Getting in a car is pretty much the most dangerous thing a person does in an average day. You may be trusting a cleaner with you possessions, but you're trusting that Uber driver with your life.
With a house cleaner, my desire to keep my possessions is at odds with the cleaner's desire to have more stuff. I have to count on their desire for repeat business, or their morality, to outweigh that.
Maybe it makes sense, though, because the other person in the interaction has more incentive to defect when given access to all of your possessions than when given control over you yourself. That is, you have little reason to think that the Uber driver is working at cross purposes to you, and mainly just have to take their competence on faith. With something like Homejoy, it is their character and motivation you are gambling on moreso than their competence.
I haven't heard of people abusing Homejoy to rob houses or anything, but it seems not entirely stupid that someone would worry about bad actors more than incompetent ones.
While trusting someone with your physical safety should be a
high-trust decision, we treat it cavalierly enough in our day
to day lives that most people clearly don't worry about it.
Essentially our lives are in other peoples' hands pretty much 24/7!
Going back to Uber vs. Homejoy, the level of risk differential is much higher with Homejoy, because when using an Uber, you are probably not assuming much extra risk compared to what else you would do to get where you are going. For a cleaning service, then the risk differential is noticeable ('someone has access to my house' vs 'Only I and my family have access to my house') when jumping up from "doing the cleaning yourself". If you're comparing Homejoy to other cleaning services on a risk basis, you'd have to actually look at the numbers. I'm really not trying to bash Homejoy or cleaning services here.
If an Uber driver wanted to hurt you, he would be extremely likely to pay the legal price. After all, there's an electronic paper trail of the ride he gave you. So an Uber driver won't do that unless he's essentially insane and a) doesn't understand this or b) has nothing to lose and doesn't care if he's caught or c) thinks he can get away with it because you're incapacitated/inebriated or something.
Whereas with housekeepers, it's more a crime of opportunity. They notice that you have valuable items laying around that won't be missed. Or an acquaintance of theirs pressures them for tips on houses to rob. A housekeeper that's an otherwise "good" person can convince themselves that it's a victimless crime if they decide that you won't even miss the item(s) they take. I mean, who wouldn't be tempted to take a shiny, never-used bauble from the home of somebody with 10x their income if it was the difference between having food on their table or not?
Don't get me wrong - the vast majority of housekeepers are great people. I have family members that clean houses. I just mean that an Uber driver would have to essentially be insane to harm you, whereas a housekeeper would just have to give into temptation in order to pinch some items.
You may be trusting a cleaner with you possessions,
but you're trusting that Uber driver with your life.
2. If you have things worth stealing, each person you let into your house increases the odds that a robbery will happen. Maybe the cable guy isn't a burglar, but how many friends does that guy have? 50? Is one of them a burglar? If you were a burglar and you knew a cable guy, wouldn't you bug that guy for tips?
3. Any home burglary is potentially dangerous to one's life. Who knows what happens if you're home while the robbery is in progress or if you arrive home while it's happening.
So yeah, there's a trust factor there!