Uber Technologies Inc (UBER)

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At the beginning of October, Lyft rolled out a mandatory app update for its drivers. After installing the update, drivers noticed they could no longer see how much the rider paid for any given trip. It’s yet another move that potentially undercuts Lyft’s (and Uber’s) legal logic that classifies drivers as independent contractors instead of employees, to say nothing of how it further obscures how the app actually works.


Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say
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This change, which was reported by users on the popular rideshare driver forum Uberpeople.net and written up by The Rideshare Guy, makes clear this change was an intentional part of a larger redesign of weekly pay statements Lyft announced in September.

In place of the “Rider Pays” section of the fare breakdown, drivers are directed to a web link that shows a weekly breakdown of their fares, how much Lyft took, and how much all of their riders paid during that time period in aggregate. In other words, when a driver looks at their history, the app now only tells them what they earned—not the total of what the rider paid, potentially keeping Lyft’s own take pretty opaque.

“Personally, it makes me wonder what they are hiding,” one driver, who, like all the others who spoke to Jalopnik, asked for anonymity in order to speak freely out of fear of retribution from Lyft. “I mean, I know when I was a kid and didn’t want my parents to know something I kept it from them and lied to them and it definitely was cause [sic] I was up to something that was wrong for me to do. It’s that simple.”