Uber's Festering Sexual Assault Problem | Hacker News Reader

Uber's Festering Sexual Assault Problem

nytimes.com

26 pointsheyts15 comments

When one travels, one frequently sees signs in airport arrivals halls: do not accept lifts from unlicensed / unmarked vehicles, as it is not safe. Use a licensed, vetted taxi service.

Uber's entire business model is, essentially, supplying unlicensed taxi services. I am honestly surprised it works as well as it does.

The thing is the Uber/Lyft model identifies both people. That makes it much, much safer than you would have from simply an unlicensed taxi. And note the problem applies across the transportation industry, this isn't Uber-specific.

If anything, I would feel safer in an Uber than a taxi because there's a clear record of who is in that car.

Uber actively works against police trying to investigate these incidents, in ways that are almost actively malicious. They require warrants - not simply police inquiries, nor customer consent, but warrants issued by a judge, to turn over any data, even the identity of the driver. They purposely delete this data on an accelerated basis so that they can say "We don't know" - doing dirty tricks like making receipts that don't include enough information to identify drivers (and intentionally obfuscate). They have ordered and made it both official and unofficial policy for their agents to stall police inquiries until they hit those data deletion dates.

At some level, they are attempting to avoid bad press, but their methods go far beyond "Washing our hands of it, not my problem" and into "Trying to obfuscate and cover up crimes so that we can't be tied to them".

Source: Worked at Uber for about six months and quit in disgust.

None of this is to exonerate the NYT for their biased reporting, because the crime rates in conventional taxes are almost as bad, and closure rates are worse. It's an ugly industry that Uber could have cleaned up but decided the pragmatic approach was to spin doctor.

Don't we want companies to require warrants before sharing information, though? I don't want police being able to go to uber and find everyone who tooks rides near protests, for example. I want Uber to make police go through the proper channels to do things.

I don't want that either. I do want them to hand over driver information to the police when they have a case number and the customer's request. That is what the deliberately created a process to stall. That should not require a warrant - in fact, the process of getting a warrant should require the identity of whom they're looking for, provided by Uber as a mediating third party to prevent fishing expeditions. But they've proven to be an untrustworthy partner in this matter.

> I do want them to hand over driver information to the police when they have a case number and the customer's request.

Hold on. In the previous message you didn't mentioned "customer's request". You explicitly stated "customer's consent". This is different. "Customer's consent" means law enforcement demands access third party data without a warrant and asked customers to allow law enforcement to access data related to them. "Customer's request" is entirely different. It means it is the customer who is actively seeking their own information. They are not the same thing.

This switch is odd because last time I requested an Uber I firmly believe they show the driver's identification, car licensing plates, and share positioning and route with the customer. I just peeked into my Uber app and I have ride details that go back up to two years, which include the driver's name. From a layman's point of view, this is clearly enough data to get police to build up a case and put together a warrant. Why would law enforcement try to gather data on riders and drivers without the collaboration of riders?

Care to explain what exactly is missing?

I have no problem with requiring warrants. The police engage in far too many fishing operations.

But if they are obstructing beyond that I would think they would be asking for a lawsuit.

> The thing is the Uber/Lyft model identifies both people.

In theory. I can't speak about Uber; but, with Lyft, I've seen husbands driving instead of their wife (and vice versa). According to some drivers, this is not uncommon. I had one driver who's name, according to the app, was "Google."

I've also had a number of drivers tell me that many riders don't have their picture on their account.

Yes, but the named person on the account will almost certainly know the identity of the person actually doing it. It's not anonymous.

> Uber/Lyft model identifies both people

They make the driver fill some information in an online form and occasionally send an image that is supposed to be a selfie. Certainly in my account I can see a record of what various people who drove me claimed were their names, but that's not really the same thing as identifying them.

In New York at least, Uber's vehicles are licensed through the same agency that licenses taxis - the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC). They are held to the same standards as taxis and can be delicensed for violations.

The NYT is moving more and more into scaremongering articles. This is a great example where the title says "Sexual Assault" but within the article it mentions the vast majority are nothing near as serious as assault (but obviously still a problem).

The article does not compare or contrast the rates to other industries, situations or just living life in general. My comment is not to absolve Uber, but rather point out that the article does not do a good job at proving that Uber is any more dangerous than a variety of other places/activities/things.

This is not new; NYT has been doing this for quite a long time, and it got exacerbated when Trump started running for office in 2015-2016. It is very difficult for me to take NYT (or most news websites) seriously now - one can take advantage of a lot of platforms just stripping out most fluff and giving you only the objective details.

Just take a cursory look at the front page, and see how much of it is hard, actual news. Even in the Business section, you'll find words like "cult-like" and "drowning in debt". It's very difficult to believe that this is a newspaper of record.

https://archive.ph/9Ldug

I am perfectly OK with a world where each corporation is not expected to act as its own private police force.

Uber is certainly not capable of dishing out the kind of punishment these scumbags deserve, nor is it capable of providing due process to defendants.

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