Uber promised drivers a way to appeal deactivations. They say it doesn’t exist

Devins Baker, an Uber driver, was driving a passenger to the San Francisco airport in late 2024 when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw another car driving across the highway lanes. He hit his brakes to avoid crashing. The passenger in the back of his car, who Baker said wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, fell out of his seat. Baker safely dropped him at the airport, but then when he opened the app to take another ride, it was almost entirely blacked out. Despite maintaining a nearly five-star rating, he had been deactivated. Baker immediately called Uber, but it took him an hour of navigating an automated system and sitting on hold before he could talk to someone. They told him he had been deactivated for unsafe driving and wouldn’t tell him which ride it was related to due to passenger privacy. “They basically just read from a script,” he said. He could only guess that it was the ride to the airport, so he submitted his side of the story about driving defensively through the app in an attempt to appeal. He didn’t hear back for a week; when he did, all he was told was that his deactivation was permanent. “It’s so inhuman,” he said. After that experience, Baker bought a dashcam to have more evidence should the same thing happen while continuing to drive for Lyft. Soon it did: A few weeks later, on January 15, he opened the app to find out that he had again been deactivated for alleged unsafe driving. This time he had no idea which ride could have been the one to cause the problem. He called the company many times to find out more, but it refused to disclose more information. It took him two weeks to figure out where he could submit an appeal and evidence, and when he went to attach dashcam footage the system would only accept photographs. Three days later, he was told he was permanently deactivated. “I had everything at the ready to plead my case,” he said. But the company had “already made a decision that I wasn’t coming back.” When Uber and Lyft helped bankroll Proposi