I was going to post the following (below -----), but I read the stories and they mainly focus on the signup process for Uber. While I still mostly feel like my original post, it is troublesome to hear that Uber employs people with no background check or verification into a job which, if you think about it, entails a trust-relationship not unlike that of a doctor or cleaning lady/man: someone in in an intimate setting who you entrust to care for you. For a doctor it's obvious, a cleaner enters your home, where you trust they don't steal sneakily or assault you. And for a taxi driver who drives you home at night, you expect when you hire through a large company that you're in the hands of a professional you can trust. Not a person who went through background checks/verification/training as much as if you took a random stranger and put them in a car.
So to that extent I'd say Uber has a lot of work to do in its signup process. But beyond that, it still feels like an incident that doesn't justify a post on HN. I wonder what the process is like for regular taxi companies in India and if it's much different. Did you guys remember the Polish woman who was raped earlier this year in a non-uber Indian taxi?
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As horrible as this is, it's a non-story for me. That's not to say the rape isn't horrible. But we need relevance, we can't just report any horrible fact. About 17k children die each day, it doesn't make sense to fill HN with that daily unless there is some direct relevance. If we didn't have a 'relevance filter', I nor anyone else would visit this particular community anymore.
Now what's the relevance here? Uber? And...?
Imagine an employee from Microsoft raped someone (pretty much 100% guaranteed one of them did in the past decades). Should that be a story we talk about on HN, just because it's bad and because it's a tech company and no other reason? Of course not. So why should it be a story that a non-employee freelance driver rapes someone in a country of over 1 billion people?
Look if this story had a sociological context about gender relations in India that was interesting for HN, sure. I'd love to read about that. My girlfriend was just in India this summer for social work and we chat about this every now and then. If it was a story about gender-violent policies at Uber, sure, that'd be interesting. If this was a story about how Uber attracts disproportionately higher rates of criminal drivers, sure. But there's none of that.
So I don't see the relevance, and without any kind of trend, evidence of bad policies or whatever, it's just a single incident. Shit happens, and without context this is a story that smears a company. I'm no fan of Uber, but there's a lot better things to focus on IF this was an incident.
Anyway I'd be happy to hear otherwise, I could totally be missing something.
"Imagine an employee from Microsoft raped someone "
This is somewhat iffy logic. If Microsoft's purported USP was "our OS is way safer than the alternatives" (this is, partly, how Uber positions itself in India[1], which is smart, given the horrible "rape in moving vehicles/by taxi drivers etc" history in India) and then it turned out that Windows was much easier for cybercriminals to hack into and steal your credit cards (than say OSX, which made no such claim) that would be worth discussing on a site about OS es.
Or maybe not. Hence the question.
[1] Uber Delhi used to have this in their marketing copy (emphasis mine) "Uber is New Delhi's best way to request a safe, reliable, affordable ride"
Yeah fair enough, although it does seem as if they just went with the 'standard' message, by your analogy 'windows is a safe and reliable OS to make payments', as opposed to 'windows is out now, enjoy the safest way to make payments ever conceived'. If you then get hacked after the first message ('it's just safe and reliable'), and it's a single case of 1 person being hacked due to a single 3rd party app not behaving like it should without permission from Microsoft, I don't know if it's worth discussing. As another member said, it feels like a tabloid story that's only interesting because Uber has a $40b valuation and rape is a justifiably concerning topic in general. But it doesn't seem like anything systemic is going on here.
I've never used Uber and am not too familiar with their marketing, but I'm not aware of them ever pushing hardcore the notion that they're the safest concerning the trustworthiness of the driver. I don't even think that's a marketing variable, even in a place with a history of rape in moving vehicles that you mentioned. (reliability of the driver concerning trip duration, professionalism etc, sure, but whether you can trust him not to hurt you?).
I think the core question is whether they really missed out on something in the screening process. If not, it kind of feels like this is a lone incident in a country of 1 billion people, one of few such cases (2 or 3 now?) after tens of millions of rides.
"country of a billion people". Oh please, not that tired cliche again. Police verification of employees is standard in India, even for software jobs. Uber as usual seems to be cutting corners, playing fast and loose, operating outside the law. The drivers aren't really 'employees' just 'licensed driving partners' and so Uber has no responisibility.
If this had happened in the USA (" a country of 300 million people") everybody would rightly be looking into how Uber operates and what to fix. But hey some third world country half a world away and it is just people being unreasonable.
And this "numbers" logic is fallacious. Why is the police shooting of an African American causing such ripples in a "country of 300 million people" with millions of police/citizen encounters. Surely the proportion ending in unarmed citizens being shot for no good reason are really really low? Then why all the hoopla? Why are people so outraged?
> If this had happened in the USA (" a country of 300 million people") everybody would rightly be looking into how Uber operates and what to fix. But hey some third world country half a world away and it is just people being unreasonable.
Blah, stop putting words in my mouth. I'm from such a 'third world country', and my gf just returned from her work in India. Let's also ignore the multiple times someone was charged with rape over there in the US (I don't live there, you know). I'm certainly not saying nobody cares because it's India. I'm saying it appears like a single case related to uber in a country of 1 billion (where rape happens every hour) after millions of rides.
> Then why all the hoopla? Why are people so outraged?
Because it's SYSTEMIC, that's my point. It literally, not kidding, literally happens every single day and enough is enough, and it is a consequence partially of some identifiable issues in the police system that they're responsible to fix (and haven't been doing for decades). That's why such a story is interesting. Why is it not interesting if a white person is shot by the police? Because arguably it's not systemic, it's not based on a certain culture, on certain policies. For example if you go to a police station to train them on cultural sensitivity often the first question is 'what do you think if you see am 18yo black kid in a nice car?'. They'll virtually all say 'drug dealer'. And the white kid? They'll virtually all say 'rich daddy'. And they're brutally honest in this. That's literally racial discrimination, as a citizen is seen and treated differently SOLELY based on the color of their skin and such racial profiling it's pervasive in American (police) culture. It's a small example of how systemic the problem is.
But here I DON'T see that as of yet. It looks like a genuine incident that Uber couldn't have done much against. If they screened the driver, he probably wouldn't have been filtered out unless he was going around telling everyone of his rapist tendencies. There's no gender-violent culture or policies we can specifically identify at Uber that should be rooted out but isn't, contrary to howwe can EASILY identify race-biased culture and policies in the American police system that should be rooted out but isn't.
I'm all for extra screening of taxi drivers by the way and think Uber should be doing this and doing it better. No argument from me there. And while I've never used Uber, unlikely I ever will, didn't flag this story, don't like uber, I don't think it's fair to bring this story as if Uber took some huge missteps and caused this rape. It appears to me like an incident.
The interesting thing for me is how Uber frame their method of evaluating drivers as better than taxi industry regulation.
Obviously a single incident in itself doesn't mean anything but if there is significant percentage of incidents it would indicate that the vetting needs to be changed.
It reminds me of the airbnb story about an apartment getting trashed that got a lot of attention here a couple of years back. It ended up spurring airbnb to launch a range of changes to make the service safer for users. If we had buried that then the changes may never have happened.
You are applying a wildly divergent double standard in how you consider startup security failures. If Uber had a security flaw in their signup form that leaked personal info, no question zero people would be disputing its relevance to HN. But a rape happens because of security flaws in the driver signup process, all of a sudden an army of scholars on the ethics of HN posts emerges defending censorship. Very disturbing.
You're implying I or others wouldn't care about rape, but would care about leaking personal info? That's a bit offensive actually and really needs to be backed up with a lot more than just an assumption.
To address your analogy. If a security flaw in the form leaks personal info and privacy of tens of millions of people is compromised as a direct result (like has happened), that's a bit different from an indirect result in a screening process that affects a single person. Consider that statement beyond the fact that this seems like an incident, as I'm not trying to make a numerical comparison between the two examples here. What I mean is that one is a direct consequence, while the other is not. That is, I wonder if there is any screening process that could have prevented this, if there was any one thing they forgot to do that directly caused this event.
Using your analogy, if the security form leaked only a single piece of information and the leak was due to say a third party (like the driver in this case, say it'd be a problem in the Chrome browser) that Uber should have noticed in development, it wouldn't be a big deal and beyond the technicality of the particular security flaw, it's not relevant. I wouldn't flag it, but I'd easily see why others would.
Anyway I don't want to push this analogy much further as frankly I don't feel comfortable with it, I certainly don't want to belittle this rape and compare it to something non-trivial like a security form. Apologies in advance if anyone felt that way about this post.
To get to the actual point: what is uber's responsibility? I think that's the key question here. It's a bit of a tricky one. Uber kind of sits between two positions. The first is that it's 'just the facilitator', and can't be fully responsible for 3rd party drivers. Of course it'll claim to aim to feel responsible, but in the end uber drivers aren't like real employees. Uber kind of feels like more of a freelancer on odesk type of place, at least to me, where Odesk would have limited responsibility. On the other hand, they also try to position themselves as a quality brand, as distinctly Uber, as a company with its own drivers, not random freelancers on its platform. It's clear they have responsibility, but how much?
Anyway, perhaps that's not the correct question. A more specific question would be: what kind of screening process could they have had that prevented this?
You said this: > But a rape happens because of security flaws in the driver signup process
But I wonder what exactly that flaw was. Sure there's a chance he did this before and was registered somewhere and a background check would let that fact surface, but I think it's unlikely. Most rapists aren't the cliche-criminal, it's usually an uncle, a boss, a friend. It's likely none of these people, nor likely the driver, would carry stereotypical characteristics of a person you'd want to reject in the hiring process. Meanwhile, Uber does have his identity on file and records of the trip, so it's likely he'll be caught just as quickly as an employee of any other company. As such I still wonder if this isn't just an incident unrelated to company policy like the case of the rape of a Polish woman earlier this year in India in a regular taxi.
Anyway I have no clue about what kind of screening they do and what kind of screening is typical for drivers at a taxi company. If anyone is privy to this info let me know! In any case I think it's a clear signal Uber should improve its screening process so that we'll never hear from a case where someone was raped in a taxi by someone with a record of having done so before, as that means it may have been preventable with better screening.
The issue here is not whether Uber could have screened better, but whether that very question should be flagged for removal from public view by senior HN users, or open to investigation and debate.
I think you realized partway into this how vile a corner you were painting yourself into with your "it only affected a single person" line of reasoning. But to follow your logic, which assumes that rape and the leaking of personal info are of the same magnitude of error, Uber's error would only be worth non-censorship if "tens of millions" of women were raped.
Whether or not this was truly due to a flaw in Uber's screening process or an unavoidable crime is certainly a valid question. All the more reason not to censor it.
You're missing the point. The point is not that it's 'only bad if it happens often'.
The point is that if it happens to tens of millions of people, it's systemic. If it's a single case, it's an incident UNLESS there is evidence that it's a direct consequence of certain policies.
And if it's an incident unrelated to Uber's policies, I don't think it's relevant, personally. That's the point. That doesn't make it 'not bad', it just makes it 'not-relevant' for a tech-focused community. To filter out irrelevant topics is not censorship, it's focus.
Now you have said yourself the issue is not that Uber could have screened better, so does that mean indeed that it's an incident? That's the focal point of my issue here. I'm not for flagging or censorship. If I think it's relevant, I'm all for keeping it. If the story was about 1 person being raped and it was because of Uber policies, or an interesting story on gender relations in India, or the history of trust in taxi companies, I'd love to read that. Hell, if 0 people were raped but Uber policies were such that it could happen anytime soon, I'd want to read that, too. But this has none of that as of yet, it feels like an incident, therefore not relevant and therefore I don't care to see it.
As for the flagging, I've never flagged in my life and don't feel strongly this should have been flagged either. But you're implying there was an investigation that was censored. To me it feels as if there was no such investigation, but rather instead, a tabloid-like article on an incident with a rape by a freelance driver of a $40b company that everyone happens to be talking about. If it really is an incident, not systemic, not caused by Uber policies and just tabloid material, then it doesn't seem like the worst idea to down vote it to remove its visibility. I don't know exactly how HN works, apparently through flagging which is like a mega-downvote I guess? I just don't particularly see the problem.
> Whether or not this was truly due to a flaw in Uber's screening process or an unavoidable crime is certainly a valid question. All the more reason not to censor it.
So help me do answer it :) This thread hasn't been removed, has it? (I wonder by the way who flagged the other threads. One member said it was because the title used the word ra ping instead of ra pe, implying the others might've been auto-flagged, which would certainly be strange to me as you can't presuppose anything about the validity of the article from the word alone)
Earlier you said this rape incident "feels like an incident that doesn't justify a post on HN".
Now you are backtracking by saying "This thread hasn't been removed, has it?", welcoming discussion, and you "don't feel strongly this should have been flagged".
Glad you changed your position. It's the right one.
What? You keep ignoring my points and making a silly one in return.
I'm STILL saying it doesn't feel like this incident justifies a HN post. Why? Because it's an incident. And you ignore my points on that and just seem to want to win the point that this 'shouldn't have been flagged', while I've never flagged a thread in my life. You're arguing against someone else here, not me.
Feel free to go back and read my post and see if you disagree and think there's something systemic going on. (it's an interesting question. Look for example at the police brutality topic in the US, it's generally not interesting to most to hear about a white person getting shot, and a story like that without any interesting angle doesn't have a place on HN, because it tends to be an incident rather than when it happens against minorities, e.g. black minorities, as that is usually systemic, which is interesting and is justified imo. That's kind of how I look at this story, and I still feel it's an incident.)
Doesn't mean I'll flag it though, again please don't bring that up again. Tell that to someone who actually flagged this thing.
So to that extent I'd say Uber has a lot of work to do in its signup process. But beyond that, it still feels like an incident that doesn't justify a post on HN. I wonder what the process is like for regular taxi companies in India and if it's much different. Did you guys remember the Polish woman who was raped earlier this year in a non-uber Indian taxi?
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As horrible as this is, it's a non-story for me. That's not to say the rape isn't horrible. But we need relevance, we can't just report any horrible fact. About 17k children die each day, it doesn't make sense to fill HN with that daily unless there is some direct relevance. If we didn't have a 'relevance filter', I nor anyone else would visit this particular community anymore.
Now what's the relevance here? Uber? And...?
Imagine an employee from Microsoft raped someone (pretty much 100% guaranteed one of them did in the past decades). Should that be a story we talk about on HN, just because it's bad and because it's a tech company and no other reason? Of course not. So why should it be a story that a non-employee freelance driver rapes someone in a country of over 1 billion people?
Look if this story had a sociological context about gender relations in India that was interesting for HN, sure. I'd love to read about that. My girlfriend was just in India this summer for social work and we chat about this every now and then. If it was a story about gender-violent policies at Uber, sure, that'd be interesting. If this was a story about how Uber attracts disproportionately higher rates of criminal drivers, sure. But there's none of that.
So I don't see the relevance, and without any kind of trend, evidence of bad policies or whatever, it's just a single incident. Shit happens, and without context this is a story that smears a company. I'm no fan of Uber, but there's a lot better things to focus on IF this was an incident.
Anyway I'd be happy to hear otherwise, I could totally be missing something.