Hacker News Reader

Cryptography can be used to maintain trust, not establish it. If there's no party checking who the driver is (in real life), having a cryptographic certificate isn't much of a guarantee apart from "it's the same guy it was yesterday".

And if these certificates can be created ad-hoc, then you can always create a new one if you get a zero star review.

You can do that second one already. Nothing requires that where you have a hire car drop you off be where you are actually going. Just, you know, tell the driver another place. (And don't let the app use background location data.)

You'd need to be familiar enough with the place to know the name of nearby places though.

Or you could look up the address, and scroll down the map for a block or two.

Uber apparently makes you take a photo of yourself and then does facial recognition to confirm the user at the start of a session.

Yup. It runs on Microsoft Cognitive Services: https://blogs.microsoft.com/firehose/2016/09/26/powered-by-m...

Just getting credit card details would be simpler. Works for Uber. Why fix it if it ain't broken?