A new Uber feature allowing users to check previous reviews of their drivers has opened up a world of drunken apologies, private confessions and angry complaints.
The feature, rolled out to users worldwide on Friday, is intended to provide more insight into who will be picking customers up. It helps align the app with Uber’s long-running claim to be simply a middleman, linking what the company calls “driver-partners” with “riders” in a largely hands-off manner.
Alongside the pre-existing driver star rating, users can now see how many “rider compliments” the driver about to pick them up has earned and their Xbox-style “achievements”, such as two years of service or five thousand five-star trips.
The intended goal of the feature has been largely overshadowed, however, by the fact that it also publishes five recent “thank you notes” given to the driver. Those notes, pulled from a text-entry box in the Uber app that has previously been unpublished and shared only with the driver and Uber itself, are occasionally more revealing than the company perhaps intended.
One common category appears to be grovelling apologies from the morning after – or the night before: “So sorry I threw up all the way home last night,” one reads. I have a bug and decided to drink. Bad mix!!” Another thanks the driver “for putting up with my drunk boyfriend”.
Other thank you notes are just as positive, but perhaps a bit too private to be shared publicly. Among those seen by the Guardian include one thanking the driver for picking a bump-free route for a passenger returning from surgery, and a second thanking them for a trip to a named hospital while their wife was in labour.
Then there are the weird, wacky and uncomfortable. From the comments which are, perhaps, film recommendations: “It’s The Most good and Beatiful Taxi Bolivia and from Bolivar as from David Sushet’s serials Hercules Poirot. He’s Super Driver. He must see this film, where Poirot say: is not Bolivar. Bolivia, Bolivia, Gastings.”
To the bizarrely forgiving:
Reading rider thank you notes for uber drivers is my new favorite thing pic.twitter.com/eJwM3hQpHX
— KP (@kittypearse) October 26, 2017
And even those which Uber definitely shouldn’t have released:
“To Über: It is REALLY inflammatory to force you to rate every ride. Stop this. I want a service, not to review it.”
The company’s ongoing relationship with its drivers has become an increasing source of friction for Uber. In London, where it faces the prospect of being stripped of its private hire operator licence, it has told an employment tribunal that it is basically a minicab firm, and so should be allowed to treat drivers similar to other minicab agencies.
