Driving Service Uber and Lyft are working together to ensure that crawlers kicked off their platforms stay off their platforms.
The two announced a partnership Thursday teamed up with HireRight for the background screening to create a database of drivers disabled for committing serious offenses, including physical and sexual assault, as part of their new operational sharing security program. Passenger safety concerns have plagued Uber and Lyft for years with dozens of complaints and lawsuits claiming the companies are failing drivers adequate screen and ban those with multiple strikes for rule breaking.
The program is initially being developed in the US, and other delivery and delivery services will be able to participate in the data sharing system, as long as they agree to the same privacy measures as Uber and Lyft.
“You have to be safe no matter what platform you choose,” said Uber’s senior VP and chief justice Tony West. a press release. “Dealing with these difficult security issues is greater than any of us, and this new business sharing security program demonstrates the value of working with experts, advocates and others to make a meaningful difference. We encourage more companies to join us. ”
Drivers for ride service like Uber and Lyft are largely considered independent contractors, not employees, which means that they can and often does drive for both companies.
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A third party, HireRight, will collect and manage all data shared between these companies and ensure that all parties comply with the standards set by the National Center for Sexual Violence. Per the Associated Press, information about the victims will not be shared in the database and the incidents that led to a driver’s dismissal are divided into six broad categories: attempted sexual penetration without consent; non-consensual touching of a sexual body part; non-consensual kissing of a sexual body part; non-consensual kissing of a non-sexual body part; non-consensual sexual penetration; and fatal physical assaults.
“We will share the basics of the deactivation, as well as identifying information about the driver just enough so that other businesses can find that person on their platform, nothing else,” West said in an interview with NBC.
Incidents of sexual assault and harassment are notorious underreport to the police, who make the most important market of dangerous drivers important because they can move under the radar with traditional background checks that often rely on legal records. The rights group of the victims, Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network, which previously criticized Uber and Lyft for a lack of rigorous process to investigate drivers, praised the companies for the gathering in the name of the safety of passengers.
“Sexual violence thrives in secret,” Scott Berkowitz, the group’s president and founder, said in a press release. “Thanks to this initiative, offenders will no longer be able to hide or escape responsibility by simply switching off platforms.”
Over the past few years, Uber and Lyft have both built in a bunch of safety features, including in-app panic buttons and additional ways for passengers to verify their drivers. But critics argue that these precautions have long been unnecessary. In 2018, CNN found that 103 drivers of Uber and 18 Lyft drivers have been accused of sexual assault or abuse in the past four years. In the company’s very first safety reportUber has revealed that it received 3,045 reports of sexual assaults during travel in 2018. In the same year, nine people were killed and 58 killed in auto-related accidents. Lyft has also filed several lawsuits by women over the case handling complaints of sexual assault and allegations that it did not do enough to protects passengers from dangerous drivers.