How safe are taxi apps? Arrest of Uber driver, a repeat sex offender, for rape in Delhi...

The arrest of an Uber driver for raping a young woman in Delhi has shaken the false sense of security that taxi apps have given. Anybody taking a traditional taxi or auto-rickshaw after hours in India would think twice, especially a woman alone. But cool new services like Uber with their smartphone apps and GPS-tracking have made many people lower their guard. You no longer worry about how to get home alone after a late night event or an evening out with friends. You can get an Uber in minutes; after all, the driver would have been vetted by an international company that has raised billions of dollars and has an image to maintain.

The incident in Delhi over the weekend has shattered this false sense of security.

First, the sordid details of the crime, as told to media by the police. A young woman working for a financial services firm in Gurgaon, a satellite town of Delhi which is a tech hub, went to a pub with colleagues after work on Friday. She took a ride with a friend to Vasant Vihar, a residential locality of South Delhi, and then called for an Uber to go the rest of the way home. She dozed off during the ride, and woke up to find the car parked in a secluded spot. There she was beaten, threatened, and raped. The driver then dropped her home in North Delhi. The woman took a picture of the car’s number plate, called the police control room immediately, and got herself medically examined to confirm the rape. The driver had fled his home by the time police reached there. He was tracked down in a small village a couple of hours from Delhi on Sunday evening, after police offered a reward and an informer came forward with a tip. The driver, Santosh Kumar Yadav, will be produced in a Delhi court today.

Uber immediately came out with a statement on its blog after the incident: “Safety is our #1 priority and in India, Uber exclusively partners with registered for-hire drivers who have undergone the commercial licensing process, hold government issued IDs, state-issued permits, and carry full commercial insurance. Uber also has a GPS trace and record of all trips that occur on the platform – information that has been shared with the authorities. ”

What is glossed over are several issues:


Uber claims that “every ridesharing driver is thoroughly screened through a rigorous process we’ve developed using constantly improving standards. The specifics vary depending on what local governments allow, but within each city we operate, we aim to go above and beyond local requirements to ensure your comfort and security.”

The Delhi police, however, told media that Uber is under investigation to verify if even the basic mandatory safety procedures were followed in this case – primarily, police verification and background checking of the driver.

With taxi services getting more competitive, Uber has been ramping up its services rapidly in recent months. It launched a lower cost, small car variant UberGo on November 20, which is available only in India. The question is whether Uber goes “beyond local requirements” for safety, as it claims, or takes short cuts in its expansion drive.

What’s shocking is that the Uber driver arrested in Delhi is a repeat offender who, in 2011, had spent seven months in Delhi’s Tihar jail for rape but was acquitted later.

Arrested Uber driver was jailed earlier too on rape charges: sources http://t.co/UprBye7QxX pic.twitter.com/RkVRx8n4xw

— NDTV (@ndtv) December 8, 2014
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The quality of Uber’s screening of drivers has come up earlier too in several cases around the world, including allegations of rape. Last month, The Daily Beast published a whole list of horror stories around Uber. Two months ago, in San Francisco, an Uber driver clobbered a passenger over the head with a hammer.

Of course, no amount of screening of drivers can ensure foolproof safety. And it isn’t as though women have felt any safer in traditional taxis – on the contrary, most women would welcome the choices that taxi apps have given them.

The issue here is that a taxi app makes a connection between you and a ‘screened’ driver, giving you a false sense of security. As soon as a booking is confirmed, I get a message with the name, mobile number, and photograph of the driver. But often, it’s somebody else who arrives to pick me up. The driver, on quizzing, tells me that the owner of the cab pays him a fixed daily wage of INR 500-800 (US$8-13). These proxy drivers rarely get any training from Uber or others, and you can see that in their lack of efficacy with the GPS or smartphone app. They call up repeatedly to ask for directions after a booking is confirmed, even though they’re supposed to use the location features of the app.

What is creepy in this situation is that your phone number gets shared with someone who doesn’t even have a direct connection with the taxi app.

A couple of weeks ago, when I wrote about GrabTaxi’s success in Southeast Asia, one of our readers commented: “I had a female friend that got harassed by her taxi driver after she used a taxi booking app. The driver had her number and kept calling her. I think it’s one of the potential issues that taxi apps need to deal with.”

Taxi apps had raised hopes that women can feel safer with the use of technology. The sad truth is that the new services have made transportation more convenient, but have done little yet to make it safer. On the contrary, they may have introduced new risks by bringing new sets of drivers into the ambit of taxi services. A company like Uber, which just had a second billion dollar funding round, can do a lot more to improve the situation – if it has the will to do it.

How it responds to the event in Delhi, which has a reputation for being India’s “rape capital”, will be a litmus test for Uber, as well as regulatory authorities.

Tourists in the city, especially, have been easy targets. Early this year, there were reports of a Polish tourist drugged and raped in a taxi by the driver. A 51-year-old Danish woman was gangraped near the New Delhi railway station in January. A couple of months ago, a 24-year-old was again drugged and gang-raped in a moving car.

@NMenonRao Hmm… Are we saying this guy would have not found his next victim without Uber? The issue is larger here, no?

— Nakul Shenoy (@nakulshenoy) December 8, 2014
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According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), in 2013, 1,441 rapes were reported in Delhi, making it the city with the highest number of rapes – that is four rapes everyday. As most rapes go unreported, the actual number will be much higher.

See: Uber is pissed with India’s payment rule, calls it antiquated, cumbersome, and stifling

This post How safe are taxi apps? Arrest of Uber driver, a repeat sex offender, for rape in Delhi shatters sense of security appeared first on Tech in Asia.