Source: Radio New Zealand
RNZ / Quin Tauetau
Thousands of people seeking to shave a few cents off petrol prices are flocking to a fuel price app – while some are fuelling false information about shortages.
On Sunday morning, the Gaspy app altered its reporting features so people could report shortages directly to the company, and made other changes in an attempt to avoid errors and deliberate misinformation.
The app, which relies on user reports of petrol prices to allow people to compare prices across petrol stations, has gained thousands of users a day as fuel prices surge.
Gaspy director Mike Newton said the app had seen a huge influx of new users in recent weeks.
“We’ve had generally between 6 and 10,000 new users every day for the last couple of weeks – that compares to a baseline level of about 700 every day so it’s a pretty massive uptick in new users. In terms of active users on the app, we normally see between 50,000 and 100,000 a day … for the last week and a half, we’ve had over 200,000 active users every day and a couple of days of over 300,000.”
Newton said the surge in new users meant many people were still getting used to how the app worked, which could see them enter prices in the wrong category.
“With that comes some learning. People are figuring out how to enter the prices and sometimes they’re not getting it quite right.”
But he said there was also people entering misinformation about petrol being $4 a litre – potentially as a way to indicate stations had run out, as there was no other way to do so.
The app had introduced a temporary system to allow people to message them directly about shortages, which would then be checked, Newton said.
The company was working on longer term fixes.
“We’d like to put in a much more robust system for handling reporting of shortages, but that’s going to require some dev [development] work, and so it takes a little bit of time for us to turn that around, test it, and get it out to the users.
“We’re also looking at putting AI measures in place … to make sure that our fuel updates are accurate. It could look at a station and go, well, somebody’s getting the diesel price higher than the 91 price, you know, maybe that doesn’t seem right, we should probably just reject that update.
It had also removed the ability to submit a price update from a distance.
“We’ve actually clamped that right down so you have to be next to the station to update prices at the moment … if there were some bad actors out there – and we don’t believe that there are a significant number, they would actually have to drive to a station to be a nuisance, and I just don’t see people going to that effort,” Newton said.
False reporting was not a “massive problem”, and errors were being picked up quickly because there were so many active users at present.
“It’s unprecedented territory – we’ve been running for 11 years, and we’ve never had to deal with widespread shortages before.”
Newton urged users to keep updating prices and notifying shortages given it didn’t look like the conflict in the Middle East or rising fuel prices would be resolved any time soon.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
