Uber has recently come out with a plan to introduce a new feature to its App in Brazil and Mexico. The feature will record the conversations between the driver and the passenger, with their consent. But consent here is a bit tricky.
Basically, if the driver decides to turn on the recording feature, they are not obligated to warn the passenger and vice versa. Once the recording has been made and submitted to support for some kind of violation, neither of the two parties will have the ability to view it ever again.
It will be solely reviewed by Uber’s support team or handed over to the police if requested.
This addition to the App was caused by Uber’s not-so-clean history of having drivers that sexually or physically assaulted their passengers. In fact, there are around 131 cases with 31 of them being found guilty.
There are also audio recordings from individual passengers of Uber drivers overstepping their boundaries and speaking non-professionally. At that moment, Uber can’t really do anything else but to simply fire the driver.
Is this a slap in the face?
Many Uber users believe that this is a slap in the face. A voice recording is not going to help people from being sexually or physically assaulted. Furthermore, the lack of consent that the driver or the passenger can give on the recording of their voice is also a serious issue with the privacy policy.
Nobody wants their personal conversation with an Uber driver to be recorded and stored in Uber’s database to be sold to a large corporation in the future, right? Therefore, there aren’t going to be many supporters or even users of the new feature.
But, what can Uber do besides adding the automatic 911 dial on the App? Well, there may be a way.
Similar issues in the rest of the world
One country, in particular, the Republic of Georgia, was having similar issues with Yandex Taxi drivers as they were usually very pushy, or didn’t really conform to the etiquette set out by the company.
Therefore, the company installed the voice recording feature, which very few people ever used. Furthermore, it was deemed unconstitutional to eavesdrop on personal conversations, thus removed from the application completely, at least for the Georgian market.
However, according to Kapitali.ge, a leading financial media website in Georgia, Yandex Taxi started developing something even more accurate and useful.
The application would receive a plugin of a new AI software, which would monitor the sounds and conversations happening between the passenger and driver. The AI would try to determine the tone of the conversation, whether it was a normal discussion, an argument or a full-on fight. If the AI would determine that things were starting to heat up, it would immediately call the police and provide the current location, tracing guides and numbers of the car in question.
It has not been installed yet, simply due to limited resources that Yandex may have in this small market, but for Uber in a market like the United States, and for the English language it may be much easier and more relevant to install.
There are some issues to be dealt with first, such as the accuracy of the software, but as of now, there seems to be nothing else Uber can do besides even more extensive background checks on their drivers.
