Uber Faces Growing Pressure over Sexual Assault Record
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The only way I’ve found to contact a human when a ride goes awry is to say an accident happened. (In truth, it often involves a concern around safety.) That connects you with humans who can actually, sometimes, address or at least recognize your problem in a way the chatbot never can.
Uber’s refusal to fingerprint drivers betrays that they know they have criminals on their rolls. But I wonder how many cases of rudeness by the driver got upgraded to sexual assault (which, to be clear, is a matter of personal discretion) because Uber went all in on bots.
The best way to reduce your incident count is by not collecting incident data.
There’s a whole weird underground economy around uber. The guys I get in my area in Upstate NY are often migrating up from NYC. They are like a cloud labor force and follow the rates around. It’s cool in some ways, as the friction of getting a job makes it hard to move, but that type of arrangement is a great operating environment for predators.
Another way of phrasing this is that if you take Uber to and from work, you'll likely have an incident within 2 years.
>The best way to reduce your incident count is by not collecting incident data.
The guy you're replying to is actually claiming the opposite, ie. that rude drivers complaints are getting upgraded to "accident" or "driver was threatening" complaints to get past the chatbot, and Uber is actually safer than their statistics claim.
I’m not sure I’m reaching that conclusion. (Possibly because I don’t want to.)
I was once in an accident due to a New York cabbie being on their phone. Blew through a stop sign and got T-boned. When I’m in a car with a distracted driver, now, I tend to report it after the trip.
Uber sometimes lets me do this. And sometimes it does not. When it does not, when I escalate to a safety issue (Uber will sometimes call the sheriff before putting anyone on the thread, they’re that cheap and dismissive), I am making the record reflect louder than a chat with support would. But the underlying jeopardy is both real and unchanged.
So are Uber rides safer than the figures reflect? Or was their lack of safety controls previously mollified by customer service? I’m not drawing a conclusion on that delineation. Just pointing out the effect.
In NYC, you have a good handle on cab incidents because the TLC fines companies for failure to comply. There’s no regulator and anyone assume that honest reporting is happening is naive at best.
It's more like prioritizing lower operational expenses over passenger safety. Sadly, safety and security only seem to matter when they are absent.
Just wait till there is more supply than demand in programmers/tech. Then you'll learn how much the rest of the world sucks.
A lot of us here are earning in the top few percent of our countries households and we don't have to deal with any of the bullshit that people making 1/4th we do or less.
Will this happen though? There's still a lot of work to be done, but principally I wonder if AI hype hasn't actually reduced the top of the funnel significantly. If non-programmers (i.e. those who might become programmers) believe the job "won't exist in six months", they are probably not going to set themselves up for that direction. Plus juniors starting work now will suffer from leaning on AI too much as well.
Overall I think it's counterintuitive. When I was growing up, it seemed obvious that my generation knew technology better than the last, and of course the next generation would be even more familiar. In practice though, kids these days are mostly phone-only. The ability to produce technological artifacts remains uncommon.
I mean, it will, but trying to time the market is a hard game :D
Is it normal to be fingerprinted for a job? It would be seen as an incredible overreach here. Then again, so would a drug test. Uber drivers in particular seem a vulnerable group, which makes forcing this a bit 'icky'.
Depends on context. In finance or anything concerning children, yes. You’re given autonomy where others are vulnerable. On a construction site, on a factory floor, or in an office, where you’re constantly supervised, no.
> Uber drivers in particular seem a vulnerable group
So are their passengers.
Every job and volunteer role at which I’ve needed to get fingerprinted outsources it. When I’ve collected fingerprints for a job, my firm never got a copy, just the report.
You seem to be redefining the word “vulnerable” to mean the opposite. Uber drivers disproportionately are men without full time jobs. That pool of people almost certainly has a higher likelihood of criminal behavior than the population as a whole. Assuming finger printing actually works (which I’m not sure), they’re exactly the people who should have more scrutiny.
This is how the vast majority of compliance regulations work. You the law abiding person don't want to file bank paperwork, or whatever, yet you do because some smaller portion of the population would fraudulently rob the population blind if we didn't.
Then step up and deeply think about the situation at hand and all it's ramifications.
When you see Chesterton's Fence don't rip it out of the ground before you understand why it was built in the first place. Think of how you would make a system with the least problems (you can't solve all problems without infinite costs or infinite loss of freedom).
> I mean vulnerable in the sense that fungible labor is vulnerable to the whims of the employer. In this case it might be for a good cause but in general the more leverage you give Uber over its employees, presumably the worse. Whether they have a higher propensity for crime, you're talking still about a very small minority of drivers. The law abiding ones still suffer the leverage from above.
It may not require fingerprinting, but it’s certainly stricter than many jobs.
What's the point of fingerprinting when there's no way to ensure the person who registered for the account is the person actually driving?
There are plenty of ways to do that verification, or at least make it more difficult. Prints then finger who fucked up.
The drivers all have smart-phones - shouldn't it be possible to use the face-id feature to verify the driver is the driver-of-record on the account?
Rep. Dingell says, "There is no trade-off that should be acceptable to Uber, considering the devastating impact of sexual assault"
But apparently there is a trade-off for her, seeing as she only wants to focus on one direction of this crime by fingerprints and background checks for drivers and no safeguards protecting drivers. Seems she has chosen to ignore 38% of sexual assaults as well. I wonder why her trade-off is morally superior?
I mean, if you start using your thinking cap for a few minutes it makes sense.
1. The number of drivers is small. The number of passengers is large. This makes checks on drivers technically possible.
2. Drivers work in their own cars. Are you saying they should get bars installed between the back and front of the car?
3. The passengers are the random public, do you want to submit a criminal background check before riding in a car?
4. These are all things Uber can do themselves to protect their employees. These are not things the public can do to protect themselves from Uber employees.
Pushing predators around from job to job doesn't solve the problem.
Many of these assaults may not rise to the level of criminality, either in their deeds or the quality of evidence.
How about we teach sexual assault dynamics in school so people actually recognize it to report in the first place.
How about we go after the groups with people in positions of power over others that commit assaults at a much higher rate than the general population.
Oh, yea, because those people in power don't want that, would make their trips to private islands a bit hard to explain.
My wife and I went to a couple cities where Waymo operated and when we tried it were pleasantly surprised. Talked to a few people and did some research and it's clear women feel much safer and will pay the premium to have their type of experience vs basically a random gamble as to the type of person who will pick you up in an Uber.
Not to mention lately it seems like Ubers standards for the cars picking you up have gone way down the drain. That or maybe people are just lying or gaming the system about the state of their vehicles.
And on top of that there are plenty of drivers who probably shouldn't even have a license. As a man there have been plenty of rides where I've felt unsafe simply due to erratic driving.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-public-transit...
Without going into too much detail, I’ve learned just how bad it is. On the “less” vile end of things, my current parter had some desperate slime try to offer her money for sex. I made sure he reported him, but Silicon Valley loves to enable sex criminals, I imagine he’s still out there.
Uber received 400,000 reports of sexual misconduct from 2017 to 2022 - https://web.archive.org/web/20251023145410/https://www.engad... - August 7th, 2025
> Uber only disclosed 12,522 serious sexual assaults during the same period.
Uber’s Festering Sexual Assault Problem - https://web.archive.org/web/20251023144648mp_/https://www.ny... - August 6th, 2025