"Only in the last few months it has been established that 14,000 Uber journeys have involved fraudulent drivers uploading their photos to other driver accounts - with passengers' safety potentially put at risk getting into cars with unlicensed and suspended drivers."
This seems, from a technical perspective, an easy problem to solve with the resources of a public company.
Is it the desperation of people who need the money so badly they will constantly cheat the system? Can you design for that?
Writing this from China- it’s hard to really understand how little the Chinese seem to care about any of this. The systems that so obsess western writers seem to have absolutely no effect on Chinese society, and the majority of these new systems seem to be replacing similar but more intrusive systems of human-to-human checks. The concerns are warranted, but the interest approaches zero in the culture here.
I can’t speak to all of the US, but circa 2010 there was still a ton of people driving “private cars” in Brooklyn. You would negotiate up front with the driver and pay cash. My guess is 100% of those guys use Uber now.
Their response on Twitter is hilariously out of touch, considering that a few of them will certainly go to jail- “If success breeds envy and scrutiny, then so be it. There are countless firms that have used our tactics to get information on target customers.”