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On 4 June 2017, several web sites reported that the ride-sharing company Uber had increased its prices in London, in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack there, a day earlier. CNN, for example, reported: The Daily Mail carried the headline: And Resistance Report went even further in its accusations against the company: There is no dispute that Uber prices were elevated in London around the time of the attack, which police say started just after 10 P.M. local time. This is because the company uses a system called dynamic pricing, which increases or decreases the price of a journey based on algorithms that analyze the intensity and volume of demand for Uber cars in a given geographical area. Crucially, these price changes happen automatically, and are not the result of a decision made by anyone at Uber. However, dynamic pricing can be switched off manually, which is what the company says happened in this case. A spokesperson for Uber told us: The spokesperson added that dynamic pricing was also suspended throughout central London about an hour and a half after the attacks were first reported. It is true that the first official Metropolitan Police statement — that is, the first to appear on its website — was published at 3:58 A.M. local time, some five hours after Uber claims it suspended dynamic pricing in the vicinity of the attacks. However, the Met Police Twitter account first posted an advisory about what transpired to be a terrorist attack at 10:28 P.M. At 10:37 P.M., the London Ambulance Service Emergency Planning and Resilience Officers tweeted a public warning to avoid the area near London Bridge. In any event, while a price surge was ongoing at the time of the attack, it was switched on automatically, and Uber does appear to have switched it off within 25 minutes of the first reports of a serious incident. In the past, the company has been criticized for consciously allowing a price surge to continue in response to a crisis, such as in December 2014, when a hostage-taking in Sydney, Australia saw Uber prices go up. Uber appeared to defend this practice at first, explaining on Twitter: However, the company later apologized: We asked Uber whether they had changed their policies to prevent such actions being repeated, but we did not receive a response to that question.
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