And so the Uber plot thickens.
Appearing on the Hidden Brain podcast (it's really good, you should check it out) last Tuesday, the Head of Economic Research for Uber, Keith Chen admitted that 'We do have access to a tremendous amount of [user's] data.' Including, as it turns out, when your battery is about to run out. They also know that, in this instance, you're probably more likely to accept surge pricing.
According to Chen, 'when your cell phone is down to below 5 percent battery and that little icon on the iPhone turns red, you know, then people start saying, well, I better get home, like, because I don't quite know how I'm going to get home otherwise.'
He does say though that the company don't exploit this. 'We absolutely don't use that to kind of like push you a higher surge price, but it's an interesting kind of psychological fact of human behaviour.'
Hmmmm.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.