No, Uber will charge you more money if your battery level is low on your phone. Are you serious? Yes. It means you're desperate. You're probably stranded somewhere. You need to go home. You're like, I got to get an Uber. It's all in an investigation. Can I get a fact check on aisle nine? Uber actually commented on this video, obviously saying that it was false. But let's go deeper. She quoted this article from Vice. Uber accused is already a bit weak. I could accuse Uber of charging me more whenever I really have to go. But that doesn't make it true. But then the reporting gets really bad. The small study by the Belgian newspaper Dernier. looked at how the app changes its price for users in Brussels based on their battery. A study, huh? The original article is paywalled, and in French. But let's look at the Brussels Times version. It turns out their so-called study involved a single test of just two phones booking the same route from their headquarters. One was at 85% battery, the other at 12%. And it showed a price difference of just under one euro, a dollar and five cents. And multiple newspapers thought that this was a newsworthy study? Can we get some more scientists on staff? Yes, it is possible for an app on the phone to access phone battery level so that it can enable battery saving features. But there are tons of factors that go into Uber's pricing calculation. Like how many people are requesting rides from the same location, so that second request may have been a bit more expensive because the app thought it would have to pull in a rider from a little bit farther away, rather than because of a battery difference. That was not a study, and yet this video was shared 347,000 times. This is how misinformation spreads. Vice, do better.
Additional notes
Remember: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but just because a claim sounds like it could be true—and upsetting if it were—does not make it so! Have you ever experienced this? @uber @mikekimcomedy @zeoniuforreal #science #uber
References
No DOI, PMID, or source link was listed in the spreadsheet caption. The transcript discusses reporting from Vice, a Belgian newspaper, and The Brussels Times, but the workbook row does not include direct URLs.