A flood of disenchanted Uber users tried to cancel their accounts last week hours after Buzzfeed revealed a senior executive's alleged plan to launch smear campaigns against the company's critics, specifically journalists. But what could have been a mass exodus turned into an epic snarl, as consumers discovered how near impossible it is to untangle oneself from Uber.
Turns out, it's an unintuitive, byzantine process that isn't clearly defined on the company's website. Many people have better luck finding such instructions on Reddit or WikiHow. And even those are complicated. One way to extricate yourself from Uber is to fill out a form on the company's Help Center page, explaining why you want your account deleted. (You'll have to include a city of residence, the email associated with the account, a subject header, and a compelling explanation of your problem.) Another way is to email Uber's support team directly, again with all of your account information and a cogent explanation of why you want to leave. Then you sit and wait.
In short, Uber has laid a whole series of traps in place to prevent its customers from dumping its service. It offers no simple account removal feature; rather, the process has to be completed manually, which leaves everyone's fate in the hands of an Uber customer service representative.
More unsettling, though, is Uber's policy of retaining user data (including geo-location, credit card information, and trip history) for customers who've long left the site. That's common practice for social media companies, Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman says, adding that many networks don't even disclose their data retention policies. That leaves users blithely unaware of the ongoing relationship they might have with, say, a dating site or a car-hire service, long after they thought they'd left.
Consumers have few legal avenues through which to challenge this practice, and seldom does a jilted user sue a tech company for untoward use of data. In most cases, the burden of proof is too arduous, according to Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
Goldman has, however, seen a few such suits in the online dating world, since many sites retain user profiles for people who are no longer subscribers (the idea being that a vast trove of profiles is a good marketing feature). Legislators in Delaware passed a bill in July that allows executors to access — and terminate — the social media profiles of their loved ones who've died, superseding any terms of service agreements that the deceased had with the networks. Tech companies fought tooth and nail to kill it.
Now other states are contemplating similar laws that would erase our spectral presence from the Facebooks and Googles and Ubers of the world. That's heartening, though it doesn't help the rash of consumers who tried to kill their Uber account last week — and move on with their lives.
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