Hacker News Reader

Comment by axaxs | Hacker News Reader

That poor lady. I hope she really sticks it to Lyft, mainly so companies will learn that providing non-existent or piss poor customer service is expensive.

View on HN

> I hope she really sticks it to Lyft

I agree. This is not just piss poor customer service but IMO (criminal?) negligence to not protect other passengers from this person until the allegations are either proven or disproven. Also it is a shit response to charge the person for the ride.

Seems like the only way these companies will change these days is getting sued and shamed into doing the right thing. It boggles the mind why management at these companies can't put themselves in the shoes of the victim er customer.

Guess its time to #deletelyft

> but IMO (criminal?) negligence to not protect other passengers from this person

So, what's your suggested fix? We should let any unproven accusation be enough to deny someone their income?

As far as I can see, the only reasonable course of action is to provide as much data as you can about the driver and location of the vehicle to police and let them sort it out before acting against the driver.

This kind of situation is what "paid leave" is for. Ride-share companies have the extra employee/contractor divide, but in this case, getting the driver off the road is probably worth the cost in both damages and reputation while the issue is sorted out.

The police themselves would put an officer on paid leave during the investigation, right?

Lyft could suspend the driver, paying them temporarily into escrow, then release that if the allegation is false. Not perfect, but that would mean they had acted quickly and the driver didn't go without income if they were innocent. If it started a rash of false claims so drivers could be paid without working, you can investigate the claimant for fraud (?) and flag the driver's account for review.

Or look into what taxi companies do in these situations.

You can't give someone paid leave if they don't work regular hours. I know everyone likes to mock them for calling them "contractors", but in some ways it makes sense - they're employees doing work on a per-contract basis. There's no magic number you can use to accommodate that, especially if something like this could cause them to lose other jobs and need the income.

Looks like some taxi companies suspend without pay over a lot less though, so do we just call that fair enough? I dunno. Doesn't seem ideal really.

You can pay them some sort of living wage, if the alternative is uproar over innocent drivers being suspended by fake allegations. That's all I'm saying.

I can't fathom the fact that they didn't deplatform the driver after a customer reports a sexual assault occurred (even if temporarily while reconciliation with a police report is performed), or that they still charged for the ride.

Right? And I didn't necessarily mean only the complaint stage. I'd consider hiring a potential sex offender, but worse and more realistically, allowing him to stay employed after such a complaint, piss poor customer service, not only to her obviously but every future rider.

It's a little unclear what Lyft's response to the driver actually was. One article ( from heavy.com ) says that "Lyft continued to allow this driver to continue driving for Lyft under a different name", which suggests the possibility that the driver may have been suspended and re-registered under a psuedonym. The implication is that this is fine by Lyft, which is unclear. Please don't take me as being unsympathetic, I certainly am not. Here's some food for thought: If you were falsely accused of a crime of this nature, heaven forbid, your life pretty much depends on you receiving the full due process of the law granted to you by your rights as a citizen. Cases like this can take years of litigation to resolve, which is very unfortunate. This is not because the legal system does not care about women, it's because the legal system cares about the rights of the accused. Unfortunately sometimes this can mean guilty people being able to fall through the cracks, but if you can think of a better system for guaranteeing individual rights we'd all like to know. Until proven guilty you are presumed innocent. Unless remanded to custody, you are free to go about your life in the meantime. If you were fired from your job at the first hint of accusation, the ramifications for you as an individual could be very severe. In this case it sounds like the driver was guilty. However, I'd advise you and many other people to resist the urge for lynchings, kangaroo courts and witch-trials.

I replied to another comment, if you care. They should be able to tell whether or not the driver went 80 miles out of the way. That'd be a great starting point.

Another user commented on paid leave. That sounds like another fantastic option. Or something as simple as pairing the driver with only day time, male riders during the investigation period.

Should any random complaint without evidence be grounds for terminating a driver's source of income? This allows for easy abuse of the system.

Absolutely not. But they have ways to see easily whether or not she was driven 80 miles out of the way. So, if this is true, either she's telling some version of the truth, or they allow drivers and/or riders to just do whatever. If that's the case, it's on them for not having such restrictions in place. That seems like a day one level safety check.

It's important information, yes. But it is paramount to have law enforcement involved which didn't seem to happen until later. That's when they can follow up with the company to gather evidence about what took place.

If someone was accused of murder, would you be so dismissive of the allegation and so worried about abuse?

Which is why the first thing is to go to the police and have them investigate. It's not a private company's job to do this.

"This man murdered someone!"

"Thanks for letting us know! As soon as prosecutors bring and successfully convict them, we'll be sure to remove them from our platform."

Lyft claims it's because she didn't tell them, and neither did the police.

>Lyft says that when Alison Turkos originally reported the incident to them, she didn’t mention the rape and only sent a message to support asking them to look into the ride. They argue that they basically had no way of knowing she had been raped. We’ve read the messages she sent.

>We first became aware that this was a safety incident when the Wall Street Journal published an article on May 8, 2018. We received a subpoena from law enforcement on May 14, 2018, six months after the ride took place. We complied with the subpoena and worked with law enforcement for over a year as they investigated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com