him daily, waiting until they could live together again. Carmen planned to move him to a new apartment (...)

    #algorithme #criminalité #prédiction #discrimination #locataires #surveillance

    ##criminalité

  • Uber and Lyft finally admit they’re making traffic congestion worse in cities
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756945/uber-lyft-tnc-vmt-traffic-congestion-study-fehr-peers

    Ride-hailing accounts for up to 14 percent of vehicle miles traveled in some cities, according to a study commissioned by Uber and Lyft Uber and Lyft have long argued that ride-hailing apps have the potential to make cities better by easing traffic and reducing personal car ownership. And every time a study emerges that counters that narrative by exposing ride-hailing’s worsening effects on congestion, the two companies respond by casting doubt on the studies’ findings. Well, this time the (...)

    #Lyft #Uber #écologie #VTC

  • The Terror Queue
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21021005/google-youtube-moderators-ptsd-accenture-violent-disturbing-content-interv

    These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD GoogleGoogle and YouTube approach content moderation the same way all of the other tech giants do : paying a handful of other companies to do most of the work. One of those companies, Accenture, operates Google’s largest content moderation site in the United States : an office in Austin, Texas, where content moderators work around the clock cleaning up YouTube. Peter is one of hundreds (...)

    #Accenture #Google #YouTube #modération #conditions #travail

  • Facebook tells US attorney general it won’t remove encryption from its messaging apps
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/10/21004873/facebook-whatsapp-bill-barr-justice-department-instagram-messenger

    Law enforcement is ticked off about Facebook’s privacy pivot Facebook executives told Attorney General William Barr that the company would not provide law enforcement with investigative access to its encrypted messaging products ahead of a senate hearing on encryption on Tuesday. In a letter, WhatsApp and Messenger heads Will Cathcart and Stan Chudnovsky, respectively, said that any “backdoor” access into Facebook’s products created for law enforcement could be used by bad actors for (...)

    #Facebook #Messenger #WhatsApp #cryptage #backdoor #écoutes #surveillance #web

  • Amazon reportedly plans bigger cashierless supermarkets for 2020
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/20/20974037/amazon-go-cashierless-2020-expansion-supermarkets-pop-up-stores

    Amazon is reportedly planning a big expansion for its cashierless store format in 2020. According to Bloomberg, the retail giant wants to open both larger supermarkets and smaller pop-up stores as early as the first quarter of 2020, both using the same Amazon Go technology that creates a shopping experience without any checkout lines. Back in September The Information reported similar plans, noting that Amazon originally wanted to open between one and five larger Go supermarkets in 2019. (...)

    #algorithme #Amazon #supermarché

    ##supermarché

  • A Facebook content moderation vendor is quitting the business after two Verge investigations
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/30/20940956/cognizant-facebook-content-moderation-exit-business-conditions-investigati

    Moderators complained of filthy offices and severe mental health strain The professional services firm Cognizant will exit the content moderation business after two Verge investigations into working conditions at sites dedicated to Facebook, the companies said today. Cognizant had hired thousands of moderators around the world to remove hate speech, terrorism, and other inappropriate content from platforms including Facebook, Google, and Twitter. “We have determined that certain content (...)

    #Cognizant #Facebook #travail #modération

  • A health care algorithm affecting millions is biased against black patients
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/24/20929337/care-algorithm-study-race-bias-health

    A health care algorithm makes black patients substantially less likely than their white counterparts to receive important medical treatment. The major flaw affects millions of patients, and was just revealed in research published this week in the journal Science. The study does not name the makers of the algorithm, but Ziad Obermeyer, an acting associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked on the study says “almost every large health care system” is using it, as (...)

    #algorithme #discrimination #santé

    ##santé

  • READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT OF MARK ZUCKERBERG’S LEAKED INTERNAL FACEBOOK MEETINGS
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20892354/mark-zuckerberg-full-transcript-leaked-facebook-meetings

    Highlights from two hours of leaked audio from recent Q&A sessions with Facebook’s CEO On October 1st, The Verge published text and audio from recent internal meetings at Facebook where CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered tough questions from employees who are concerned about the company’s future. In two July meetings, Zuckerberg rallied his employees against critics, competitors, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, among others. To provide more context around Zuckerberg’s remarks, The Verge is (...)

    #Facebook #domination

  • A pioneer in predictive policing is starting a troubling new project
    https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/26/17285058/predictive-policing-predpol-pentagon-ai-racial-bias

    Pentagon-funded research aims to predict when crimes are gang-related Jeff Brantingham is as close as it gets to putting a face on the controversial practice of “predictive policing.” Over the past decade, the University of California-Los Angeles anthropology professor adapted his Pentagon-funded research in forecasting battlefield casualties in Iraq to predicting crime for American police departments, patenting his research and founding a for-profit company named PredPol, LLC. PredPol (...)

    #algorithme #Predpol #criminalité #discrimination #surveillance

    ##criminalité

  • Mapping All of Earth’s Roads and Buildings from Space
    https://www.planet.com/pulse/mapping-all-of-earths-roads-and-buildings-from-space

    Above is a map of all the roads and buildings on Earth. To our knowledge, it is the most complete and up to date map of these features ever created. It reveals details not available in popular mapping tools, in both industrialized cities and rural settlements. Built from a diversely sampled training set, the model produces quality results across a wide variety of terrains, densities, and land cover types. // Credit: Leanne Abraham, Planet

  • How making politicians unblock trolls could hurt speech online - The Verge
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/6/20847366/politicians-twitter-trolls-blocking-legal-ruling-trump-ocasio-cortez-free-

    Last week, the Knight First Amendment Institute urged Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to unblock critics on Twitter. The Knight Institute has led a push to treat politicians’ social media accounts as public forums, filing a successful lawsuit against President Donald Trump for his Twitter-blocking habits. Ocasio-Cortez argued that the issue was more nuanced, though: she said she was blocking “less than 20 accounts” and that it was for harassment, not political viewpoints.

    Social media poses some unique problems that physical spaces don’t, however. It can operate at a scale that wouldn’t be possible offline, and it’s easy to hijack a conversation or amplify a point of view with automated posts or a handful of dedicated people acting in bad faith. Trolls can attack anyone who participates in a conversation, not just politicians, and they can do it across all of social media, not just in a single thread or post. This can turn supposedly open spaces into deeply hostile or unnavigable ones — not just for public figures like Trump or Ocasio-Cortez, but for anybody who wants to engage with them.

    As writer and law professor Tim Wu, journalist Zeynep Tufekci, and many others have pointed out, new tactics like troll armies and spammed responses have made traditional First Amendment protections less effective at promoting free speech online. “It is no longer speech or information that is scarce, but the attention of listeners,” explained Wu in a 2017 Knight Institute blog post. “No one quite anticipated that speech itself might become a censorial weapon, or that scarcity of attention would become such a target of flooding and similar tactics.”

    #Politique #Twitter #Liberté_expression #Trolls

  • Border agents are checking entrants’ Facebook and Twitter profiles — but we still don’t know how closely
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/31/20837448/social-media-dhs-cbp-surveillance-us-border-ismail-ajjawi-harvard

    Earlier this week, incoming Harvard freshman Ismail B. Ajjawi found himself blocked from entering the US. Ajjawi, a Palestinian resident of Lebanon, had landed in Boston before the start of classes. But The Harvard Crimson reported that after hours of questioning, US Customs and Border Protection agents revoked his visa. Ajjawi said a CBP agent searched his phone and laptop while asking questions about his friends’ social media activity. Then, she “started screaming at me,” Ajjawi said. “She (...)

    #CBP #Facebook #Twitter #smartphone #migration #écoutes #surveillance #web #EFF

  • Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say
    https://jalopnik.com/uber-and-lyft-take-a-lot-more-from-drivers-than-they-sa-1837450373


    Das Magain Jalopnik hat in einer längeren Untersuchung die erste, einzige und beste Untersuchung der Fahrerverdienste bei Uber durchgeführt. Dieser Artikel beschreibt die Ergebnisse.

    Dhruv Mehrotra, Aaron Gordon, 26.8.2019 - In July, an Uber driver we’ll call Dave—his name has been changed here to protect his identity—picked up a fare in a trendy neighborhood of a major U.S. metropolitan area. It was rush hour and surge pricing was in effect due to increased demand, meaning that Dave would be paid almost twice the regular fare.

    Even though the trip was only five miles, it lasted for more than half an hour because his passengers scheduled a stop at Taco Bell for dinner. Dave knew sitting at the restaurant waiting for his fares to get a Doritos Cheesy Gordita Crunch or whatever would cost him money; he was earning only 21 cents a minute when the meter was running, compared to 60 cents per mile. With surge pricing in effect, it would be far more lucrative to keep moving and picking up new fares than sitting in a parking lot.

    But Dave, who was granted anonymity out of fear of being deactivated by the ride-hail giant for speaking to the press, had no real choice but to wait. The passenger had requested the stop through the app, so refusing to make it would have been contentious both with the customer and with Uber. The exact number varies by city, but drivers must maintain a high rating in order to work on their platform. And there’s widespread belief among drivers that the Uber algorithm punishes drivers for cancelling trips.

    Ultimately, the rider paid $65 for the half-hour trip, according to a receipt viewed by Jalopnik. But Dave made only $15 (the fares have been rounded to anonymize the transaction).

    Uber kept the rest, meaning the multibillion-dollar corporation kept more than 75 percent of the fare, more than triple the average so-called “take-rate” it claims in financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

    Had he known in advance how much he would have been paid for the ride relative to what the rider paid, Dave said he never would have accepted the fare.

    “This is robbery,” Dave told Jalopnik over email. “This business is out of control.”

    Dave is far from alone in his frustrations. Uber and Lyft have slashed driver pay in recent years and now take a larger portion of each fare, far larger than the companies publicly report, based on data collected by Jalopnik. And the new Surge or Prime Time pricing structure widely adopted by both companies undermines a key legal argument both companies make to classify drivers as independent contractors.

    Jalopnik asked drivers to send us fare receipts showing a breakdown of how much the rider paid for the trip, how much of that fare Uber or Lyft kept, and what the driver earned. (https://jalopnik.com/we-think-uber-and-lyfts-new-surge-fares-screw-drivers-a-1835952856)

    Link: We Think Uber and Lyft’s New Surge Fares Screw Drivers and Riders. Help Us Prove It. https://jalopnik.com/we-think-uber-and-lyfts-new-surge-fares-screw-drivers-a-1835952856

    Link: Uber changed how its surge pricing works last year. Not for riders, but for drivers. The changes… https://jalopnik.com/we-think-uber-and-lyfts-new-surge-fares-screw-drivers-a-1835952856

    In total, we received 14,756 fares. These came from two sources: the web form where drivers could submit fares individually, and via email where some drivers sent us all their fares from a given time period.

    Of all the fares Jalopnik examined, Uber kept 35 percent of the revenue, while Lyft kept 38 percent. These numbers are roughly in line with a previous study by Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute which concluded Uber’s take rate to be roughly one-third, or 33 percent. (https://www.epi.org/publication/uber-and-the-labor-market-uber-drivers-compensation-wages-and-the-scale-of-uber)

    Of the drivers who emailed us breakdowns for all of their fares in a given time period—ranging from a few months to more than a year—Uber kept, on average, 29.6 percent. Lyft pocketed 34.5 percent.

    Those take rates are 10.6 percent and 8.5 percent higher than Uber and Lyft’s publicly reported figures, respectively.


    Graphic: Jim Cooke — G/O Media

    In regulatory filings, Uber has reported its so-called “take-rate” is actually going down, from 21.7 percent in 2018 to 19 percent in the second quarter of 2019 (Uber declined to offer U.S.-only figures for a more direct comparison to Jalopnik’s findings).

    Business Insider has previously reported Lyft’s take rate for 2018 was 26.8 percent, although Lyft claimed it does not publicly share their take rates and declined to do so with Jalopnik.

    When asked for comment, Uber and Lyft disputed Jalopnik’s findings as flawed and not representative of their overall business. But neither company agreed to Jalopnik’s request to provide statistically significant data sets of anonymized fares for independent verification, continuing their longstanding pattern of data secrecy. (https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/uber-drivers-lawsuit-personal-data-ride-hailing-gig-economy/594232

    The findings “support the argument that their business model is built on large scale labor exploitation.”

    Trips like the $65 Taco Bell run only highlight inequities between the multibillion dollar companies and drivers earning at or below minimum wage. When asked about that fare, an Uber spokesman acknowledged, “For all the pain points new surge helped solve, it has its challenges: top among them is the fact that drivers may earn comparatively less on longer surged trips, even if they earn surge more frequently.”

    The spokesman added that “To better serve drivers, we often increase surge payments on longer trips with added amounts that vary based on the length of a trip. Drivers are able to see this additional amount on their trip receipt after the trip is over.” Dave received no such increase.

    Trips like Dave’s also expose inconsistencies in the very logic under which these companies operate. Drivers like Dave are technically independent contractors, but they have no control over many aspects of their work life, including the price of their own services.

    “This is really fascinating and troubling,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director of the Open Markets Institute, a nonprofit studying corporate concentration and monopoly power, when briefed on Jalopnik’s findings. Vaheesan went on to say the findings “support the argument that their business model is built on large scale labor exploitation.”

    “This is, as far as I know, the most convincing data that we have at the individual driver level about the share that Uber takes of every driver’s gross earnings,” said Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah who studies labor markets, “and in that respect it moves the ball a lot forward in terms of understanding how these labor markets work.”

    He added that “if their [Uber and Lyft’s] response is this is not representative of all the drivers, it is representative of other people who have tried to verify their claims and found them wanting.”

    To be sure, Jalopnik’s data set is not perfect. The sample of 14,756 fares is a tiny fraction of the millions of trips Uber and Lyft complete each day in the U.S. alone; it would be impossible for any independent researcher to get their hands on an adequate data set without Uber and Lyft’s cooperation (or, in theory, more nefarious methods such as hacking or data breaches).

    And there is almost certainly some degree of selection bias in Jalopnik’s data acquired via the web form toward drivers who are unhappy with their share and would therefore be more likely to take the time to submit their fare. Along those lines, the fares Jalopnik received through the web form were disproportionately from outside of Uber and Lyft’s major metropolitan markets and during surge times, indicating a possible selection bias in our findings.

    “While 8,926 fares is a large increase from the 175 you had before,” (https://jalopnik.com/we-think-uber-and-lyfts-new-surge-fares-screw-drivers-a-1835952856) an Uber spokesman said, “it is still not a statistically representative sample, given Uber completes approximately 15 million trips per day around the world.”

    But there are also reasons to believe our findings are more representative of the individual driver experience than Uber and Lyft would care to admit. Even the complete fare records Jalopnik received showed a higher take rate than previously reported (https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-lyft-strike-why-take-rate-is-so-important-2019-5). And these drivers, Steinbaum observed, may present a selection bias in the other direction.

    By keeping diligent records, “they’re probably the savviest drivers and therefore the ones that the companies are least able to fleece, so to speak, so you might be getting an underestimate of their take from them.”

    Lyft disputed this as well. A spokesman told Jalopnik, “Even if the investigation looked at every ride for a handful of drivers, the sample pool of drivers needs to accurately reflected [sic] a cross section of all Lyft drivers, and not just a specific subset (i.e., did that sample size have enough diversity to say it represents the average experience for Lyft drivers across the board).”

    In regulatory filings, court cases, and their terms of service, Uber and Lyft claim to merely be facilitators between the rider and driver, not a transportation service. They claim their actual customers are drivers (https://jalopnik.com/uber-s-twisted-logic-means-this-isnt-a-strike-its-a-bo-1834598838). And drivers pay Uber and Lyft a cut of their earnings for connecting them with their customers, the riders. This echoes a common Silicon Valley refrain: they are just technology companies, and therefore should not be subject to the regulations of the industries they are disrupting.
    Article preview thumbnail

    Link: Uber’s Twisted Logic Means This Isn’t a Strike. It’s a Boycott https://jalopnik.com/uber-s-twisted-logic-means-this-isnt-a-strike-its-a-bo-1834598838

    Link: Today, many Uber and Lyft drivers in major cities across the country are striking to protest their… https://jalopnik.com/uber-s-twisted-logic-means-this-isnt-a-strike-its-a-bo-1834598838

    But in recent years, in efforts to stem the tide of their multi-billion dollar losses, both ride-hail companies have separated what riders pay from what drivers earn, moving away from a strict percentage-based commission.

    Using what it calls Upfront Pricing, first instituted in 2016, Uber tells riders exactly how much they will pay before the trip begins based on their own algorithm’s prediction (as is often the case, Lyft instituted the same policy shortly after Uber). It then compensates drivers based on the trip’s actual time and distance.

    According to both companies, the change to Upfront Pricing was made in response to rider and driver feedback; riders didn’t want to be surprised with a higher bill, and drivers wanted to be compensated for the work they actually performed.

    This common-sense policy has potentially profound legal implications. In practice, Upfront Pricing decouples the rider’s payment from the driver’s earnings; one price is set before the ride based on an estimate, the other after the ride is completed based on reality.

    This change is most evident with how Uber and Lyft now handle high-demand periods. Along with the move to Upfront Pricing, both companies also changed the way their high-demand pricing model, often known as Surge or Prime Time works (Lyft has since changed the brand name to Personal Power Zones for drivers).

    Instead of drivers receiving a multiplier on their earnings, as Dave did for the Taco Bell run, most now get a flat fee bonus, typically only a few dollars per ride. Uber and Lyft will sometimes kick the drivers a couple extra bucks if the surge is particularly high or the ride especially long, but there seems to be little rhyme or reason for when this happens. Riders, meanwhile, still pay the multiplier, meaning riders are often paying far more than drivers are earning on those rides.

    “It shows that they are a firm that is charging consumers and then making decisions with that money, including how to pay a labor force.”

    An Uber spokesman explained this dynamic to Jalopnik as follows: “While driver- and rider-side surge are both tied to real-time imbalances in supply and demand, what a rider pays in surge and what a driver earns from surge on a given trip isn’t always the same. This is due, in part, to the fact that new driver surge is based on the driver’s location, not the rider’s. What this means is that a driver may receive surge on a trip even if the rider doesn’t pay anything extra.”

    Similarly, a Lyft spokesman said, “Lyft continues to pass the rider Prime Time onto the drivers, via PPZs, at the same rate in aggregate. There are differences on a ride-level but these differences cut in both directions,” in that sometimes drivers earn an usually higher or lower percentage of the fare.

    In other words, Uber and Lyft say they are taking all the surge charges riders pay and spreading the proceeds among all the drivers in the area, whether their particular passenger pays a surge fare or not (both companies deny they merely pocket the difference).

    This, according to Wayne State University law professor Sanjuka Paul, who has written extensively on the ride-hailing industry, is a new wrinkle in the independent contractor debate, because it doesn’t align with the arguments the companies make that they merely facilitate interactions between two independent actors in a market.

    “The economic reality is they, Uber and Lyft, are collecting the fare from the consumer and then making a capital firm decision which, in this case, doesn’t sound like a very bad decision— actually making quite a sensible decision,” she said. “But it shows that they are a firm that is charging consumers and then making decisions with that money, including how to pay a labor force.”

    Or, as Steinbaum put it, “what they’re doing is exactly what employers do with their workers.”

    In addition, the companies can, and have, changed the base time-and-distance rates drivers earn whenever they want. And there have been many pay cuts.

    In recent years, driver forums have been flooded with angry comments about hastily announced pay cuts in markets around the country. This, despite drivers already making near (or sometimes below https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/22/uber-lyft-ipo-drivers-unionize-low-pay-expenses) minimum wage. These cuts have led to some drivers who spoke with Jalopnik on the condition of anonymity curtailing their own hours, or exiting the ride-hail business entirely, because it’s no longer worth their time after accounting for expenses like fuel, insurance, and car payments.

    Uber and Lyft both deny that driver earnings have declined. “While not every driver has the same experience,” an Uber spokesman wrote to Jalopnik, “that’s not what we see when we look at trends in drivers’ average hourly earnings over the last couple of years, which have increased.”

    A Lyft spokesman told Jalopnik the number of drivers on their platform is increasing and that driver earnings increased over the past two years. The company claims drivers make “more than $30 per booked hour nationally,” although that figure only accounts for the time from when a driver accepts a ride request to when the passenger is dropped off and does not include expenses.

    Some drivers didn’t even realize the extent of the changes in the company’s take rates, both for high-demand trips specifically and across the board, until they compiled their records to send to Jalopnik. One driver, who has been working for Uber in Texas for three years, sent us almost 500 surge fares.

    “Kind of depressing to know that Uber used to take 20 percent when I started and now gets on average 31 percent, with some fares up to 50 percent,” he said.

    A former full-time driver from Iowa said that prior to the pay cuts that ultimately slashed his per-mile rate more than half, he estimates about 30 percent of the fares he picked up were, after Uber and Lyft’s cut, not worth his time. After those changes, from 2018 onward, he says the number of undesirable fares is now closer to 70 or 80 percent, which is why he stopped driving full-time.

    (It’s tricky to compare ride-hail take rates with the taxi industry in any meaningful way, where drivers are on the hook for fixed expenses such as dispatching services, leasing the taxi and/or paying off the cost of a medallion. Taxi drivers have to pay those fees regardless of how much money they earn. In fact, many taxi drivers switched to ride-hailing because percentage-based commissions—along with the hefty sign-up bonuses Uber and Lyft once offered—sounded like a better deal.)

    The drivers’ frustrations with pay cuts and Uber and Lyft’s rising take rates are compounded by other inequities of the ride-hail industry.

    Uber and Lyft argue that drivers are not employees, but independent contractors, since they are allowed to set their own schedules. Both companies lean heavily on this arrangement in advertisements and promotions to recruit drivers, using phrases like “be your own boss” (http://ourweekly.com/news/2015/may/07/becoming-your-own-boss-uber) to describe the arrangement.

    But the reality is much more complicated. In fact, drivers don’t have the power to make many of the decisions that typically come with self-employment. Chief among them is the ability to set prices—or even negotiate—for the services they provide.

    In driver agreements, both companies state that drivers accept their new rates simply by continuing to drive for the company. In other words, the only recourse drivers have to a pay cut is to quit; a familiar arrangement for any employee, but not for anyone who is their “own boss,” and thus would not have income determined by another company’s ever-changing set of rules.

    “It’s really crazy how companies have carte blanche to deprive us of our rights through contract,” Vaheesan wrote in a follow-up email after Jalopnik showed him the contract language. “Courts and Congress have basically accepted this regime as normal.”

    Furthermore, drivers have the option to decline or cancel rides, but there is widespread belief among drivers that if they do it too often, they risk being put in “timeouts” where they receive no requests at all for a certain amount of time, a phenomenon that is frequently documented in driver forums and blogs.
    Drivers don’t have the power to make many of the decisions that typically come with self-employment. Chief among them is the ability to set prices—or even negotiate—for the services they provide.

    Both companies deny they punish drivers in any way for declining rides, but Lyft acknowledged some incentives are only available to drivers with high ride acceptance rates.

    In another bid to increase revenue, Uber is rolling out Comfort Mode (https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20686640/uber-comfort-extra-legroom-quiet-mode-temperature-air-conditioning-ac), which provides riders amenities such as a car with extra legroom, the option to set a desired temperature, or request the driver to be quiet for an extra fee (drivers for Comfort rides get a few cents extra added to their mile-and-time rates).

    Uber says this is merely a request to the driver rather than a requirement, but riders are unlikely to be pleased if a driver refuses to comply with a request they paid extra for. Should a driver not follow the instructions, it is likely they would at the very least receive a lower rating.

    Taken together, rather than being their own bosses, drivers often feel as if they are being governed by algorithms, as Alex Rosenblat wrote in her deeply reported book Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work. (https://www.amazon.com/Uberland-Algorithms-Rewriting-Rules-Work/dp/0520298578) This algorithmic “boss,” which sets pay rates in opaque ways and governs work rules through carrot-and-stick arrangements, not only removes any accountability but results in drivers having to guess what the algorithm wants. In her book, Rosenblat wrote:

    An algorithmic manager enacts its policies, penalizes drivers for behaving in a manner unlike what Uber “suggests,” and incentivizes them to work at particular places in particular times…When I ask drivers if they are their own boss, they usually pause and remark that it’s sort of true, and that they set their own schedule. But an app-employer provides a type of experience that differs from human interactions, and it can be challenging to identify the fault lines of autonomy and control within its automated system.

    In an interview for this story, Rosenblat, who spoke to hundreds of drivers researching her book, added that drivers had different reactions to rides where they thought they didn’t get a fair cut.

    “Some drivers were pissed, and they would say, if I’m an independent contractor you should give me the information I need to make an informed choice,” Rosenblat said. “But other drivers rationalize taking bad fares with the idea that taking a bad one is kind of like karma… If you only take a passenger a couple of blocks on this ride, you might get compensated for a better ride later.”

    Rosenblat added that the karmic realignment theory is a direct result of the lack of transparency from the ride-hail giants. She characterized it as a “magical thinking [drivers] wouldn’t have to resort to if Uber and Lyft gave them the actual facilities to make informed decisions, or to better understand how they might be treated, or rewarded and penalized, for their work performance with valuable or less valuable dispatches.”

    A full-time veteran driver from New Orleans told Jalopnik that she somewhat subscribes to the karmic realignment theory on the take rates, although recent cuts have changed her attitude a bit. She has seen her earnings drop roughly 20 percent this year due to a combination of factors, including an expanding of the driver pool as a result of the companies allowing older vehicles than prior years. As a result, she is considering a job change, even though an occasional health issue makes the flexible hours of ride-hailing especially appealing.

    Even though she prefers driving to her previous jobs in the service industry, she said she has come to believe Uber and Lyft’s take rates ought to be capped, perhaps at 25 or 30 percent, and said she would get behind a driver organizing campaign to make the profession more sustainable.

    But for now, she still avoids looking at individual fare breakdowns. “It just annoys me,” she said, “and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

    –----

    Discussion, Community (492)
    Sort by: Popular

    BigRed91
    Dhruv Mehrotra
    8/26/19 12:18pm

    So this is an at-will gig where you pick your own hours, have no barrier to entry besides owning a car, have no interview process, and can quit whenever you want with no repercussions and you make $30/hour. What exactly are people complaining about?

    If you don’t like it, go get an actual job and quit driving. Hell, get your CDL and go be a delivery driver. Clearly drivers are willing to work for the pay here since the companies are having no issue covering demand (financial issues aside). If you have an issue with the way they do business, don’t drive for them and don’t use their services.
    145
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    Give Me Tacos or Give Me Death
    BigRed91
    8/26/19 12:36pm

    I can’t comment on the average hourly wage an Uber/Lyft driver makes because it almost certainly varies with geography.

    But the entire time you’re driving, you’re burning fuel, wearing out tires and such. Those cost money. They could PROBABLY be deducted from one’s taxes, but I’m not sure the average person knows if that’s true, or keeps their receipts, or has an accountant who can answer the question with any authority.

    So the real wage is almost certainly going to be considerably lower.
    94
    Reply
    eviligloo
    BigRed91
    8/26/19 12:37pm

    I drove for Uber for 6 months in a major market. I never saw the $30 they claim. Actual take home after expenses was closer to $12-$17/hr depending on when it was. Tipping was almost nonexistent.

    How would you come up with a number of $30/hr? Well you would have to ignore all the expenses the driver incurs (taxes, insurance, gas, etc) plus disregard all of the idle time waiting for the next time you are paired up with a driver. There is an airport lot near me where drivers sit for over 2 hours waiting for a single fare (and you don’t know if they are going 40 minutes away or 2 minutes away when you finally DO get it because they don’t tell you in advance). I guarantee none of that time was factored into their calculation.

    I killed an hour just waiting in a lot making $0 once. I’ll never sit in an airport lot again.
    146
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    Cash Rewards
    BigRed91
    8/26/19 12:37pm

    You’re right in a lot of what you’re saying, but when I put off cdl school to do this gig because they say they only take 20% or so, then stiff me another 10-15%, then I’ve wasted time and money because they lied about how they do business. That’s shitty
    89
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    Big Block I-4
    BigRed91
    8/26/19 12:40pm

    You don’t make $30/hr. That is only if you are constantly booked, if you do 6-10 min. trips over three hours you will make $30 in a hour of work time, but it will have taken you 3 hours to work an hour. Their $30/hr booked rate is a useless stat unless you can work non-stop, which is impossible since you are never dropping off and picking people up at the exact same time a place ride after ride after ride.
    147
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    Show more replies in this thread
    Revson
    Dhruv Mehrotra
    8/26/19 12:25pm

    So the companies are ripping off drivers and still losing a metric shit ton of cash. It seems nobody is making any money in this scheme except the investors and executives, ohhhhhhhhhh.
    109
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    For Sweden
    Revson
    8/26/19 12:58pm

    How are the investors making money?
    Illustration for comment
    27
    Reply
    Left Lane is for Passing
    Revson
    8/26/19 1:06pm

    They are the only ones loosing money. Drivers get paid, passenger get cheaper than should be rides.
    13
    Reply
    krhodes1
    Revson
    8/26/19 1:07pm

    I really don’t get how they lose as much money as they do, unless they are heating their buildings by burning $100 bills.

    Somebody is making money here, but it is neither the drivers nor the investors.
    30
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    For Sweden
    Left Lane is for Passing
    8/26/19 1:11pm

    “Billionaires are going bankrupt subsidizing my Uber ride and that is bad.”

    -Jalopnik
    29
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    Show more replies in this thread
    Harry
    Dhruv Mehrotra
    8/26/19 12:35pm

    This is a lot of words dedicated to a fundamentally broken statistical analysis of a non-random survey of an insignificant sample size and some anecdotal stories.
    67
    Reply
    Nytmare
    Harry
    8/26/19 1:52pm

    Well go ahead and do an article on the data you wish you had, so you can compare it to the article Jalopnik did on the data they do have, and then we’ll see whose article is better.
    137
    Reply
    ZHP Sparky, the 5th
    Harry
    8/26/19 1:58pm

    What alternative are you suggesting? The rideshare companies are notorious for keeping their ridership data close to the vest...so that leaves you needing to try gathering what you can from the drivers.

    If you’re willing to fund a larger and more scientific study perhaps you should reach out to the author?

    Or are you suggest some form of regulatory filing requirement for ridership data? Excellent idea, I’m sure Uber and Lyft will be thrilled!
    45
    Reply
    Sean Bond
    Harry
    8/26/19 2:04pm

    I don’t want to say “well, they got your click,” but aside from the informational aspect of this piece (and it does give some insight into Uber/Lyft even if it’s not an incredibly significant sample size), they also are getting traffic on the piece (no pun intended), even by people who don’t think the story matters. So, mission accomplished.
    5
    Reply
    Patrick
    Harry
    8/26/19 2:40pm

    Your comment is entirely anecdotal.
    15
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    Show more replies in this thread
    Hayden Lorell
    Dhruv Mehrotra
    8/26/19 12:10pm

    Uber and Lyft ripping off drivers?
    Illustration for comment

    Seriously, I started to notice these discrepancies within 3 months of driving for Lyft.

    I did it at the time because my contract job was up, and I was in-between jobs looking for new work. I’m happy I didn’t have to do it for more than the year that I did do it. While it’s a fun and amusing side-gig, driving people around, it’s by no means sustainable with the current structure.

    It was good, quick cash to help me in a rough spot but truly this was never meant to be long term. I don’t see a [regulated] situation where it is any more sustainable than a cab business. In which case, cab companies are you listening?

    If you upgrade to digital dispatching, payment, ride-hailing, etc. on a universal system, and maybe vacuumed a fucking cab more than once a year, you could easily overtake these apps.

    Because as a driver? Fuck these guys. But as a rider? What the fuck is a better option when public transit is a joke, cabs are....cabs, and owning a vehicle is nothing but a headache in urban areas.
    70
    Reply
    ZHP Sparky, the 5th
    Hayden Lorell
    8/26/19 2:00pm

    OK that’s a very reasonable take, but I object to your statement that “this was never meant to be long term”.

    Sure, that’s the companies’ PR spin on things – but the reality is they need rivers to stay with them for as long as possible, and to drive as many hours as they can entice them in to.

    Grandmas trying to make knitting money and college kids in between classes aren’t going to make up the ridership volume they’re looking for in the large markets they’re trying to dominate.
    11
    Reply
    Sean Bond
    Hayden Lorell
    8/26/19 2:07pm

    Yeah, it really sucks because in some ways, Lyft and Uber have revolutionized people getting around (especially in metro areas). It’s so much more convenient than it used to be, response time is insane (4 minutes is about as long as I typically have to wait around my neighborhood), and in general the whole user experience is great for riders.

    But for drivers, and for traffic (and yes, for cabbies), it just blows.
    12
    Reply
    Hayden Lorell
    ZHP Sparky, the 5th
    8/26/19 2:41pm

    My argument to that would be that these “driver incentives” that they use for new drivers are just made up through this price gouging, especially when the driver is out of that probationary period and they’re no longer entitled to driving incentives. I would argue they absolutely can deal with constant driver turnover as it’s not like they have anything invested in the drivers besides giving them a free LED “pill” (after they’ve done over 250 rides). As long as they keep getting desperate people, with or without 4 wheels, who need money, they will keep this shit up.
    4
    Reply
    lonememe
    ZHP Sparky, the 5th
    8/26/19 2:59pm

    I look at it like when I worked retail during college at REI and tried to make a living off of it afterward. As a society, we honestly don’t really need the benefits offered by having full-time long-term employees in areas like retail and cab driving, and companies are recognizing this and moving away from it. This isn’t to say I agree with this practice, as I wish we do still had knowledgable long-term full-timers in specialized retail, but I think this is what’s going on:

    Think of the retail experience prior to the internet. You were going to a store to talk to someone with experience and knowledge (albeit biased) in a field you were less familiar with and had less information available to you about. The long-term full-time retail worker would have been to trade shows and the like to increase their product knowledge, on top of years in the field working with those products. Now that we have review blogs/vlogs, and product reviews on product pages, we kind of don’t need them except for the few specific items that are body fit specific. We can find out more seemingly unbiased information online than they can tell us in-store, so what’s the incentive to keeping them around as they become more expensive for a company to retain? I just don’t think there is one from a business perspective, which is a monetary one, but I wish they’d rethink that since I think there is a less tangible benefit felt by customers in terms of trust and what not.

    Same goes for driver professions. Prior to everyone having GPS on their phone, who was the best source of navigation in a local area? AAA and cab drivers. Well, cab drivers got greedy and people got smart and saw they were being ripped off considering the information is now widely available in your handheld devices. I experienced this in London too when my company booked a black cab from city back to Heathrow. Not exaggerating, it was 3 times more expensive than the Uber I took from Heathrow to the city and there was absolutely zero advantage that I could discern. The black cab driver didn’t say squat to us that would indicate they gleaned something from their supposedly rigorous knowledge test they have to take, and it was just a really typical taxi when it comes down to it.

    I don’t know, it’s just my .02 but I think that’s why we’re seeing these companies try to make it hard to stick around. They just don’t want us to.

    #Uber #Lyft #USA #Ausbeutung #surge_pricing

  • They said you could leave electric scooters anywhere — then the repo men struck backhttps://www.theverge.com/2019/7/24/20696405/dockless-scooters-share-repo-men-repossessor-lawsuit-tow-yard-lime-bird-ly

    The multibillion-dollar dockless scooter industry is going after a repossessor and a bike shop owner who have 10,000 scooters languishing in a tow yard

    By Jul 24, 2019, 10:00am EDT, Amy Martyn

    ThereThere are more electric scooters than people in Pacific Beach, a crowded neighborhood in San Diego known for its bars, surf, attractive college students, and increasingly unaffordable rent. Scooters from Lime, Bird, Lyft, Uber, and Razor are parked along the main path. People can even rent tiny electric bikes from a company called Wheels.

    John Heinkel, a professional repo man with a full head of graying hair and a small and scrappy build, hoists a Lime scooter on its back wheel, setting off the alarm underneath the scooter’s brake. Heinkel muffles the annoying sound with his hand.

    “You want to throw a couple?” he offers at one point, gesturing toward the dumpster, halfway jokingly.

    Dan Borelli, his business partner, says that towing scooters is no different than writing parking tickets. “We aren’t just grabbing scooters off the street and throwing them in a yard,” Borelli insists. “We write a parking ticket for every single one we have.”

    Together, the two men run an operation called ScootScoop. They say that they have impounded thousands of dockless e-scooters around San Diego on behalf of business owners and landlords who are fed up with the deluge of dockless two-wheelers.

    ScootScoop is a simple, low-budget concept, making use of a tow yard and flatbed truck that Heinkel already owns. Their advertising is word-of-mouth. They have no employees and no outside funding. But they seem to pose an existential threat to the multibillion-dollar scooter industry.

    First came the lawsuits. Heinkel and Borelli are accused in a lawsuit filed in California Superior Court in late March of improperly impounding Bird’s scooters and then ransoming them back to the $2 billion company. Lime filed a nearly identical suit soon after.

    The same companies that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars working around any local permits or regulations are now demanding protections under the California Vehicle Code, asking a judge to intervene and save their dockless scooters from ScootScoop. Depositions are scheduled to take place at the end of July.

    “The people of San Diego are being bamboozled by a local tow company scheme,” Bird’s press team says in an emailed statement. “Scooter Removal aka ScootScoop, orchestrated by Talon Auto Adjusters,” the name of Heinkel’s repossession business, “is unlawfully impounding micro-mobility devices and demanding a ransom for their return.”

    Ransom is a word “that we don’t really particularly like,” Borelli told me. “It’s a fake bully word that’s been made up to make our character look worse.”

    Then came the chargers, or the freelance contractors who work in the cutthroat industry of charging scooters with low batteries. (Lime calls its contractors “juicers, while Bird calls them “hunters”). Heinkel and Borelli and one of their ScootScoop clients tell me that they’ve recently caught juicers breaking into a ScootScoop impound storage unit, going after the Lime scooters specifically. The juicers allegedly became violent when confronted. (“This is a disturbing report and such aggressive behavior is never tolerated on the Lime platform,” Lime said in a statement.)

    But today, on this sunny afternoon in April, with scooters zipping by everywhere, it’s hard to imagine how a device that was supposed to be fun and healthy took such a dark turn.

    “Their app specifically says you can ride it ‘anywhere’ and leave it ‘anywhere,’” Borelli says as he pushes a Bird scooter through the Pacific Beach neighborhood. If he sounds slightly bitter, it’s only because he owns a bike shop nearby and believes that dockless scooter companies are trying to steal his customers.

    Nobody cares or tries to stop the men as they push the scooters along. There are too many scooters in circulation for anyone to miss these two. In fact, a few minutes later, a construction worker cheers Heinkel and Borelli on. “Those things are annoying!” he yells. “They started showing up at my house. I live in the suburbs, I was like...” He shakes his head disapprovingly.

    Borelli says the experience is universal. “Everybody says, ‘Where did they come from?’”

    LastLast April, Heinkel and Borelli met me on the boardwalk in matching blue collared shirts, with a crossed-out scooter embroidered on the left breast pocket, to demonstrate what it means to be a scooter-tower. They have dreams of expanding, perhaps by going to another city or working with investors. But for now, it’s just the two of them in San Diego, working around 12 hours a day, seven days a week. They have small tow yards around town and a larger lot in the suburbs that is guarded by security cameras, dogs, and razor wire. They also rolled out an app that clients can use to order a tow.

    Before scooters consumed his life, Heinkel, 55, specialized in hunting down cars and other valuables south of the border. Among the many items he has retrieved on behalf of banks and other clients over his 25-year career: a celebrity’s yacht from Cabo San Lucas, a Hertz rental car that a Russian tourist left in Cancun, and a Ferrari that a con artist abandoned in Mexico City. He characterizes his repo work as a relatively low-risk job because he has the backing of the court system.

    He started out as a young man looking for work after a stint in the Marines. “I discovered that I was not really good at college,” Heinkel says. “I was good at the job of taking stuff from people in the middle of the night or during the day. I can speak, I can think. I realized that it comes down to the ability to de-escalate the problem. Because nobody’s happy when you’re taking their stuff.”

    Borelli, 43, has 29 percent ownership of a bike rental shop in the neighborhood, just off the boardwalk. The first time he saw dockless e-scooters, around February or March of last year, they were brazenly left outside his store.

    Bird, Lime, and their supporters believe that dockless electric scooters can help reduce car dependency. But to Borelli, it seemed that the scooter industry was really trying to replace bicycles. He threw the offending scooters in the dumpster, but they were quickly replaced by more scooters.

    “They’re trying to take away my customers on a daily basis,” he tells me.

    The two men hit it off last year after Heinkel took his daughter for a bike ride in the neighborhood. He needed to put air in her tires and walked into Borelli’s shop. They eventually got to talking about the scooters that seemed to be taking over the boardwalk. Heinkel noted it wasn’t really safe for him to let his two-year-old ride a bike there anymore.

    Borelli pointed out to Heinkel that he already owned a flatbed truck and a tow lot. The next step was obvious. Their first client was Borelli’s frustrated landlord. From there, more business followed.

    “We did not seek anybody out, those property owners came to us,” Heinkel says.

    For the last 54 years, Jim Bostian has managed day-to-day operations at the Crystal Pier Hotel, a hotel property of small cottages built on top of a pier in Pacific Beach. The pier is smack dab in the middle of an especially touristy strip and has a driveway for hotel guests that feeds into the boardwalk.

    In the midst of the scooter explosion, Bostian noticed that people were littering the hotel driveway with scooters, blocking guests from driving in and out. He’s tried asking riders to move the scooters elsewhere. About half have agreed. The other half threw f-bombs.

    Bostian says that he has nothing against scooters. He insists that he likes the idea of emissions-free transportation. But, like others in town, he’s found that dockless scooters have a disturbing ability to reflect the ugliness in people.

    “It’s the people,” he says. “They don’t care. I mean, they just don’t care where they leave them.”

    Not far away, a restaurant owner in Mission Beach tells me that she hired ScootScoop after riders started leaving scooters in front of a wheelchair lift that she built for her disabled customers, blocking access. And a federal lawsuit that a disability rights group filed against Bird, Lime, Razor, and the City of San Diego in January says that scooters are being left in front of wheelchair ramps, curbs, and crosswalks. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit say the scooters are a menace.

    “I’ve almost been knocked over several times,” Alex Montoya, a San Diego-based motivational speaker who wears three prosthetic limbs, tells me. Montoya is the lead plaintiff in the disability lawsuit. “We’re not trying to eliminate the scooters. We’re trying to make sure people ride them responsibly.”

    On July 1st, the City of San Diego implemented new regulations to address the scooter complaints. The regulations will require scooter companies to obtain insurance policies, free the city from all legal liability, cap speeds on the boardwalk, and obtain permits for every scooter in circulation. It’s still too early to tell whether the new regulations will make a difference.

    “We are aware that people are still riding on sidewalks, we are aware that people are colliding into people and then taking off,” San Diego Police Department Lt. Shawn Takeuchi says.

    Bostian, the hotel operator, called ScootScoop last year after reading an article about them in a local newspaper. He tried contacting the scooter companies first, but says they never did anything about the scooters blocking his driveway. Since then, he’s been happy with ScootScoop, and even let them keep some of the impounded scooters in a storage unit on his property.

    But information about where the scooters are stored seems to have made it to the juicers —the freelancers paid a small fee to find scooters with low batteries, charge them overnight, and then drop them back off in the streets. Bostian has noticed that some Limes have gone missing from storage, and he believes that juicers have been cutting the brake cables on scooters to free them from impound in the middle of the night.

    About a month ago, Bostian says that he caught a juicer red-handed, trying to walk off with a scooter that had already been impounded. Bostian ordered him off his property. They got into an argument, and then the juicer pushed him while he was walking away.

    A few weeks later, on June 22nd, Bostian came to work at 5:15 in the morning. Heinkel and Borelli were there, and they told him the police were on the way. He remembers they looked like they had been beaten up.

    WhenWhen Heinkel and Borelli lead me on a scooter-towing tour, it takes about ten minutes to find a dozen or so scooters parked on a property belonging to a hotel owner they work with. They write “tickets” in their app, pick up the scooters, and bring them to their nearby tow closet. It’s around noon, but dozens of scooters are already impounded, neatly organized by brand. Their larger lot in the suburbs, the one guarded with razor wire and dogs, holds the thousands of leftover scooters that Bird and Lime are refusing to pick up, on the basis that ScootScoop is demanding “excessive fees.”

    Heinkel counters the charge is far lower than what tow companies typically ask for when they are towing cars. ScootScoop charges the scooter companies $30 for pick-up and an additional $2 for each day that the scooter is in storage, capping the daily fees off after a month.

    Initially, Bird agreed to play along, after ScootScoop had impounded 1,800 Bird scooters from July through November of 2018. When Bird finally showed up to collect them, it wasn’t a contentious meeting. In fact, company representatives handed over a $40,000 check to cover the towing fees. Then they all took friendly pictures together.

    Afterward, Bird sent ScootScoop an invitation to invoice through Bird Pays, the app that the company uses to pay its contractors. In their lawsuit, Bird admits that it initially paid the $40,000 fee because the company was confused about its rights.

    In hindsight, “it looked like they thought we were going to go away, and we weren’t going to do this anymore, so they tried to play nice guy with us,” Borelli says. He submitted invoices, as instructed, but Bird never paid them again. So ScootScoop stopped releasing its scooters. Lime also discussed a possible settlement with ScootScoop, Borelli says, but never followed through.

    In its complaint, Bird claims they have learned that ScootScoop is actually grabbing scooters from public sidewalks and other city property where they aren’t authorized to do business. (Heinkel and Borelli dispute this.)

    “Defendants’ improper impoundment scheme has caused—and continues to cause—Bird harm,” Bird says in its complaint. “Bird has suffered—and continues to suffer—lost business, not to mention reputational harm, from having fewer scooters in circulation.”

    Bird is demanding that ScootScoop stop doing business, release all Bird scooters, and pay Bird back four times the amount of the fees that they are attempting to bill Bird for the scooters. The company is also demanding punitive damages and “any profits made by Defendants” in the course of their entire scooter-towing career.

    Borelli says that the towing has hardly made a dent in the flow of scooters in town. “They have more devices out there than anybody possibly could think.” (The City of San Diego does not have an official count of how many scooters are out in the wild because they are still reviewing permitting applications.)

    As we walk toward the Pacific Beach boardwalk, a perfectly tan 20-something who looks like he is on his way to the gym passes by. Heinkel says the man works for Wheels and flags him down, to confirm that ScootScoop gets along with the young contractors who work for big scooter. “Keeping it clean,” the Wheels worker says of the scooter towers.

    But not all of their interactions are so friendly.

    On June 22nd, hours before hotel operator Jim Bostian saw into the ScootScoop guys, Heinkel was at the Crystal Pier property in the middle of the night to pick up an order of shipping containers to use as security at his impound lots. He saw that two Lime juicers were already there. They had broken into his storage unit and were holding scooters, he says. Heinkel confronted them, trying to grab the scooters back. He says that one of the workers, a man who towered over Heinkel, punched him a few times. Then he got on the scooter and started riding it toward Heinkel, who says he refused to back down and, as a result, was run over by the scooter. Borelli, who showed up shortly after the fight had started, says he got sideswiped. In a video that Heinkel captured partially of the fight, a man’s voice is heard saying that he works for Lime, and a Lime scooter is clearly visible in the video.

    “We are looking into the incident and will ensure this individual is removed from our platform, and we stand ready to support however we can,” a Lime spokesperson said in a statement.

    (Lt. Takeuchi with the San Diego Police Department confirms that Heinkel filed a police report describing a fight over stolen scooters, but the report does not name a specific scooter brand.)

    “All over something that is $4.50 each,” Heinkel says.

    Heinkel sounds confident that the new shipping containers will keep the juicers away for good. And neither he nor Borelli sound very worried about the lawsuit. They’ve responded to Bird’s lawsuit with a counter-complaint, and their attorney tells me that their defense will focus on private property rights because there is some ambiguity over whether scooters are considered vehicles under the California Vehicle Code.

    When I call them in July, Heinkel and Borelli say that they recently celebrated impounding their 10,360th scooter with some donuts and large coffees from 7/11. Then they got back to work.

    “If you take all the BS that they’ve thrown out, and you take our BS, and you take it down, it’s a very simple concept,” Heinkel says. “They have taken their stuff and placed it on someone else’s property without permission.”

    “Now that’s them, and here’s us. We’re two guys who went to the property owners and got permission with that property owner to remove that stuff off their property. That’s all it is.”

  • Netflix explains why it snuck a physical...
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/1/20750424/netflix-physical-activity-tracker-data-stream-quality-test

    Netflix explains why it snuck a physical activity tracker onto some phones Netflix was researching how to improve video quality when you’re on the go Netflix managed to alarm some Android users who noticed that the popular streaming app was detecting their physical motion activity without explaining why. The company confirmed to The Verge that it was using this data as part of a test to determine whether it could find a way to better optimize streaming performance when customers were on (...)

    #Netflix #sport #mouvement #surveillance