It's somehow funny how all these abuses are occurring in an industry that had rules put in place to prevent exactly that from happening. Same goes for hotels.
Sure maybe the rules need updating but using a loop hole to just completely ignore all of them and the having its users complain about 'unfair business practices' is just mind boggling.
I spent around 2 years in different countries in South America before this and I guarantee you the situation was worth without uber. Getting scammed was guaranteed, I was consistently more concerned about getting robbed or killed. 90% of the stories I heard of people getting robbed in South America were from cab drivers. Chloroform rags being tossed in the back seat, Guns pulled, Driving to a bad part of town and getting jumped by the cabbies friends, etc...
Definitely not. I live in São Paulo, where the situation is much better than Rio, for example, but still.
With Uber you have a much lower probability of being scammed and a much higher probability of getting your money back after it (with taxis the probability of getting your money back is basically zero).
And by the way the probability of being scammed at all increases not only by being a foreigner, it increases only by being from another place and not knowing the city. There are dozens of cases of friends of mine born in São Paulo who got scammed by taxi drivers in RJ. With Uber/Cabify/99 this became much less common.
Don't let perfection get in the way of improvement.
Plus, with uber you can easily give a low rating, then drivers will disappear from the platform within long. This is why behavior like this isn't widespread, and why it's better than taxis..
The existing rules were even less effective than what Uber is doing, though. One of the reasons why I use Uber when in an unfamiliar area is because of the significantly lower risk of scams.
Sure maybe the rules need updating but using a loop hole to just completely ignore all of them and the having its users complain about 'unfair business practices' is just mind boggling.
Uber is becoming the mob 2.0