Uber and sexual harassment of female riders

Feel safe now after reading this post

Many women mistakenly think that by riding with Uber they are safer. What they don't realize is that taxi drivers in Tampa (and most major cities) have been cleared by extensive background investigations by the PTC. The riding public can rest assured that when a United Cab driver pulls up, this person is not a strange and deadly individual who will stalk you. Stalking of female riders with Uber is happening because they don't background check and their drivers have access to information about you that a cab driver does not.

Olivia Nuzzi, a writer for the Daily Beast had a weird experience with an Uber driver who began stalking her. If she was not a high profile journalist, you would not know this. In her words:

I met the Uber at the corner of the street where I live near Lincoln Center in New York City, and asked the driver to take me across town. It was an unremarkable trip.

Until the end.

At the end of the ride, the Uber driver asked me if I had been near Lincoln Center a few hours earlier. I said I hadn't, since I didn't remember walking past there. Then he took out his iPad. "Really?" he asked. "Because you look like this girl." He turned the iPad around to face the back seat. To my surprise, I saw a full-length, close-up picture of me, wearing the workout clothes I’d had on an hour previously.

The Uber driver asked me if I wanted him to send me the picture. I declined, and quickly got out of the car....The Daily Beast

She wrote a review on Uber's App and was subsequently informed that the driver had been fired. Then, a writer friend from another publication said they were contacted by email from the fired driver with the jogging image as an attachment!! WTF. It seems the fired Uber driver wanted to enlist her help in getting his job back by contacting her friend to see if she would remove the complaint. The stalker then contacted Ms. Uzzi at her place of employment through a private emial. Ms. Uzzi was at a loss to explain how he had received it.

I had previously been under the impression that the only personal information Uber provided to drivers about riders was a first name, so I was a bit confused as to how this driver had enough information about me to find out my employer. I reached out to Uber for clarification. When Uber got back to me, they assured me that they were not at fault. The privacy and safety of customers, they said, was a priority. I was told that under no circumstance would an Uber driver be given the full name of an Uber customer—particularly not one that had just gotten him fired. Uber told me the driver must have just recognized me. Uber's decision to fire the driver so quickly was due to the fact that this was not the first time there had been complaints about him, they told me.

It did not stop there. Her Facebook friends started getting friend request from him and he wanted to know if she was single! He seemed obsessed with her and she went back to Uber for an explanation. It seems with Uber, drivers will know the full name of their riders. At my company, we only know the first name and we never handle your credit card.

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