Uber Safe Ride Fraud
Uber imposed a $1-per-ride called “Safe Rides Fee” in 2014, but turns out that it was all for profit. At the time, Uber was facing major expenses with insurance and background checks, so they came up with the idea of imposing safety fees to help boost its margins. Similar to how companies impose a “shipping and handling fee.” Uber said “the fee was meant to pay for operational costs associated with safety, such as marketing, driver screening, incident response, and technology upgrades.” However, the fee was never used for driver and passenger safety, it was “devised primarily to add $1 of pure margin to each trip.” Due to two lawsuits in 2016, Uber was required “to change the name of the surcharge from safe ride fee to booking fee.” That fee remains on every passenger’s bill today.
The trust of Uber executives has never been warm and fuzzy, this is another dent.
(Source: The Verge)
Using your iPhone as a Passport?
In the UK, new technology has been developed that uses a combination of facial recognition technology and your mobile phone in a bid to cut passport queue times.
Check out this video for more info:
(Source: BBC)
BBC Launches Alexa Competitor ‘Beeb’
Move over Alexa, the BBC is producing its own in-house voice assistant called Beeb, which will integrate with the UK public broadcaster’s website and iPlayer apps on smart TVs. Beeb is currently planned for launch next year.
The announcement of the voice assistant comes as the BBC has started to withdraw some of its content from select third party services. Earlier this year it removed its podcasts from certain Google products, and its radio stations are also disappearing from TuneIn at the end of the month.
What makes Beeb different?
Rather than attempt to match the wide functionality offered by Alexa and Google Assistant, Beeb will instead be focused on letting people interact with the BBC’s services. The BBC says that it is developing Beeb to give it more flexibility and allow it to be more ambitious with how it develops its voice assistant.
(Source: The Verge)
