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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

Uber has no idea if you are poor or not. Even if you want more price segmentation (maybe okay) you certainly can't ask each passenger their income. And Uber isn't indicating if a price is cheap or not, creating a very large disadvantage to the poor as they are unable to accurately judge the expected value of the service before planning their method of transportation somewhere.

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>Uber has no idea if you are poor or not.

Seriously? Of course they do. They have your online id and your credit card so they know more about you than you do.

No, they don't. They have indicators and clues about your income based on your rides and credit spending at uber, but they do not know if you are poor. All those indicators could and often are very wrong if that is what they draw assumptions from.

Their indicators can be wildly off because they do not know the person themselves and they can only make guesses.

Also,

> Seriously?

Yes, seriously. Of course seriously. Stop being insulting and rude.

I would have thought that they know enough to make a decently accurate guess.

Not that I know what they do of course, but without much thought I can think of a model that would allow me to predict income.

- They're using Uber, that cuts out a decent chunk of poor people.

- What areas do you visit and at what times?

- Property prices in those areas, are they workplaces or urban commuter areas? Can likely predict value of someone's house if they use it from home.

- Type of Uber taken

- Size of tip

- Frequency of travel

- etc. etc.

I reckon that given some time and some people's ride data I could estimate their income, house value, and even perhaps job. I would guess Uber have done this and then some.

Of course it's not going to be 100%, but Uber don't need that.

It's not important if a specific person is poor, it's just important to be right often enough to offset the expense of being wrong. Since they have your billing address, it's pretty trivial to look up the median income for the zip code or even neighborhood you live in, or the average sale price of the home in your neighborhoods, etc, to figure out which wealth/income bracket you are in.

Many companies provide household income data (e.g. Acxiom, Epsilon). It's available to anyone who'll pay for it.

There is nothing to suggest Uber "[does] not know if you are poor", they could very easily be buying this data on their users.

Hopefully the various comments on this thread have shed some light on why I expressed incredulity at your assertion. Incredulity isn't intended as rudeness but I unreservedly apologize since you took it as such.

Reading your response I suspect you failed to account for the fact that what "Uber knows" is not limited to the set of facts that you choose to disclose to Uber. They can and likely do use those facts to lookup your information in third party databases. They also know facts that you may not have chosen to disclose but unwittingly did so.

What about having a (potentially temporary) card number gives Uber knowledge of a person’s annual income?

Where you're coming from and and going to. Your name and home address.

It doesn't need to be 100% perfect in all cases to be useful.

that doesn't answer the question, which is about credit cards.

Then I don't understand the question, but you can probably make pretty decent guesses about a person's income just by looking at the type of credit card and the issuing bank. And definitely if you include credit card billing address. There's tons of databases that translate a zip+4 to a median household income.

I don't know about temporary card numbers, which afaik don't exist where I live but : the data-industrial complex indexes people by credit card numbers so given the number you can get a full profile. Income, etc.

Data brokers like Experian can tie that number to the rest of your profile. Even something like "this is an AMEX" can give you some info.

The know where you live too which is a bigger indicator.

And specifically where you're going, which likely includes your employer, your home, your friends' home, and probably some restaurants you like

They also know the model of device you have, its retail price, and possibly what cellular carrier you have.

They've also got your e-mail address, which has some predictive value for income. And access to your contacts, which likely includes the names / e-mail addresses / mailing addresses / phone numbers of people with which you interact. If you have an entry for yourself with your address, they can probably know your home's value and whether or not you're listed as an owner.

With enough cross-referencing between users, I imagine they could get a reasonably good guess.

how do they get access to your contacts? why do they get access to your contacts? why do people give them access to their contacts?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubercab

    This app has access to:
    [...]
    Contacts
      * find accounts on the device
      * read your contacts

But why?

I'm pretty sure it's used to assist with selecting other accounts for fare splits, so that could be one justification.

ah... didn't think of that one... Clearly not an Uber user here. At least there's a possibly helpful reason to do it.

I'm on iOS and signed up for Uber long before the privacy scandals went mainstream. iOS would have required that I be prompted for access to contacts, but I don't remember what the justification was.

I do know it knows where "Home" and "Work" are without me explicitly telling it. I assumed I'd be able to type in the name of a contact and it'd resolve that to the contact's address I have listed (an actual valid use case), but I just tried that and it didn't work. So I don't know OTOH what valid justification they have for using it.

I do see if you go to invite friends (for "free rides"), it allows you to connect contacts to send codes to. I don't think that's how I got prompted, though.

>Uber has no idea if you are poor or not.

I would think that there is no way they don't know that. They know where you live and which bars/restaurants/whatever else you frequent via uber. They might even know where you work if you've ever taken an uber to work. I'm sure they've either purchased from a third party or taken off your phone all sorts of other data they use to build a customer profile on you.

New customers are likely enticed with the low end of the rates, and as you use Uber they learn a lot about you. If you're using Uber to get from a low income area to the rail station or to Walmart, you are poor. If you use Uber to travel from and to various international airports, you can probably afford to pay a lot more (or somebody is paying a lot of travel costs for you).

> low income area to the rail station or to Walmart, you are poor.

That is a wickedly evil definition of poor and extremely distopian if you truly believe that. Your scenario does not make someone poor or define them as poor or anything like that. It is a data point that Uber can use to guess your income but it does not mean you are poor. To define poverty like that is so extremely mean and also possibly straight false.

Of course that's not a good way of defining poverty. For all I know, somebody living in a low income area and shopping at Walmart could be a billionaire that lives frugal. But to Uber that doesn't actually matter: somebody who seems to spend little money on living expenses or travel won't spend a lot on Uber either, and likely wouldn't stay a customer if Uber inceased prices for him. In the end, spending is much more important in this context than actual wealth.

> Uber has no idea if you are poor or not.

Wow. This is just wrong. Uber knows where you live and its trivial to link that to general income level, either indirectly based on zipcode/neighborhood or directly via public property records.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_(demographics)

They have an idea. You signed up with a credit card and a phone. Experian will answer the rest.

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