I'm not sure why you think why this discovery has to be some sort of "effort in trying to tarnish DeepSeek". Deepseek is the #1 downloaded app and and the media can't stop talking about it. That means a lot more people are looking into the app and possibly finding vulnerabilities, no conspiracy needed.
Responsible disclosure normally means you wait up to 90 days so they can fix it, before you disclose it to the public. In this case, it was fixed immediately, so they disclosed it to the public immediately.
Which is another thing it seems Chinese corporations do better than American ones.
Installing Lineage by itself will drastically reduce power consumption on many devices, as vendor bloat is wiped. A net gain is possible, even with ACC 80% in place.
With a Pixel, there is less bloat, so it is less of a factor with this particular device. However, you don't get the full suite of Chrome/Maps/Gmail/Drive/Photos/etc. installed by default, and what you have not installed will not drain your battery.
In any case, one would hope that Google's safeguards are equaled by ACC.
This seems surprisingly high to me, unless you're constantly on extreme power saving mode. I liked the 4a and still have it in a drawer, but replaced it partly because I couldn't order a new screen and the battery life was frustratingly terrible after a while
The picture at the end showing deepseek's privacy policy and being concerned that it's "a security risk" is hilarious[1]. Basically every B2C company collects this sort of information[2], and is far less intrusive than what social networks collect[3]. But because it's Chinese and at the risk of overtaking Western companies, people are suddenly worried about device information and IP addresses?
I welcome friction, so I'll be blunt: I disagree with you, not because what you are saying is wrong but because you only consider systematic data collection.
That's not the issue here.
There's a difference between democracies like the United States or European countries, no matter how IMPERFECT they are, and a dictatorship that does not allow dissenting opinions.
There's a difference in how the data collected will be used.
Freedom of speech, even when it is relative, is better than totalitarianism.
>There's a difference between democracies like the United States or European countries, no matter how IMPERFECT they are, and a dictatorship that does not allow dissenting opinions.
>There's a difference in how the data collected will be used.
>Freedom of speech, even when it is relative, is better than totalitarianism.
I don't disagree with "democracy is better than totalitarianism", but what does that have to do with collecting device information and IP addresses? Is that excuse a cudgel you can use against any behavior that would otherwise be innocuous? It's fine to be against deepseek because you're concerned about them getting sensitive data via queries, or even that their models be a backdoor to project chinese soft power, but hand wringing about device information and IP addresses is absurd. It makes as much sense as being concerned that the CCP/deepseek does meetings, because even though every other companies does meetings, CCP/deepseek meetings could be used for totalitarianism.
Also, the same people that complain about this are just fine with a western government having access to the same data via big corporations. Why being democratic gives you a free access card to disregard privacy, in other words, doing exactly the opposite of what is expected from a free society?
I don't disagree with you either and like you, I'm entirely against privacy violations in any way, shape or form.
I admit I am concerned when I see blatant algorithmic manipulation of social platforms to favor any narrative that aligns with geopolitical objectives.
I also wrote about the TikTok algo a few days ago. You'll see what I think of user privacy violations (closed ecosystem + basically a keylogger in this case):
>I'm entirely against privacy violations in any way, shape or form.
>Our privacy should be respected.
Characterizing device information and IP addresses as "privacy violations" is a stretch. If you showed a history railing against this sort of stuff, agnostic of geopolitical alignment, then you get a pass, but I think it's fair to assume the converse until proven otherwise.
>In the meantime: strong encryption at every corner, please!
Irrelevant. The data collection is done by first parties. Encryption doesn't do anything.
>I admit I am concerned when I see blatant algorithmic manipulation of social platforms to favor any narrative that aligns with geopolitical objectives.
>I cannot stand when dissenting voices or opinions are shadow-banned.
What does this have to do with privacy? Again, it's fine to be against "blatant algorithmic manipulation of social platforms" or whatever, but dragging seemingly unrelated topics in an attempt to amass as big pile of greviances as possible is disingenuous.
>I also wrote about the TikTok algo a few days ago. You'll see what I think of user privacy violations (closed ecosystem + basically a keylogger in this case):
Where's the keylogging? I skimmed the article and the only thing I could find was a passing mention about an article that you "was advised not to publish it and I didn’t". How much keylogging could possibly going on in a short video app? Is the "keylogging" just a way to make "we measure how engaged someone is with a video" as sinister as possible?
>Characterizing device information and IP addresses as "privacy violations" is a stretch.
I agree: this is a characterization I never made. FYI, I also collect this type of data about you when you visit my website. That said, telemetry + totalitarianism = bad combo.
>Irrelevant. The data collection is done by first parties. Encryption doesn't do anything.
Even if data is collected by first parties, encryption is still highly relevant because it ensures that the data remains secure in transit and at rest. It does a lot.
>What does this have to do with privacy? Again, it's fine to be against "blatant algorithmic manipulation of social platforms" or whatever, but dragging seemingly unrelated topics in an attempt to amass as big pile of greviances as possible is disingenuous.
You are aggressive for no reason whatsoever. There's nothing disingenuous: when users are shadow-banned by platforms under dictatorships, they end up flagged, and their private data is often analyzed for nefarious reasons. There's a link with privacy but I'll stop at this stage if we cannot have a civilized discussion.
>Where's the keylogging? I skimmed the article and the only thing I could find was a passing mention about an article that you "was advised not to publish it and I didn’t". How much keylogging could possibly going on in a short video app? Is the "keylogging" just a way to make "we measure how engaged someone is with a video" as sinister as possible?
“TikTok iOS subscribes to every keystroke (text inputs) happening on third party websites rendered inside the TikTok app. This can include passwords, credit card information and other sensitive user data. (keypress and keydown). We can’t know what TikTok uses the subscription for, but from a technical perspective, this is the equivalent of installing a keylogger on third party websites.”
Please note that this article is outdated (August 2022). Importantly, the article does not claim that any data logging or transmission is actively occurring. Instead, it highlights the potential technical capabilities of in-app browsers to inject JavaScript code, which could theoretically be used to monitor user interactions.
> I admit I am concerned when I see blatant algorithmic manipulation of social platforms to favor any narrative that aligns with geopolitical objectives.
I'm curious how robust this principle is for you, because China and Russia are not the first countries that come to mind when talking about the (actual, existing, documented) manipulation of US speech and media by a foreign government.
Yet it seems we can only have this discussion, ironically, when the subject is a US government-approved one like China. Anything else would be problematic and unsafe.
It’s also important to recognize that the Chinese government is known to walk into internet service companies and demand they censor, alter data, delete things. No court order or search warrant required.
China considers industry to be completely subservient to government. Checks and balances are secondary to ideas like harmony and collective well being.
Amusing Bruno seems to think in terms of labels when the reality is that the USA imprisons far more people per capita, and blatantly disregards its so-called "core freedoms" (ie, Bill of Rights) for its citizens very often.
This kind of person has a lot of cognitive dissonance going on.
>Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.
Source? Aside from bad models (eg. ST3000DM001), their failure rates are comparable to other vendors, hovering around the low single digit percentage points.
I'm mostly concerned about the power cord getting unplugged if, say, somebody is vacuuming around the area. On top of the usual "whole machine gets turned off" failure mode that happens maybe 10-20x a year in my neighborhood because of power loss there is a "machine is turned on but HDD is powered off" case.
Personally I don't trust a NAS as far as I can throw it, or rather I'd use one the way I use Amazon S3.
My home server has a ZFS array, the media server and some other programs access it directly. If I want to move files to or from it I use SFTP. If I want to back files up to it I use rsync. I have Lightroom running pretty good on an external HDD, no way I'd take my chances running it on a NAS.
By "NAS" most people mean "box they bought from someone to share files on a network" - think Qnap or Synology. They'll call a "NAS" that is home-built a server, even if they do basically the same thing.
To make it more fun, you'll have people refer to "I don't have a NAS, I run FreeNAS on my server."
An appliance with the primary role of storage, and the ability to share files over the network are the distinguishing features for a NAS. Network support for iSCSI, SMB, NFS makes a NAS; sharing data exclusively over the media protocols (http, rtsp, etc) makes it a media server
People have been battle testing those cheap as possible external drives on top of hot xboxs in enclosed cabinets for years and years now. Backup, and I would think failure rates would be too small to consider.
Doesn't it use regular cellular frequencies? You might be able to "disable this" by using manual network selection, but if they use the same mcc mnc as tmobile (their partner), it'll be impossible to distinguish.
>Old phones are an underappreciated resource, imo.
Not really. Old phones don't receive security patches and can be trivially unlocked to extract all relevant information. Sure, it might not have your nudes or bank login, but if you're using it to coordinate the protest that's plenty of incriminating evidence for the police.
>For alternate cell/SMS service I have a RedPocket SIM. (note: I see now it's $45/yr on ebay.
You have to be very careful with this, otherwise it's trivial to tie the phone/SIM back to you. Off the top of my head:
* the billing/shipping address used to order the SIM
* any payment information used to top-up the account
* location correlations with any other devices you own (for instance, if your burner phone pings the same towers as your primary phone for an extended period of time)
* using it for anything other than protests (eg. as a "burner" number when applying for jobs to avoid spam)
It depends on the threat model. A local police force vacuuming up cell data looking for easy targets and ways to intimidate protestors is different than a targeted investigation by a state actor to identify everyone at all costs.
The Jan 6 insurrection is a good example of how difficult it is in a real world scenario to ID specific people in a large protest, and many of them got caught because they talked about it afterward on Facebook. If you are cell phone 2,347 on a spreadsheet of 33,422 phones and the number has no associated locational data, open source information, etc. you are way safer than bringing your regular phone, while not being an easy target and being able to communicate if you need to.
>The reasoning behind this is that your fingerprints and face etc. are public knowledge.
Not really. You can be compelled to give blood sample for alcohol testing, but your blood is hardly "public knowledge". Same thing with strip searches.
That is usually due to 'implied consent' laws. Most states have it written into what you sign to get your license that you must submit to DUI testing. Generally, you can refuse, but the penalty for refusal is worse than the DUI penalty.
>To avoid having to pay any difference to make up the hourly wage to drivers, Uber runs an algorithm which kicks drivers out of the app randomly if demand gets too low, without warning or indication of when they can get back in. It can be minutes or hours. So the drivers remain on the road, driving/idling, waiting to get back into the app. The "work" is still getting done, but it doesn't count against Uber.
I get legislators want uber drivers to earn a living wage, but expecting uber to continue allowing unlimited amount of drivers to be "online", when they have to pay for them is absurd.
>Imagine a small restaurant doing similar, deciding at random slow times instead of sending staff home for the day, they assign them no tables and mark them as off-the-clock. When demand picks up again, they get assigned some tables and resume making money.
You're trying to imply small businesses don't do this but this happens all the time. It's not even limited to minimum wage laws. After the ACA was passed, everyone started avoiding hiring people for more than 32 hours if they could, to skirt the "you have to provide healthcare to all full time employees" requirement.
If Uber has let so many drivers on the app such that they cannot earn a minimum wage, they should stop aggressively enrolling new drivers. They could have also kicked people out for full days, rest of shift, or given an indicator of when they may try again. Something that leaves it more clear they are off and don't linger around to try and get back in.
Restaurants/retail will reduce staffing due to demand, but they don't leave people hanging by an on-call thread the way this automated Uber model did. Tends to be more like cutting shifts off early or calling people not to come in. It is not this automated app-driven robo labor optimization. People aren't being told to go outside and maybe they'll get called back in 5 minutes, 1 hour, or 1 day.
Agreed a lot of businesses moved people to 32 hour weeks to avoid ACA, which is a different issue.. how's all the on-demand faux contractor workforces healthcare though?
>If Uber has let so many drivers on the app such that they cannot earn a minimum wage, they should stop aggressively enrolling new drivers.
Most of those drivers were presumably enrolled before that legislation was passed/came into force. Blaming uber for having those drivers seems like a stretch.
> They could have also kicked people out for full days, rest of shift, or given an indicator of when they may try again. Something that leaves it more clear they are off and don't linger around to try and get back in.
Is this a real concern? This seems like something that sucks for the first few days and then everyone realizes what's the new normal and adapts accordingly. I don't doubt uber could have done better here, but characterizing poor UI as "circumvent the NYC law to try and ensure Uber drivers get a fair minimum wage" is a stretch. It's also unclear how uber benefits from drivers being frustrated at the UI.
>Restaurants/retail will reduce staffing due to demand, but they don't leave people hanging by an on-call thread the way this automated Uber model did.
Uber driver are not "on call". They can sign off at any time. Sure, they might need the money, but in that respect I don't see how that's any different than 0 hour contracts that some restaurants have.
>Agreed a lot of businesses moved people to 32 hour weeks to avoid ACA, which is a different issue.. how's all the on-demand faux contractor workforces healthcare though?
The point isn't that being an uber driver is a dream job, it's that contrary to your rhetoric of "Imagine a small restaurant doing similar", small restaurants indeed will do something similar, if given the chance.
> I don't doubt uber could have done better here, but characterizing poor UI as "circumvent the NYC law to try and ensure Uber drivers get a fair minimum wage" is a stretch.
Honestly, that's _exactly_ what it looks like to me. Law makes it so that they have to pay drivers that are available to drive but aren't actively involved in a fair... so they change the system so that, if they don't have fairs for you you're not considered available to drive. Everything about that reeks of trying to circumvent the law.
Now, I don't know that there _is_ a better solution that works with their business model; but the answer to that isn't "cheat", it's "your business model it's sustainable".
You effectively have two options. Option one, Uber signs up as many drivers as they have customers during off-peak hours and then if you want to drive only during peak hours to take advantage of surge pricing you can't and if you want a ride then there won't be enough drivers, because they won't sign up any more if they'd have to pay someone for 8 hours to have them only drive for one. Option two, there are that many full-time drivers and then they sign up some additional part-time drivers to satisfy peak demand, but the part-time drivers are part-time and they're not getting paid during off-peak hours.
Which one do you want? Notice that there is no one better off under the first option; the people who don't want to work part-time still have the option not to under the second option, the first just prevents them from doing it even if they want to.
Option 3 - You hire enough people to cover general demand, have surge prices to lower demand when there's not enough drivers, and charge prices for normal/lower demand that allows you to make sure everyone you have on duty makes at least minimum wage.
And if you _can't_ find a solution that allows you to pay everyone minimum wage, then you don't get to do business. I can think of plenty of businesses I could set up that would make me money and allow me to pay the people that work for me below minimum wage. But, see, we don't allow that; and we created a minimum wage law to make it very clear that we don't allow that.
Not every business model is viable given the rules society has setup (to protext society as a whole)
> Option 3 - You hire enough people to cover general demand, have surge prices to lower demand when there's not enough drivers, and charge prices for normal/lower demand that allows you to make sure everyone you have on duty makes at least minimum wage.
This is just a rehash of Option 1. The point of surge pricing is to get more drivers to drive during peak times. If you're instead using that money to pay other people to be idle then the average driver makes less money because part of what would have been their compensation is now going to pay someone else to sit around idle, and they lose the ability to make a higher hourly rate by working only during peak demand. Which in turn reduces the number of drivers available during surge pricing and there goes your funding source for hiring more drivers, so you're back to laying off lots of drivers who would otherwise have part-time work, but now also reducing the median driver's hourly rate.
> Not every business model is viable given the rules society has setup (to protext society as a whole)
Minimum wage laws in general have never protected anyone. If there is another job available to you that pays more than minimum wage and is otherwise on equally favorable terms, you would have taken that one regardless of whether a lower paying job is available. If the lower paying job is better, e.g. because it pays slightly less but you also have lower costs in terms of commuting distance or greater flexibility in hours etc., taking away that option "for your own protection" is patronizing BS.
This is why minimum wages are set at the level that only ~1% of people make minimum wage, because it minimizes the damage done by the law while still allowing opportunistic politicians to claim they've done something. Actually doing something is creating opportunities for people that have better conditions or pay higher wages so that it doesn't matter if someone is offering low wages because people aren't desperate to accept them for lack of alternatives.
Notice also that taking away alternatives can do more than just force you to take a worse one. It can make the worse alternative worse. Suppose there is a job with low pay but it's across the street from where you live, and another one with an hour commute each way, costing you $40 and two hours/day. You take the first one unless the second one pays significantly better, at least several dollars/hour more to compensate you for the gas and the time. Unless the first one is banned and goes away because it was $1/hour below the "minimum". Then not only are you stuck with the second one, they can lower their pay to the minimum when they would otherwise have had to pay more to compensate for the commute because you no longer have an alternative.
> Minimum wage laws in general have never protected anyone. If there is another job available to you that pays more than minimum wage and is otherwise on equally favorable terms, you would have taken that one regardless of whether a lower paying job is available.
That "if" there is doing a lot of work. I think you underestimate how many people out there are in a situation where it's the job they have or the street. Not everyone has the option to just go pick another job, and the people that don't is heavily skewed towards the people with the worst jobs.
> That "if" there is doing a lot of work. I think you underestimate how many people out there are in a situation where it's the job they have or the street.
That's making the opposite case from the one you want. You take away the lower paying job when it was the only one available and now they're on the street because there is no alternative.
"Fortunately", in more cases than not the "if" was the actual. This is geometry: If there is one viable employer within 50 miles of where you live then statistically there are four within 100 miles, 9 within 150 miles and 16 within 200 miles, because area is pi r^2. So if you take away the first job there is a large chance that there is a second one with a much worse commute. But the commute is going to more than eliminate any value from getting paid slightly more, which is why they didn't take that job to begin with.
Option three: They get enough drivers to cover most of the peak, and end up paying for some idle time otherwise. Just like almost every company with permanent staff.
Alternatively option two with an explicit, upfront decisions who is actually part-time, so there are no surprises and the rules are known.
> Option three: They get enough drivers to cover most of the peak, and end up paying for some idle time otherwise. Just like almost every company with permanent staff.
That only works when the difference in demand between peak and off-peak is small relative to the cost of idle workers. In this case it isn't.
> Alternatively option two with an explicit, upfront decisions who is actually part-time, so there are no surprises and the rules are known.
Then you'll be objecting that the majority of people are classified as part-time because there will be a lot of people who get 40 hours some weeks and zero other weeks due to changes in seasonal demand etc.
Also, the result of that would be that in the slower weeks, one person gets 40 hours and one person gets 10 instead of each person getting 25 hours, and that's obviously not to the advantage of the person whose hours you're cutting. Which in turn implies that the person getting 40 will be signing up for some fresh hell like "you get 40 hours but we choose when they are" and then they're both getting screwed by the change.
> one person gets 40 hours and one person gets 10 instead of each person getting 25 hours
If these are the upfront conditions, why is that an issue?
But the main issue you're getting closer and closer to is: uber's model doesn't seem to be profitable if they have to pay and employ with reasonable conditions. They don't have to be profitable though. We really can let them fail. The reasonable cities can then provide standard overprovisioned public transport.
> If these are the upfront conditions, why is that an issue?
Because they might have both preferred 25 hours with flexibility to a forced choice between 40 inflexible hours or 10 flexible ones.
> uber's model doesn't seem to be profitable if they have to pay and employ with reasonable conditions.
Uber is an app. Their primary cost is paying drivers. They're not going to fail because you imposed this inflexibility on them. What's going to happen is they're going to have fewer drivers and provide less service. But "have fewer drivers" is those people losing their jobs, which isn't really helping them out.
> But "have fewer drivers" is those people losing their jobs, which isn't really helping them out.
Laws that regulate how people can be treated by employers have always been a balance between _some_ people having it worse (ex, their jobs not being available) so that the _vast_ majority of people have it better.
The same things is true of things like safety regulations. It costs more to be safe, and you have to charge more or hire less if you're going to have them. But overall, society is better for them (even though some people no longer have jobs).
> Laws that regulate how people can be treated by employers have always been a balance between _some_ people having it worse (ex, their jobs not being available) so that the _vast_ majority of people have it better.
Not all of them. For example, a law that requires companies that agree to pay workers for services rendered to actually pay them has no obvious mechanism to destroy jobs and may even create jobs as people become willing to do work when they otherwise wouldn't have trusted the employer to pay them with no enforcement mechanism.
The types of rules you're talking about are typically lobbied for by specific groups to gain advantage for themselves at the expense not of the employer but of their competition for employment, i.e. other workers. For example, the passage of minimum wage laws came about during the Jim Crow era because what white workers wanted from discrimination was to prevent black workers from "taking their jobs" but what the discrimination was actually causing was for the black workers to accept lower pay and then receive the jobs anyway. The law was motivated by the desire to prohibit the latter and thereby cause the black workers to lose their jobs because then the discrimination would manifest in the hiring decision rather than the wages.
This is the same category of thing which is happening with Uber, except that the groups aren't black people and white people, they're part-time Uber drivers and full-time ones. The full-time ones want the part-time ones out of the market, so they keep lobbying for laws to make casual acceptance of fares more burdensome.
> The same things is true of things like safety regulations. It costs more to be safe, and you have to charge more or hire less if you're going to have them. But overall, society is better for them (even though some people no longer have jobs).
The premise of safety regulations is that people are busy and don't have time to read through statistical studies to determine if a more expensive product is worth the cost because it's sufficiently safer, so the government should do the evaluation and then require the ones that are worth the cost.
The problem is the government doesn't require the ones that are worth the cost, they require that ones whose manufacturers or other interest groups have the best lobbyists even when they're not worth the cost, and then net-negative rules accumulate over time. Soon you have a thicket of rules where the vast majority aren't worth the cost, and a tiny minority that are but are mostly things the market would have demanded even without the mandate. This is a big reason why, for example, it's so expensive to build housing in the US and high rents are causing homelessness, preventing family formation and transferring wealth from working people to landlords.
Notice also the scam here: New "safety standards" are passed but they don't apply to existing buildings, so people continue living in the existing buildings (which by this logic are unsafe) because now newer buildings have been made prohibitively expensive. This benefits landlords, not safety, but attempts to remove the rules are met with claims of impacting safety.
That's not an option though. The option uber gives is "maybe 25, maybe not, you'll find out on the day".
That's still "how do we keep uber in business". There are alternatives like good quality overprovisioned public transport which can take most of those customers. It can also deal with peak situations like events.
It's a sunk cost fallacy to think of uber as some kind of last resort employer that can ignore the rules.
> That's not an option though. The option uber gives is "maybe 25, maybe not, you'll find out on the day".
It's 25 when it's 25. Which you can still have a preference for when the alternative is 10, or the alternative is "40 hours but your hours are 9PM to 1AM and then 5AM to 9AM".
> That's still "how do we keep uber in business".
Uber is still in business when they require you to work split shifts in the wee hours. We're trying to save drivers and riders from the consequences of foolish rules.
> There are alternatives like good quality overprovisioned public transport which can take most of those customers.
Overprovisioned public transport is just Uber with lower efficiency. You have a municipal bus with zero or one passengers instead of a smaller private car with one passenger or avoid the trip because you know before you start that no one is going there.
> It can also deal with peak situations like events.
Ten thousand people exit the stadium at the same time and each want to go to a different destination, thousands of which are single family homes in the suburbs.
> It's a sunk cost fallacy to think of uber as some kind of last resort employer that can ignore the rules.
The assumption is that Uber is bad, but Uber is better than taxi medallion cartels or private cars that then have to be parked in the city instead of picking up a different fare going in the opposite direction.
Uber is _different_ than the taxi system. Not all taxi systems are "taxi medallion cartels", even in cities with taxi medallions. And, when it started, Uber was worse than the taxis in a lot of cities in many ways. It's gotten better since then, but pretty much exclusively to try to prevent the cities from throwing them out on their asses.
>Honestly, that's _exactly_ what it looks like to me. Law makes it so that they have to pay drivers that are available to drive but aren't actively involved in a fair... so they change the system so that, if they don't have fairs for you you're not considered available to drive. Everything about that reeks of trying to circumvent the law.
How is this any different than minimum wage laws which are ostensibly enacted to increase worker's salaries, but businesses respond by hiring people for fewer hours? I agree that uber is thwarting legislators' attempt to improve the earnings of uber drivers, but this was the outcome everyone has foresaw, including the legislators. Characterizing it as some cunning chicanery on uber's part is absurd.
> How is this any different than minimum wage laws which are ostensibly enacted to increase worker's salaries, but businesses respond by hiring people for fewer hours?
Nobody is hiring more people to counter the laws "to increase worker's salaries", they're hiring fewer workers to counter the laws that require certain benefits (health insurance) for full time workers. That's a totally different issue.
> Blaming uber for having those drivers seems like a stretch.
It seems perfectly predictable that a loophole you actively exploit will be closed off. Don't build your business model around loopholes, or be prepared to face the consequences.
> If Uber has let so many drivers on the app such that they cannot earn a minimum wage, they should stop aggressively enrolling new drivers.
Why? All Uber cares about are the fees it collects, which are dependent on the total number of miles and total number of rides. It has no reason to care if its drivers make minimum wage or not, unless it can be shown that if they cannot, Uber will not have enough drivers. Fortunately for Uber, there is no evidence that this is the case.
> If Uber has let so many drivers on the app such that they cannot earn a minimum wage, they should stop aggressively enrolling new drivers.
The number of drivers needed at any given time is completely variable. It's obviously a larger number during peak travel periods.
Suppose number of drivers needed off-peak is 100 and the number needed at the peak is 500 and they have 300 drivers. They need to sign up another 200 drivers to satisfy the peak demand, but they already have 200 more than they can use off-peak. What would you have them do? They effectively need a large proportion of the drivers to be working part time specifically during peak hours.
Moreover, there are many people willing to do that. They're not sitting in their cars idling, they're at home doing chores or other contract work and they only get in their car if the app tells them they can get paid. This is not a problem for the people who are satisfied with it, and why are the people who are unsatisfied with it even doing it? If you don't like driving for Uber, don't do it.
> The number of drivers needed at any given time is completely variable. It's obviously a larger number during peak travel periods.
That's variable based upon time of day, not completely variable. It is not a new problem either. Take public transit: drivers may hate split shifts, yet they are given well defined shifts that they are paid for.
On top of that, a company that operates through an app ought to have the ability to develop software to relatively reliably predict demand.
> Moreover, there are many people willing to do that.
Willing, or desperate? For example: relatively few people want to be on-call replacement workers. They either do it because they need the money or they do it because they are hoping to get their foot in the door. Those who do it willingly are typically doing so for extra cash and because they don't have any other obligations (e.g. retirees in some fields). Now imagine that an entire company is based upon the concept of replacement workers. That puts Uber closer to the exploitive end of the spectrum than the opportunity end.
> That's variable based upon time of day, not completely variable.
It's completely variable. If there is a major sporting event in your city, the demand is going to be much different than it is at the same time of day when there isn't a major sporting event. Demand is affected by weather, public transit disruptions, current events etc. It's not just time of day.
> Take public transit: drivers may hate split shifts, yet they are given well defined shifts that they are paid for.
Public transit has internal buffers that absorb demand. You have a bus which seats 40 but typically has 7 passengers. If there is a demand spike, this time you have 35 passengers, but this is still less than 40 so you don't need any more drivers. If that happens with Uber, they suddenly need five times as many drivers.
> On top of that, a company that operates through an app ought to have the ability to develop software to relatively reliably predict demand.
They could certainly predict part of the demand, but then what? You don't know ahead of time what time of day it's going to rain and cause a ton of people who usually ride a bike to want a ride. There is still a high amount of unpredictable variability in the demand.
> Willing, or desperate? For example: relatively few people want to be on-call replacement workers. They either do it because they need the money or they do it because they are hoping to get their foot in the door.
Let's consider these people then. Their options are to have no job and likely run into serious financial difficulties, take the on-call job to cover some bills while they look for a better job, or take some even worse job than the on-call job, but that might not be worse in a way that has been legislated against, e.g. because it's two hours away and there is no law against having a four hour round trip commute.
The only reason they'd take the on-call job is if their other options are worse. But if their other options are worse then taking away the on-call job option isn't helping them. To actually help them you need to give them some options that are better, in which case you still don't have to prohibit the on-call job because then they'd just choose the better alternative once it's available.
> Those who do it willingly are typically doing so for extra cash and because they don't have any other obligations (e.g. retirees in some fields).
Then why shouldn't those people be able to do it, and get the extra cash?
> Now imagine that an entire company is based upon the concept of replacement workers.
Suppose Uber was part of Costco but otherwise operated in an identical way. Is that supposed to make any difference?
> That's Uber's business problem to solve, though, not ours.
The solution is going to be dictated by economics, not magic. There is no option where they convert all of the part-time drivers to full-time without any increase in the demand for rides.
What they're trying to do is avoid cutting off the part-time drivers entirely. But stop trying to force them to do that, it doesn't actually help people.
Let's not pretend that they want to have all the benefits of having those part-time drivers without any of the responsibilities.
I don't expect them all to be converted to FTEs. But this unavailability BS is just that, BS.
"You are unable to log in because we have enough drivers to meet anticipated demand." Simple. Not log in, and then do a job or two then "oops, you've been randomly selected to be unable to earn money for the next hour".
Suppose you're a part-time driver. You're at home, going about your other business but are willing to take a fare whenever there is one. They're not at all sure they'll have enough fares for you to do an 8-hour shift, but they know there's one for you right now. They should deny you because they can't guarantee there will be more an hour from now? How does that help you?
Particularly after operating at a loss for a decade by overpaying drivers and undercharging riders, such that they get a monopoly, squeeze out local competition, and change consumer habits to rely on ridehailing.
Now that they won and are making money, boo hoo the government is being tough on us.
I mean this is just a private corporation that replaced an older private corporation (a taxi company) who in turn was trying to solve the core issue with car dependent infrastructure, which is: what does one do if one doesn't have a car?
Because if you're just at home, car centered infrastructure while expensive, inefficient, and dangerous, does function. But then, if you leave home on a business trip or a vacation... the problems become quite apparent quite quickly.
And you're completely correct here diagnosing the problem:
> Suppose number of drivers needed off-peak is 100 and the number needed at the peak is 500 and they have 300 drivers. They need to sign up another 200 drivers to satisfy the peak demand, but they already have 200 more than they can use off-peak. What would you have them do? They effectively need a large proportion of the drivers to be working part time specifically during peak hours.
Where I disagree is that there's a car-based answer to this, because restricting ourselves to working within the bounds of the car has caused the damn problem: because you need X number of cars with X number of drivers available to move Y number of people at Z time of day, and all three of these are going to change with availability in unpredictable ways. Whereas just... good mass transit could move all of those people, with less fuel, FAR less vehicles, and while those journeys would all probably take a bit longer even in ideal conditions, they would be safer, our air would be cleaner, and you wouldn't even need a taxi company or an app that pays people slave wages to take you places.
The transit problem is largely a housing problem because mass transit needs a threshold amount of population density to function and that level is below what you get when the majority of the land area is zoned exclusively for single-family homes. But that's not something you can solve overnight -- it takes time to build stuff like that -- so people are still going to have to decide what to do today.
Moreover, even if you build more multi-family housing and mass transit, you're still not changing the nature of the issue, only the scale. There will never be 100% mass transit use because there will always be higher and lower population density areas and some proportion of people living in the latter. Then the people who live outside the reach of mass transit may want to come inside it from time to time, and you'll still have car service for that, and still have peak and off peak, and still have to answer the same questions even if there are only a third as many people doing it.
For sure, but we still have a massive proportion of what could be served by Mass Transit in the States all dedicated to cars, which is why gridlock is basically the American commuting experience in one word. I just spent a week in a major city visiting my employer's office for some face time with everyone, and every morning was started by spending about 20 minutes stuck in traffic, even though my hotel was only a short drive from HQ.
More than three quarters of Americans live in suburban or rural areas. If you tried to run an hourly bus down a suburban street in the middle of the day, it would have one passenger. You can't run bus service at the density of the suburbs, with single passengers it's just a slower, more expensive and less efficient Uber.
Then you get traffic congestion in the city because those people come into the city in their cars. But you can't just add mass transit where the traffic is because those people still need to traverse the part of their path where it isn't.
> expecting uber to continue allowing unlimited amount of drivers to be "online", when they have to pay for them is absurd.
I don't recall anyone demanding that. Maybe things have changed since then, but back when I worked in restaurants if things were slow I'd be sent home and know when I was expected to be back be that the next day or in time for the dinner rush. I wasn't randomly clocked off for 15-30 minutes, and expected to hang around, then suddenly told I'm back on. In fact we'd call that wage theft, (which is very common in the US). But suddenly for Uber such a thing is acceptable.
That's seemingly what OP was demanding, given the displeasure he was expressing at uber for the practice.
>but back when I worked in restaurants if things were slow I'd be sent home and know when I was expected to be back be that the next day or in time for the dinner rush. I wasn't randomly clocked off for 15-30 minutes, and expected to hang around, then suddenly told I'm back on. In fact we'd call that wage theft, (which is very common in the US). But suddenly for Uber such a thing is acceptable.
It's the difference between employment vs working as a contractor. Cab drivers, who also work as independent contractors. No fare, no pay.
>The tight margins of the hack trade can leave cabbies feeling frustrated. “Sometimes, I don’t like it, because I have the potential to lose money,” said M. D. Islam, a cabby from Queens who has been driving for six months. He often earns less than $100 a day, he said; if his cab breaks down, or he can’t find passengers, he may end up in the red.
> It's the difference between employment vs working as a contractor.
That's absolutely NOT the difference between employment and contracting. The general expectation from the IRS is that if you are setting someone's hours (and Uber is, the driver chooses to be available, but within that availability window, Uber can arbitrarily define them as unavailable), then they are an employee.
Contractors don't just hang around your job site because you tell them you don't have work for them now but "stick around 5 minutes or 2 hours, we might have some then".
Agreed. These tech companies are all squeezing the definition of contractor for their benefit.
Amazon similarly abuses on-demand contractors and we see this for example in the little popup trailer parks in their distribution center parking lots during holiday crush...
I get it, as a consumer these are nice services to have - but it doesn't mean we have to be OK with these labor conditions. Further, from a self interested point of view, its a slippery slope to Amazon & the rest figuring out how to do the same to their SWEs over time.
>the driver chooses to be available, but within that availability window, Uber can arbitrarily define them as unavailable
This is basically the result of new york's legislation. In jurisdictions without such legislation, uber doesn't cap the amount of drivers that can be online. Moreover "availability" in this context is entirely arbitrary. The amount of fares available is still the same. The only difference is that uber caps the amount of people that can be online because new york puts them on the hook if anyone is "available" but doesn't make minimum wage. This was never the case for regular cabbies, but for whatever reason decided to apply this to ride hailing apps only.
>Contractors don't just hang around your job site because you tell them you don't have work for them now but "stick around 5 minutes or 2 hours, we might have some then".
Right, because the labor required to build a house isn't spiky like the demand for drivers.
> That's seemingly what OP was demanding, given the displeasure he was expressing at uber for the practice.
From the OP
> Uber runs an algorithm which kicks drivers out of the app randomly if demand gets too low, without warning or indication of when they can get back in. It can be minutes or hours.
I think the OP makes it very clear that the issue is the lack of communication especially around when they can work next, not that Uber isn't willing to maintain a surge staff during minimal demand.
>I think the OP makes it very clear that the issue is the lack of communication especially around when they can work next
"When they can work next" is entirely dependent on supply and demand. Also, it seems like he was more upset about drivers having to wait around while not getting paid, than having to periodically check the app. From the OP:
>To avoid having to pay any difference to make up the hourly wage to drivers, Uber runs an algorithm which kicks drivers out of the app randomly if demand gets too low, without warning or indication of when they can get back in. It can be minutes or hours. So the drivers remain on the road, driving/idling, waiting to get back into the app. The "work" is still getting done, but it doesn't count against Uber.
In a later comment he also lamented about how uber was "leave [drivers] hanging by an on-call thread". I doubt that if uber added push notifications for slots becoming available, that OP would be even slightly placated. The issue is that there's more willing drivers than active "slots" available, since such slots uber have to pay for. As a result, there's still going to be people waiting around for a chance to make money, while being unpaid. Adding push notifications only means people don't have to check their phones every 5-10 minutes for a slot, but they're still forced to wait around unpaid.
> "When they can work next" is entirely dependent on supply and demand.
Are you really going to try to make the case that a company the size of Uber finds the demand in NEW YORK, of all places, unpredictable? That speaks more to incompetence on Uber's part than any unrealistic expectations elsewhere. Especially since restaurants have managed to operate in far more unpredictable conditions for all of human history.
> Also, it seems like he was more upset about drivers having to wait around while not getting paid.
Right, yeah. If they said hey, we don't need you for the next four hours, drivers don't have to wait around. If they say it'll be 15 minutes, drivers know to wait around. Instead, they conveniently tell them nothing, effectively keeping them on-call. A bit of communication fixes that.
A lot of jurisdictions require 4 hr minimum pay when called in to work.
I wonder, would cabs be more competitive of Uber's alternative business model, if Uber had to be fairer?
If so, then isn't Uber a sham? And shouldn't market forces see them go?
Airbnb used to be cheap... at the start. Then people added insurance, people had to get permits, and so on, just as Hotels, and other do. Now it's not so cheap any more.
One of the biggest disruptions is "don't pay your fair share". Or "pay people dirt wages".
Companies carve out a new business model, and aren't taxed or forced to pay as incumbents are.
Are people against people making a fair wage? Well guess what, you have to pay more for an Uber. And maybe Uber doesn't work as a business model unless it's too expensive.
Too bad! Uber has to work in the same ecosystem as everyone else... or it's a farce.
>A lot of jurisdictions require 4 hr minimum pay when called in to work.
>I wonder, would cabs be more competitive of Uber's alternative business model, if Uber had to be fairer?
None of which applies to cabs, who are also independent contractors. For instance
>The tight margins of the hack trade can leave cabbies feeling frustrated. “Sometimes, I don’t like it, because I have the potential to lose money,” said M. D. Islam, a cabby from Queens who has been driving for six months. He often earns less than $100 a day, he said; if his cab breaks down, or he can’t find passengers, he may end up in the red.
Re: ABNB
People book on this platform thinking it’s vetted somehow.
Well in an area I vacation there was a fatal fire at a weekly rental home with unlicensed electrical work, no working smoke detectors and no license to rent the unit (requires a town inspection). Of course the renters had used an app platform that gives them the illusion that these are somehow legal vetted and safe.
Instead you can end up in a rental with safety standards well below developing world standards.
> expecting uber to continue allowing unlimited amount of drivers to be "online", when they have to pay for them is absurd.
The market they operate is of their own making, there is no "free market" argument to be made here. What's absurd is the mischaracterization of what their constructed market can provide to its participants, particularly when people are apparently randomly banned from participating it as they please.
Further, from a markets point of view, by managing their market with micro-lockouts of drivers out during projected quiet periods, they are essentially setting a price floor such that riders are paying more than they otherwise might have.
Stock markets for example generally have circuit breakers and limit up/down rules that will put in pauses for a stock if there is too much volatility. However they do not institute asymmetric throttling by say restricting half of sellers from selling but allowing buyers orders through.
> I get legislators want uber drivers to earn a living wage, but expecting uber to continue allowing unlimited amount of drivers to be "online", when they have to pay for them is absurd.
Uber gets to choose how many drivers to schedule at a given time. Expecting it to be unable to correctly-ish choose this number, when it's 50% of the work every other company has to do, is what's absurd.
reply