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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

An element working against Uber is its pathological aversion to customer support.

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.

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From the article: “Uber has said it is one of the safest ways to get around, with the vast majority of its trips in the United States — 99.9 percent — occurring without an incident of any kind”

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.

> From the article: “Uber has said it is one of the safest ways to get around, with the vast majority of its trips in the United States — 99.9 percent — occurring without an incident of any kind”

Another way of phrasing this is that if you take Uber to and from work, you'll likely have an incident within 2 years.

I would like to know what incident entails too. Knowing the very minor things that would also happen to you while driving would really narrow down if Uber is a murder wagon or if it's about the same as driving yourself.

>>The only way I’ve found to contact a human when a ride goes awry is to basically say an accident happened. That connects you with humans who can actually, sometimes, address your problem in a way the chatbot never can.

>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.

> 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.

No, he’s saying that he does that. Most people won’t falsely report a car accident to complain about a ride cabbie.

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.

> Uber’s refusal to fingerprint drivers betrays that they know they have lots of criminals on their rolls.

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'.

> Is it normal to be fingerprinted for a job?

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.

I'm more concerned that Uber gets to farm fingerprints, than drivers are 'forced' to accept it, I suppose. Although I can't identify a clear harm or form of exploitation that would arise from Uber collecting prints, I wouldn't put it past them. Maybe a better middle ground is the licensure part of the government does the fingerprinting. Although not all cities regulate Uber in this way.

> more concerned that Uber gets to farm fingerprints

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.

> Uber drivers in particular seem a vulnerable group, which makes forcing this a bit 'icky'.

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.

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.

>The law abiding ones still suffer the leverage from above.

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.

Well yes, that is how many things work, but it being common isn't a great argument for it being good. With banking, for example, I'd much prefer a low-touch technological solution. You could argue fingerprinting _is_ a low-touch technological solution, although I'm not sure it's particularly good at enforcing who is who at driving time.

>but it being common isn't a great argument for it being good

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).

vulnerable how?

From my other reply:

> 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.

In roles where you're trusted with a lot of power over other people, absolutely. You won't get fingerprinted in a restaurant or store, but everyone in a hospital or a school should be.

Driving for Uber isn't a job, it is a gig, which is different, and why Uber doesn't have to give benefits or pay like it is a job. Uber spent TONS of money lobbying and electioneering for this position.

Uber drivers have to verify their driver's license, so it should be pretty easy to keep track of abuse.

In many countries, taxi licensing requires an ID/criminal background check, to ensure people with rape convictions don’t end up alone with drunk vulnerable people.

It may not require fingerprinting, but it’s certainly stricter than many jobs.

Yeah, but that's the government doing the sensitive parts, typically.

Being fingerprinted is required to obtain a law license.

Not just "upgrading rudeness to sexual assault", but their stance on absent customer support probably has them missing early warning signs, complaints about inappropriate behavior from drivers who's behavior may eventually escalate when they don't see any consequences.

> One element that might be working against Uber is its pathological aversion to letting passengers contact support

It's more like prioritizing lower operational expenses over passenger safety. Sadly, safety and security only seem to matter when they are absent.

>Uber’s refusal to fingerprint drivers betrays that they know they have lots of criminals on their rolls.

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?

> 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 person allowing his fingerprints to be used will have a lot of difficult questions to answer when being interviewed by law enforcement.

Uber already requires driver licenses and (presumably) banking information for payouts. The drivers page for US implies the verification is done in-person as well. All of this makes it pretty easy for the police to identify the driver, and hard for the driver to wriggle out and claim his identity was stolen. I'm not sure how adding fingerprints helps here.

I'm not sure either, but it is standard practice in many areas of employment. Want to be a teacher? You're gonna be fingerprinted. Perhaps it is a legacy of the days when different databases didn't talk to one another, i.e., drivers licensure and criminal conviction were siloed off from one another.

there's no way to ensure the person who registered for the account is the person actually driving

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?

Fingerprint? No employer does that short of the government. Standard background checks should be sufficient.

Financial services, especially folks who touch capital markets, does fingerprints and drug testing, but agree a standard background check should be fit for purpose for this use case assuming an exception process with a human queue processor.

Is tech really that relatively cushy? Because I'd quit for either of these, and I don't have any reason to fear them.

How do you feel about Palantir?

That the capabilities of its technology are greatly exaggerated.

>Is tech really that relatively cushy?

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.

> Just wait till there is more supply than demand in programmers/tech.

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.

>Will this happen though?

I mean, it will, but trying to time the market is a hard game :D

Running a business where your employees are isolated with customers in often remote areas is not a standard business. Additional safety for both parties is certainly warranted.

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