TheMaartian
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Why Uber is watching your smartphone's battery level
When will this crap ever stop? Never. Not post-Snowdon. Not post-Panama Papers. Bastidges. The following article was posted on ZDNet. Yes, ride-sharing firm Uber is collecting information about your smartphone's battery life, but it promises it's not using that information to make you pay higher fares, despite the fact that it knows you probably would.  By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes | May 20, 2016 -- 13:04 GMT (06:04 PDT) | Topic: SmartphonesDid you know that ride-sharing firm Uber is collecting information about your smartphone's battery life? You're probably wondering why the company would do such a thing. After all, the state of your smartphone's battery has nothing to do with ride-sharing, right? Wrong. Uber's head of economic research, Keith Chen, told NPR's Shankar Vedantam during an episode of The Hidden Brain podcast that users of the service are willing to accept surge pricing increases of as much as 9.9 times if their smartphone's battery is close to flat. The logic is that if your battery is almost dead, then you feel at risk of being stranded, and that means that rides are much more valuable to you than they would be if your battery had sufficient charge. Oh, but don't worry, Chen promises that the company doesn't use this information to set fares. Want to block apps from being able to see your battery's charge level? You can't. There's no mechanism to prevent this, making it one of the many different bits of information about ourselves that we are leaking every time we use apps. And on the surface, battery life seems like an innocent metric to collect, but when combined with other data, and a sprinkling of economics and human psychology and that data becomes very precious indeed.
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bapu
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Re: Why Uber is watching your smartphone's battery level
2016/05/20 13:57:22
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My battery has been dead for ages.
Uber doan call me.
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Ham N Egz
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Re: Why Uber is watching your smartphone's battery level
2016/05/22 22:18:12
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wE THINK THE "GOVERMENT" is intrusive? look at big business...
maybe the si-fi writers were right, its not the gumint, its big business who is big brother ..I dont wear a tin foil hat but maybe I should
tell you one thing I DONT use facebook
also when you opt in for privacy on browsers/web pages, do you think REALLY they are opting you out???
really
hahahahahahahhahahahhahahahaah
Green Acres is the place to be I dont twitter, facebook, snapchat, instagram,linkedin,tumble,pinterest,flick, blah blah,lets have an old fashioned conversation!
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craigb
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Re: Why Uber is watching your smartphone's battery level
2016/05/22 22:45:54
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Ham N Egz
wE THINK THE "GOVERMENT" is intrusive? look at big business...
maybe the si-fi writers were right, its not the gumint, its big business who is big brother ..I dont wear a tin foil hat but maybe I should
tell you one thing I DONT use facebook
also when you opt in for privacy on browsers/web pages, do you think REALLY they are opting you out???
really
hahahahahahahhahahahhahahahaah
Big Brother has noted your opinion. 
Time for all of you to head over to Beyond My DAW!
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slartabartfast
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Re: Why Uber is watching your smartphone's battery level
2016/05/23 05:00:42
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The reason you can get "free" internet applications, is that the information you provide is the value that pays for "free." Fixed pricing is soooo twentieth century. A few years ago it was shocking to find that Apple users were being charged more than Windows users on some online stores. The logic was that anyone who would overpay that much for a boutique computer would overpay for other merchandise as well, and the primitive customer information at the time was limited to identifying the browser. Now the system is hugely more sophisticated, from following you around with targeted ads, to toting up how many sites you visit before clicking the buy button. The Uber phone battery thing is just the next step. Visionaries in the field imagined tagging your clothing with microchips that identify you from the time you purchase it with your credit card to the time you walk into a store and are greeted by name and directions to your likely desired purchase at your personally calculated price by robots of infinite beneficence. But consumers beat them to it, by deliberately buying their own smartphones, fitness monitors and computerized bluetooth watches that not only let them track you, but replace your credit card. And to think, I might have died never having seen the beauty of our modern world of the future.
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Ham N Egz
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Re: Why Uber is watching your smartphone's battery level
2016/05/23 08:06:46
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slartabartfast
The reason you can get "free" internet applications, is that the information you provide is the value that pays for "free." Fixed pricing is soooo twentieth century. A few years ago it was shocking to find that Apple users were being charged more than Windows users on some online stores. The logic was that anyone who would overpay that much for a boutique computer would overpay for other merchandise as well, and the primitive customer information at the time was limited to identifying the browser. Now the system is hugely more sophisticated, from following you around with targeted ads, to toting up how many sites you visit before clicking the buy button. The Uber phone battery thing is just the next step. Visionaries in the field imagined tagging your clothing with microchips that identify you from the time you purchase it with your credit card to the time you walk into a store and are greeted by name and directions to your likely desired purchase at your personally calculated price by robots of infinite beneficence. But consumers beat them to it, by deliberately buying their own smartphones, fitness monitors and computerized bluetooth watches that not only let them track you, but replace your credit card. And to think, I might have died never having seen the beauty of our modern world of the future.
that used to freak me out when I would see targeted ads appear on wholly different pages,, and just not from searching for a product, say I went on ebay looking for left hand widgets, next I got to my ham radio forum that has ads, not for ham radio, mind you, but the same widgets... smart watches huh slart, I just saw an commercial last night, Hyundai now offers a car you can start, lock from your Hyundia smartwatch South Korean automaker, Hyundai, is going to develop a new Android wear app that can be used to control the company’s cars through their existing smartwatch. It is expected to be shown during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2015 in Las Vegas this week. Hyundai will become the second company to support such a feature in their cars which was used by Tesla first.
Green Acres is the place to be I dont twitter, facebook, snapchat, instagram,linkedin,tumble,pinterest,flick, blah blah,lets have an old fashioned conversation!
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craigb
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Re: Why Uber is watching your smartphone's battery level
2016/05/23 09:58:41
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I get annoyed when I do some work for my customers that requires research. Two cases in particular come to mind, one is the auto parts website I put together where I did a LOT of internet research to find identical competitor parts (so I could add them to his search terms). The other is when I was asked to find out information on some rare "medalions" for use in a book. Now, everywhere I go, I get these so-called "targeted" ads for bumper and fender clips or gold Oregon Centennial medals, etc. Two things I really DON'T care about (other than to do my jobs correctly). Then there's all those sheep porn links... Wait, never mind! 
Time for all of you to head over to Beyond My DAW!
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Ham N Egz
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Re: Why Uber is watching your smartphone's battery level
2016/05/23 10:37:11
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craigb
). Then there's all those sheep porn links... Wait, never mind!
That was BHHHAAAAAAAAAAD 
Green Acres is the place to be I dont twitter, facebook, snapchat, instagram,linkedin,tumble,pinterest,flick, blah blah,lets have an old fashioned conversation!
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