Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tell me why

Presumably because the last bit just happened.

It's in the post:

> for the first time since 2019, and tried to login to uber, still blocked

Because when it happened the first time, I was too busy having a vacation that I did not want to bother myself dealing with Uber, and just thought, must be a mistake, I'll sort it out soon. Didn't get to travel again until now.

This makes me think that if it works one way, it might also work the other way. I.e. find a way to pay them in CAD and then refund in USD.

Agreed, it's not like we don't have alternatives.

UberEATS didn't honor a buy 1 get 1 free promo and I ditched them (after I spoke with customer service) along with Uber ride.

Lyft has unfortunately no where near the global presence that Uber has. In fact, I'm not even sure they operate anywhere outside of North America.

Came here to past just that. Also since the advent of Uber, local taxi services got a fire lit under them, and now many have their own app with up front pricing and route planning.

Daily warning that not everyone lives in the USA and sometimes there are no alternatives to Uber in certain countries.

I actually had to uninstall Lyft after they kept sending me marketing push notifications that couldn't be turned off. It's not reasonable to disable notifications for Lyft, so the whole app had to go.

Do you think that Lyft would not do this?

OP wrote:

> I don't get how a ride hailing company thinks [it's] cool to behave like a bank.

Rather than "bank," they could have written "global corporation" without sacrificing accuracy. When you have billions of customers, each worth a small amount, problems with fraud that cost a much larger amount, and an algorithmic moderation toolset... the logical, financially-obvious outcome is treating individual customers who are inadvertently harmed by that automatic moderation like garbage.

In what world do software companies let AI make decisions in a black box without spitting out logs or some code that maps to the action it made?

If your username there is similar to your username here, that seems likely; "fig" and "ass" together tripped the Scunthorpe filter, but not right away.

That's true, but that's really on google.

anecdote:

I got an email one day to me (first and last name) for the receipt of a small medical purchase that definitely wasn't mine. At first I thought was getting scammed.

Then I realized, the only thing that was correct was my first and last name. Address, last 4 of PAN, state, everything was incorrect.

Upon opening the eml directly I realized it was actually sent to firstnamelastname@gmail.com, whereas my email address is firstname.lastname@gmail.com (note the period).

Did some googling, there was in fact someone with my first and last name in the area of the address.

I called the phone number given, it was indeed a man with the same first and last name. Explained what happened and forwarded the email.

So while, yes, Uber absolutely should be doing better, so should google.

I'm guessing someone is going to tell me that's correct behavior according to the spec, and if so, the spec is wrong, full stop. Those are not the same email addresses.

Can't you just reset the password on account without the dot it in? Lock them out.

I get this ALL. THE. TIME.

I usually take over & lock / delete the account or alert their fraud department, along with the Google Answers link about how the dots work.

LinkedIn scraper spam without the dot? "Hi thanks for wanting to hire me, I don't reward scrapers"

Ironically enough I didn't put in this dot-removal logic in the app I maintain at work. For one, it makes creating test accounts really easy - the second is that most of our customers have their own domain, so @gmail is very rare.

I've had something like this with a Spanish-language Netflix account. Kept getting email in Spanish for it. Tried contacting Netflix in lots of ways, and nothing worked. Eventually, I used a password reset to take control of the account and just disabled it. I assume whoever created the account didn't have access to it.

do you have a good reason to not reach out to your network to help your wife? seems odd to not help your SO over something rather helpful for quality of life

What a terrible company with terrible processes. I'm glad i stayed away from them. On the other hand taking advantage of that sweet investor money would have been something.

... and this is why I'm so glad that the EU is seriously planning an AI law which will grant consumers the right to appeal against an AI decision and request a human to explain the decision.

And if you use an AI for high-stakes decisions and you can't explain why it decided a certain way, you'll get sued into the ground similar to how the GDPR made it conveniently easy to force international megacorps to delete your data and stop spamming you.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...

   if( ( Coefficient1*RiskFactor1 + Coefficient2*RiskFactor2 + ... ) / ProfitPotential3 ) > CutoffNumber )
      BanAccount = true;

> I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup. When I finally had enough I canceled the ride and then was charged a “cancelation charge” for canceling.

I've had the exact some scenario with Bolt.

Your credit card company is the entity you can expect to apply basic logic.

In the short term, that logic will be to refund your money to keep your annual spend, but not to bother Uber. In the long term, this could raise the fees Uber pays for credit card services.

Long before Uber, a JAX airport auto rental was improperly tacking an $8 fee onto every "paid in full" Hotwire reservation. This can add up over a year. When challenged, they lied and claimed it was an upgrade. American Express of course made no effort to protest this, they just refunded my $8. Not very satisfying, but still my best course of action.

>they’ve increasingly become the transport option with a terrible customer experience, which is what they set out to change in the first place.

That's not what they set out to change at all. Their goal from the very beginning was exclusively to change who gets all the money for terrible customer service.

I enabled 2FA on my account and then lost my phone and couldn't find where I saved the backup codes. I tried to contact their support to see what my options were but that was completely useless. Bots and canned responses. No humans whatsoever. After many, many emails I finally got (what I think) was an actual human to reply and all they sent me was their support article on how to change my password. I tried to explain why that doesn't work but they had no idea what I was talking about and they just sent me the same support article again. Uber accounts are tied to your phone number, so I pretty much lost access to Uber completely unless I feel like changing my phone number. Maybe I'll try my old Grand Central/Google Voice number but I doubt that will work since they probably think it's a bot number.

I bet if I include words like "attack" or "sexual assault" in the email then I'll get past their first-line bot response filter. But I don't care about it that much. Fuck 'em.

In any case, I use Lyft exclusively now. Which is fine because I've found that pretty much every Uber driver is also a Lyft driver.

> I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup

I had that exact same experience. Some of them even messaged me encouraging me to please cancel for them so that they would not incur a penalty. (I refused.)

I've been using yellow cabs in cities again. Simple & straightforward.

I think they started to allow drivers to cancel rides so they can claim they are not employees. So now drivers cancel the rides that are no very profitable.

I had the same thing happen in my city. After I had been waiting for 20-30 minutes, I was attacked by a stranger and left unconscious and bloody in a nearby alleyway. After explaining this to Uber, they informed me that the 'no-show' fee I was charged would stand. It wasn't their fault I was attacked, but I will never use Uber again.

Uber drivers want to make more money. Uber wants to be profitable. It turns out the two may not be reconcilable. The cancellation behavior you noticed is a direct result of this. The way it works is that Uber is trying to force drivers to accept rides if they’re available. There are many rides drivers do not want, usually because they can’t actually be delivered profitably at Uber’s published price. What the drivers really want are the premium rides, but Uber will send them plenty of chaff to go along with that wheat. So the drivers game the system and cancel after accepting.

There are scenarios where this is highly predictable. Airports at rush hour will inevitably get this behavior in most places I fly. (Note: I only use Uber internationally, domestically I use Lyft. I do not know how Uber works within the US anymore.)

The solution, if you want to use it, is to pay for the up-market rides. You magically will suddenly stop being canceled. Then Uber goes back to being the way it used to work (the drivers are also more pleasant when they’re actually making money to shuffle you from point A to point B). Or you can do what I’ve taken to doing now that I’m traveling again, and try public transit. Since I mostly travel to major European cities these days, this is usually quite reasonable, and often faster than a car anyway.

In Australia they have become more expensive than alternatives. It's better to grab a traditional cab these days.

The same thing happened to me with Tinder. I guess… because they would never tell me why I was banned, even though my profile is boring and tame and so are all my chats.

Lots. Large parts of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan looks manageable too, etc. It all depends on destination and area of course, but in countries with decent public transport any part where you can't get to by bus or train or ferry tends to have decent local taxi companies to fill in the gaps.

I base my travel around public transport almost exclusively. I've never even used Uber or any other service like that. (And obviously, I don't need a car (or ride hailing service) living in a medium sized city in the Netherlands either.)

Public service announcement:

SSN's are not unique, and were never intended to be. They are assigned using an allocation scheme that ensures people of similar age will not have the same SSN, and that allows localities to independently allocate them at birth without creating collisions.

I've barely used any ride sharing apps but I definitely did not cough up my SSN. Can you just start over with a new account and no SSN, maybe a new CC?

GDPR is not enforced strongly enough to matter.