Technologies

FTC Sues Over Uber One, Saying It ‘Deceived Consumers’

The agency accuses the ridesharing company of charging customers without consent and of making it difficult to cancel the service.

The Federal Trade Commission is suing the rideshare company Uber for what it’s calling deceptive business practices involving its Uber One subscription service. In a complaint filed in a San Francisco district court, the FTC cites instances where customers say they were charged for the service when they believed their subscriptions were canceled, or were not allowed to cancel their accounts easily.

Uber One costs $10 a month and allows users to get discounts, free delivery on Uber Eats and cash back, in addition to other perks.

However, the FTC says that customers who sign up for free trials have had difficulty canceling and have ended up with unexpected charges.

«Today, we’re alleging that Uber not only deceived consumers about their subscriptions, but also made it unreasonably difficult for customers to cancel,» FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson said in a press release.

The complaint cites instances where it would take 23 screens and 32 actions to cancel an Uber One subscription.

An Uber spokesperson said that the company doesn’t sign up or charge consumers without their consent and that «cancellations can now be done anytime in-app and take most people 20 seconds or less.»

«We are disappointed that the FTC chose to move forward with this action,» the spokesperson told CNET, «but are confident that the courts will agree with what we already know: Uber One’s sign-up and cancellation processes are clear, simple, and follow the letter and spirit of the law.»

In an email, Uber contested points in the FTC’s complaint, saying that it discloses information about what customers will be charged. «Consumers who canceled were never charged additional fees,» it said.

Subscription services in the crosshairs

Subscription services have been a target for the FTC recently, as it has implemented rules requiring companies to make them simpler and easier to cancel. Last year, California passed a law requiring it to be as easy as a single click for consumers. The changes were, in large part, enacted to combat increasingly sophisticated ways that companies were keeping customers on the hook for paid services.

Expect to see more FTC action against companies that fail to follow the rules on subscriptions, says Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh, who focuses on business, antitrust and intellectual property law.

«Very likely there will be more suits as the FTC, across administrations, seeks to address anticompetitive practices that harm consumers, especially practices that raise prices and limit consumer choices,» Ghosh told CNET. «Ticketmaster is one example. We may see actions against crypto and payday loans online.»

But don’t expect rewards from these FTC lawsuits if you feel you were taken advantage of by a subscription-based service. For customers, it’s not the same as a class action suit in which plaintiffs may get money from court-designated damages, Ghosh said.

«The FTC cannot recover restitution for consumers after the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in [a 2021 case involving] AMG Management,» he said. «The FTC can change business practices, however, through injunctive relief under the Federal Trade Commission Act. The FTC can also obtain refunds for violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the (Better Online Ticket Sales) Act.»

Technologies

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Technologies

WWE 2K25 Jumps From the Top Rope Onto PlayStation Plus in September

Subscribers will also be able to play a turn-based strategy Persona game.

«The American Nightmare» Cody Rhodes, son of one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, «The American Dream» Dusty Rhodes, is the current undisputed WWE champion. And PlayStation Plus subscribers can bring Rhodes down a peg or help establish a new wrestling dynasty with the champion beginning on Sept. 16 in WWE 2K25.

PlayStation Plus is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, and it offers subscribers a large and constantly expanding library of games. There are three PlayStation Plus tiers — Essential ($10 a month), Extra ($15 a month) and Premium ($18 a month) — and each gives subscribers access to games. However, only Extra and Premium tier subscribers can access the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog.

Here are all the games PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers can access starting on Sept. 16. You can also check out the games all PS Plus subscribers can play in September, including Psychonauts 2.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

WWE 2K25

Take control of your favorite superstar from the men’s and women’s divisions in this knockdown, dragout wrestling game. Become one of over 300 wrestlers from today and years past, like Rhea Ripley and Andre the Giant. This entry in the series also introduces intergender wrestling matches, barricade diving and new brawl environments where you can get over or turn heel.

Persona 5 Tactica

Join the Phantom Thieves in this real-time strategy game set in the Persona universe. You and the group wander into a bizarre realm where people are living under tyrannical oppression, and you cross paths with a revolutionary named Erina. Now you’re in cahoots with the rebels as you try to free an oppressed people and find your way back home.

Other games on PS Plus

Those are a few of the games Sony is bringing to PlayStation Plus, and subscribers can play these games as well starting on Sept. 16.

*Premium subscribers only.

For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service and a rundown of PS Plus Extra and Premium games added in August. You can also check out the latest and upcoming games on Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade.

Technologies

Little Nightmares 3 Hands-On: a Creepy Co-Op Game Arriving Just in Time for Halloween

The sequel adds cooperative play with all the haunting hallmarks of the earlier games.

After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I’d used a person’s bisected halves to solve a puzzle, gotten a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged baby. As a 2-foot-tall youth trying to survive the morbid dangers of one demented area after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.

I’ve only sampled the first two Little Nightmares games, but in my brief preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined version of the series’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a large, grim world filled with traps to evade, puzzles to solve and horrid, lethal enemies to outwit. Take the scale of the animated horror movie 9, mix it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let players enjoy the haunting ride, room by perilous room.

This time, players aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Games, two players (or one and an AI companion) choose between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a girl with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who rely on each other and get out of rooms using their unique tools or just good ol’ fashioned teamwork. Sometimes this means pushing a box for the other to jump on, but other obstacles require rather complex puzzle-solving.

In the game, Low and Alone seek to escape the bleak Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was limited to one of these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus where our small characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque, ambling workers (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the sport of their fellows). When we thought we were safe, possessed puppets sprinted after us until we could team up to knock their wooden heads off and crush them. Being noticed by anyone meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of rather gruesome deaths.

It’s this tension and the dour setting that sets Little Nightmares 3 apart from other co-op games like the more excitable and dynamic Split Fiction released earlier this year, a rollercoaster flipbook of game genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent experience. In contrast, the section of Little Nightmares 3 I played unfolded like a series of grim vignettes that rely on its pleasingly goth trappings as much as working together with your friend (or computer teammate) to progress.

Surviving your little nightmares

While I got only an hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to iterate on rather than innovate away from its predecessors: Expect more of the same in new, grotesque settings, just with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For fans of the series, this is likely a good thing. There’s not much else like Little Nightmares.

The Carnevale stage I played through opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I as the masked Low (and someone from Bandai Namco who kindly played as the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us were brutish factory workers seeking escape at the funfair, which very quickly turned sinister as we very shortly saw some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to find one worker in connected boxes as the subject of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we had to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I tried, and failed, to ignore the viscera slopping out of the boxes.

While we hid from the human-size enemies, we had to fight the wooden puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in several rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench.

But most of the rooms are about solving puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box for my teammate to jump up and pull a switch or figure out how a radio plays into a complex solution. While these quiet moments are a nice break from the tense combat or pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I ran past one room with a circle of empty tall chairs only to come back a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, unmoving but watching.

And then there are the really, really tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining candy factory (apparently where all those brutes work) and up to the offices where the boss works, to find him asleep with the TV droning on in the darkness…and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I discovered we had to scramble for a hiding place after making it past the grate.

This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the preview as we panicked looking for a solution to our deadly woes (as opposed to the slow, methodical gameplay earlier) — but that’s part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mix. Ultimately, it was a hard-won lesson in patience. In the next room, a kitchen, the nightmarish baby banged a bowl on the table until the father walked over to a corpse (presumably his worker) and cut out some meat for his ghoulish child to eat.

In my short time with it, Little Nightmares 3 seems like a cooperative spooky storybook for players and their friends (but not couch buddies, sadly — it’s online co-op only) to experience. How much it lives up to previous games in the series, especially as developer Supermassive Games takes more of the reins from the franchise’s original creators Tarsier Games, is anyone’s guess. (Tarsier’s similar spiritual sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.)

But as the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it’s the best time of the year for a creepy co-op game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.

Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.