Uber and Lyft to swap data on banned drivers(bbc.co.uk) |
Uber and Lyft to swap data on banned drivers(bbc.co.uk) |
- competitor banks share information about people who bounce checks
- competitor insurance companies share data about customers with fraudulent claims
- competitor casinos share photos of card counters
Probably many others I can't think of.
EDIT to reply: thanks for the customers' returns example. I found a story explaining the shared database: https://www.elliott.org/case-dismissed-2/the-retail-equation...
They are all using a third party called The Retail Equation.
I'm pretty sure it's any claim. If you want to see something scary request your lexis nexus consumer report.
If you’ve ever had an account closed, you’ll discover the bank will refuse to tell you why. So if you aren’t aware of CIFAS, things can be pretty confusing.
Near zero repercussions for the bank that wrongly adds anyone to the database (potentially a 3 figure sum awarded by the financial ombudsman, again if the person is aware of the financial ombudsman).
I’m frankly surprised they’ve been able to continue to exist. Only with GDPR coming in have they given you the option to check if you are on the list without having to write a physical letter.
Examples of them screwing up:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/oct/31/mortgage-fraud...
https://www.msbsolicitors.co.uk/cifas-fraud-markers-the-prob...
Really, the only proper way to do a background check is via your local law enforcement. These companies should not be relied on. Ever. Even if they're right a majority of time, the cases where they're wrong are too damaging to be considered trivial.
A recent viral video this week showed a woman assaulting an Uber driver, she livestreamed on IG to try to justify her actions and in the process said that she would only be using Lyft, then lyft tweeted that they pre-emptively banned her.
If FAANG joined together to make a shared blocked users list, they could effectively make a digital caste system subject to little current government oversight.
You mean like credit scores?
And that's just in the US, if they pull something like that in the EU it's almost certain there would be new laws put in place to inflict heavy fines.
That's why we don't rely on the court of public opinion for deciding guiltiness of an accused.
What needs to be canceled is cancel cultuer itself.
What safeguards are there so that a grouchy driver or engineer can't use it to mess with their ex? For instance.
Not gonna say it's perfect, but as an engineer at one of these companies I'll say production access is generally very locked down and audited to the point of often being quite an encumbrance to even be able to debug production issues. Very unlikely anyone will be willy-nilly blacklisting drivers over personal vendettas.
I suspect NTSB/FAA are much more effective at correcting bad info than no-fly list which is managed by people who like to think they are fighting so much evil the harms of their policies are justified.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List#Vulnerabilities
I've seen some truly horrifying behavior from Lyft in terms of safety that makes me cautious of wanting to use the app, despite liking Lyft's public presence better. I suspect it's in the interest of growth and gaining market share to have things like lax-er driver background checks so they get more drivers. In the end it ends up hurting them a lot more, and can lead to terrible things for riders.
Interestingly, literally every C-level exec at Uber from the Travis Kalanick era has been replaced. Uber is the "Ship of Theseus" of companies.
The problem with these sorts of backchannel data sharing is that unlike things like credit reports, individuals have little to no access to see what is in their file and dispute it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/business/dealbook/wells-f...
There is some atrocious behavior out there in both the passenger and driver seats.
(For those not familiar, we do already have this in the US, but Uber/Lyft wanted their drivers not to be commercially-licensed, so now they have to reimplement the DMV.)
There's a reason we have "innocent until proven guilty" and lots of interlocking checks and balances in the legal system to prevent the mob from lynching people.
Nowadays they can lynch your social life and employment options over a drunken tweet.
How do we fix this?
https://www.theroot.com/uber-bans-passenger-for-life-after-s...
It's already hard to get a job as a felon in the US, and hasn't that worked out great!
In case it's not obvious: Just no. It's been tried. It's a horrible idea.
What in the history of policing makes you think they're immune to similar mistakes?
Basically, they put an asterisk next to their reports saying to take them with a grain of salt. But that doesn't change the damage done by a potential employer getting a peak into your past that they never should have gotten.
Edit: fixed some typos
If they don't, you have political and legal recourse. A third-party company doesn't have the same legal obligation, nor does the public have any democratic control over that organization. Data companies have institutional pressures to preserve data at all costs, not to be proactive in destroying records of innocent folks.
There's a lot of entropy in first/middle/last names, DOBs, SSN, driver's license, etc. so accidental typo matches just means bad data, not some other person.
(Obviously, intentional identity theft notwithstanding.)
Far as I understood it, that was exceptionally rare in the industry. Not sure how prolific their customer base was or if they're still active.
All these business costs are passed onto other consumers... and while maybe not illegal, businesses essentially have Terms Of Service just like any other private entity.
If bob from City A's best taxi fires you and you try to get a job at City A's fastest taxi, fastest guy is probably gonna call best guy.
If you move cross-country, probably not.
For people who don't know lawyers, that's largely theoretical.
An implication of this “banned users” data sharing is that this data exchange must be overseen by regulators, to enforce equal access to competitors to this data and also that companies drop people from the “banned users” database after some time, not penalized for life except in rare cases.
I would argue that most users’ petty behaviors that lead to banning do not deserve to make them pay for it the rest of their lives - and that there are rare exceptions who do deserve to be banned for life because certain users’ behavior is so egregious.
Also, consider cases for jurisdictional banning and global banning. Some behaviors are not allowed in certain countries. Take a gay couple kissing in a car in Saudi Arabia - should this couple be banned? If so, just if attempting to use services in Saudi Arabia, or globally? These are serious and important considerations.
the gov't can require that each company has an appeals process, which can be brought to a court if the banned user decides that it's worth escalating.
In fact, i think a general, low cost court process for digital service providers would make for a great consumer protection, but still allow digital services to be flexible in how they want to provide. For example, google can still ban people, but the user can appeal, and if the user is unsatisfied with the appeal, they can go to court (without costing exorbitant amounts of money).
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20041207/1958200.shtml
Doing these things in the dark almost always leads to abuse.
(PS: what is going on with all these colons in their urls?)
In some other there will be no real obligation of keeping the records accurate (sometimes there is one theoretical but not enforced, sometimes there is one but with a legal leeway that allows a certain amount of inaccuracy).
- shortly after Dara joined, he sent a company-wide email to the effect of "all corporate espionage projects must be halted effectively now"
- he introduced a new guiding motto: "We do the right thing. Period." and repeatedly refers back to it
- he found out about a previously undisclosed data leak and went ahead and made a proper public disclosure. The CSO had to leave the company and eventually got charged as a result[0]
- on an all-hands meeting centrally themed on making things better after the Fowler scandal fallout, a board member made a cringey sexist joke. He had to resign from the board that afternoon. This incident spoke volumes about how discrimination culture was no longer going to be tolerated.
- around the same time, as part of the HR revamp, a number of policies were introduced (training courses, anon hotline)
- there was a huge internal project called 180 days of change in response to the wave of scandals. This encompasses the safety features, along with improvements to the driver UX to make it easier to understand their income, among other things (which I hear were very well received by users).
[0] https://slate.com/technology/2020/08/uber-joseph-sullivan-ch...
Speaking that crime doesn't pay...
https://twitter.com/joesu11ivan
edit: this and some other questionable hires and moves by Cloudflare made me do everything I can to avoid using CF services. I have many of CF hosts in my blacklist now.
Not necessarily. That's the whole debate!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/10/03/god-view...
https://www.theretailequation.com/frequently-asked-questions...
> How does the system work?
> When a consumer wants to make a return, a retailer will scan the original sales transaction receipt and/or collect consumer identification (in certain regions that may be the individual’s driver’s license or government-issued ID card) to make an identification of the person and his/her unique return behavior.
(Note: I have not done this. Or have I? Well, no I haven't, but if I had you wouldn't know about it.)
It's one of the most interesting "careful" projects you can do. Something like "Satoshi Nakamoto" can release software to change the world, but you can compare their style of writing to the short list of crypto researchers whose identities are known. Similarly with JK Rowling's book released under a pseudonym. It's very hard not to slip up and have your identities connected. However, in a world where everyone is supposed to have just one identity, and present this ID to communicate or transact on a given network, and where all databases are interconnected, the only way to preserve anonymity would be to hijack someone else's identity temporarily (such as making a call from a person's phone, or having a homeless person go buy a prepaid phone for you). Sometimes people swap identities voluntarily ... such as with bitcoin mixers or when you swap DNA samples before sending them back to 23andme and other test centers (who btw keep your DNA for the government and all kinds of things). But the risk is that you can be held responsible for something someone else did, with laundered bitcoins (civil forfeiture) or some physical crime (DNA analysis might indicate it's you).
I wrote this 8 years ago: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114&cpage=553?p=114&cpage=553
The question there is whether avoiding a ban on returns would count as a honest purpose; arguably it would not. A standard example for inappropriate name change is changing the name to avoid seekers of debt repayment using the previous name, this seems similar in intent.