“Is this positive for drivers? Maybe. This depends on how you feel about surveillance, especially in a power dynamic where Uber holds all the cards,” says Christo Wilson, a computer science professor at Northeastern University, who examined Uber’s surge pricing methods in a study published last month, in an email to the Monitor.

“There may be cases where customers make false claims against drivers (e.g. ‘he was driving erratically and now I don’t want to pay’), but it’s not clear that this kind of fraud is widespread enough to justify the data collection,” he adds.

The Christian Science Monitor