No idea how you can hold a company liable for the crimes committed by employees, regardless of how awful those crimes might be. I assume this will get overturned.
The question here was whether Uber could claim the drivers were not, in fact, employees.
(edit: A commenter correctly explains that no employee relationship is necessarily required; I should have stated that this was one part of Uber's defense, in addition to the driver having agreed not to assault riders and having undergone a safety screening)
Yes, agreed - I should have stated that this was one part of Uber's defense, in addition to the driver having agreed not to assault riders and having undergone a safety screening.
Do you think Uber instructed their drivers to rape people?
According to the article you linked to, a similar case was already tried in 1838, when a boy fell off a wagon, and the master was not guilty of the behaviour of the wagon driver.
If Uber had an internal policy of only ever hiring convicted rapists, didn't tell anyone using the app this, didn't warn about unsafe rides, didn't record ride information, and (crucially) also didn't tell their employees to do anything other than to be decent, good, hardworking drivers -- what do you believe their liability should be in this case? Nothing? I'm trying to "steelman" the implications of your point of view but I'm struggling here. When does liability kick in for you - is it only if they enshrine it as policy to do the criminal act?
I don't think there's anything very complicated here. We don't need to make up unreal scenarios.
For example a company can instruct a truck driver what time he needs to have the goods delivered, then the company is also to blame if he has an accident because the schedule was unfeasible while following safe driving practices.
Or a company which is dumping harmful chemicals into the environment.
A cab driver raping a passenger is unfortunately not an isolated happening, it's not particular to Uber.
But Uber does have a hand in it, by choosing to not properly vet their drivers or lower the risk. Uber is not a marketplace - they choose the drivers and they are, more or less, assigned to you. Uber is their employer.
If the employer makes choices that leads to an unsafe working condition, then that's their responsibility. If that might, potentially, mean the current business model is not viable, well... yeah, too bad so sad. Nobody has a god given right to run a business however the fuck they want.
But I don't think that's the case here. Uber can take steps to mitigate this, it's not like theyve exhausted their options. Frankly, they haven't even tried.
Yes, that's the legal standard. You should read the linked article. A company is only responsible for crimes or injuries their employees commit, if these are part of what they've been instructed to do by the company.
How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
Sure. If Uber was convicted of the crime of rape here, that'd be weird.
They were found civilly liable. Because of things like this:
> Over three weeks, jurors weighed the harrowing personal account of Ms. Dean as well as testimony from Uber executives and thousands of pages of internal company documents, including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
Do you know what that serious safety incident was? I don't. I don't find support in the article of any connection. It could have been reckless driving, or it could have been sexual in nature. What it was makes a lot of difference.
It may surprise you, but a four week jury trial covers a few more bases than a short article can fully detail. That said, this definitely has an answer:
> When matching drivers with riders, Uber uses an AI-powered safety feature called the safety ride assistant dispatch, or SRAD. SRAD gives potential driver-rider matches a score from 0 to 1 based on potential for sexual assault and aims to make matches with the lowest risk.
The article also says that Uber sets various thresholds around this already and that their system flagged it at a score that was "higher than the late night average". What it doesn't tell us is what the threshold is/was for Pheonix, or how that threshold compares to other cities, or even how much higher the score was over the "average". Maybe their threshold for canceling a ride is 0.85, and the late night average is 0.8 in this system. So 0.81 puts the driver over the late night average as per the article and under the threshold for canceling the ride.
Your email provider has systems for detecting spam and removing it from your email. If an email comes into their system and falls under the threshold for being declared spam, but is over the average spam rating for emails in your account, have they done something wrong by allowing it through if it's spam? What if it wasn't spam and they removed it?
These sorts of headlines that espouse a "they knew something and so therefore they are liable" viewpoint seem to me to be more likely to result in companies not building safety measurement systems, or at a minimum not building proactive systems, so that they can avoid getting dragged and blamed for an assault because they chose thresholds that didn't prevent the assault. And not all measurement systems are granular enough or reliable enough to be exposed to end users. Imagine if they built a system that determined that if your driver was from a low income part of town and the passenger lived in a high income part of down the chance of an assault was "higher than the late night average". How long would it be before we saw a different lawsuit alleging that Uber discriminated against minority drivers by telling affluent white passengers that their low income minority drivers were "more likely than average" to assault them? I would hope that this verdict was reached on stronger reasoning than "they had an automated number and didn't say anything" but if it did, none of the articles so far have said what that reasoning was.
> system flagged it at a score that was "higher than the late night average"
Being charitable to the quality of Uber's legal team, I feel they could easily and compellingly have offered this defense.
It's telling that other documentary evidence highlighted that Uber decided sharing its reservations/acting on its system would be detrimental to growth.
And so what messaging do you propose Uber puts in their app for this? "Your driver has a higher than average probability of assaulting you, you may want to wait for another driver"? That will last until the first driver sues for slander. It's one thing to tell you that "prices are higher right now" it's a completely different thing to imply to you that your driver is a criminal.
The article lists a few reasons why. There were some ("some" meaning "thousands of pages", per the article) documents from the company
>....including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
as well as some
>...suggesting that Uber resisted introducing safety features such as in-car cameras because it believed these measures would slow corporate growth.
I would probably have not been included on the jury because I think uber is run by some of the biggest scumbags in the corporate world but if the article is to be believed it's not an unreasonable verdict unless you think no company should be liable for anything that results from their choices and actions.
I mean, it’s not quite that simple, is it? Did they do everything they could to make drivers and passengers safe? Or did they put profits over people’s safety?
From the article:
> internal company documents […] showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her […]
Uber actually had a whole project that produced systems that determine the risk of incidents happening. Could they make rides safer but chose not to? That’s at the core of these lawsuits.
Interesting. When it's the state I think the overwhelming opinion is that predictive policing is dangerous but when it's a private company we actually want it to enforce it?
They could not be held accountable to warn her if they had not done the analysis. They did. Their organizational conclusion was that it was potentially an unsafe trip. Shit, they could have just cancelled the ride dynamically and re-assigned her. Why wouldn’t they do that? It’d probably be more expensive. Maybe they’d get more cancelled rides. Maybe this woman wouldn’t have been raped by an agent of Uber selected for and sent to her by them.
It depends. Are the inputs to the algorithm themselves discriminatory? If so, then yes that would be appropriate. But that is a different conversation. They determined the passenger may be unsafe and did nothing.
Mind you, these companies work very hard for us to not know how they match A to B, usually so we don’t notice things like their disregard for safety.
The inputs wouldn’t even matter; the inputs could even be above reproach but if there were disparate impacts in terms of outcomes, the case for liability could be made.
Oof, this sounds like a case where executives/management who knew about this tool and didn't act upon it should be charged with accessory-to-crime. There has got to be a moral imperative to act upon tools like this.
If one of my electricians accidentally bangs a sprinkler head and thousands of gallons of water dump into the building, my company is responsible for any damages. Obviously we’re insured against these risks, but we’re liable.
There’s almost always a contract that spells it out, but in the situation where there is no explicit contract, I’d expect that we’re still liable.
My electricians are W2 employees and not contractors, and it’s possible that construction has different laws regarding liability than a ride share company that uses contractors, so they’re not equivalent, and I am not a lawyer.
Oh wow, what a bad memory. This exact thing happened in a building I lived in several years ago, a couple of floors above me. It looked like waterfalls outside our windows and water was rushing in under the baseboards. All while every fire alarm in the building was going off and fire truck sirens were blaring outside. Understandably, the fire department would not turn off the water until they had been to every floor to check for fire. On the upside, it's impressive how much water can be delivered by fire sprinklers.
Closer to the topic, the building's management company tried to come after me (a renter) for the expense of the restoration people who were brought in to rip out my drywall and carpet so mold wouldn't form. Maybe they figured tenants were an easier target than the contractor's insurance? Oh, and the management company were the ones who selected and hired the contractors. I had to get very aggressive, with plenty of threats of legal action, to get them to back down. That was fairly easy to do as my state's laws specifically specify liability rules for flooding in multi-tenant buildings. They never did do repairs while I was there - I moved out when my lease expired nearly a year later as they were tying to raise the rent, with drywall still missing.
Oh man, multi-tenant housing sounds like the worst case scenario for this sort of thing. I’m glad you were able to avoid any liability, trying to pin liability for rebuilding a unit on a tenant is insane.
And yeah, the volume of water a fire pump can move is astounding. Electrical code requires the fire pump to be wired so that it can run at its locked rotor amp rating without tripping overcurrent protection and it’s usually tapped directly off the utility transformer separately from the rest of the electrical service. There’s also a smaller jockey pump that maintains water pressure in the system so that when the main pump turns on, there’s no lag with water coming out. The pump motor will keep spinning even if there’s a dead short if it’s fused right above locked rotor amps, since replacing a motor is cheaper than replacing a fully burned out structure and keeping the water flowing allows as many people to escape as possible. The feeder has to be encased in concrete or it has to be fire-resistant cable.
The companies themselves certainly think they do when they give tasks for their workers by dictating the duration, manner, and other terms of employment. Why should they be able to have it both ways? No risk, all reward?
It probably depends on the state but in California, yes. Dog owners there are strictly liable for any injuries caused by their dogs unless the victim was trespassing.
I agree the company shouldn’t be held liable. But Uber doesn’t vet drivers properly because they want driver numbers to be high. I see too many Uber vehicles where the driver doesn’t match the name/photo.
What incentive would there be for a gig company like Uber to not deliberately hire criminals if Uber isn't liable, but other companies could be? Reputational damage isn't enough to hurt the bottom line and to change behavior - if it were, they would've already done more, but they didn't because they were operating under the assumption that they were legally insulated.
The NSA, state and local police departments have been improperly accessing my data for years. The only reason people care about this is because of the (justified) general anger of DOGE. Yet there are far worse offenders, with far more intrusive access.
I don't know why you think people aren't complaining about state and local police accessing data. I've seen these complaints a lot (though the state and local data access is a lot less visible, especially with the gutting of local news)
Who cares? LinkedIn just locked my account (I don't log in often), and is demanding my driver's license to unlock it. Ostensibly to "protect me from identity theft".
That's right. They want me to send my identity documents to some third world contractor to protect me from identity theft. Apparently they're doing this with many people... I'm supposed to be worried about the NSA? I'm not a Russian spy, and I'm no drug cartel leader. The cops and NSA don't give a shit about me. Nor DOGE, come to that.
There is a phrase I like: don't fail with abandon. Just because the NSA broke public trust doesn't make it ok for anything like it to happen again.
This data breach from DOGE is worse in many ways. DOGE employees / contractors are have fewer scruples and guardrails. This data has been used primarily for Trump-and-Company's advantage. All to the detriment of American values, such as being for democracy and reasonable capitalism while standing against authoritarianism and kleptocracy.
The NSA's bulk metadata collection, while later found to violate FISA and likely unconstitutional, operated under a formal legal architecture: statutory authorization via Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act (from 2006 onward), FISA Court orders renewed approximately every 90 days, and at least nominal congressional oversight — though most members were kept uninformed of the program's scope until 2013.
> BTW, before I read this Xweet I was a Cloudflare fan.
The CEO of a US tech company asking the Vice President for help with censorship caused you to immediately flip you opinion? And not only flip your opinion, but practically embrace complete censorship of the internet if that means Cloudflare leaving Europe?
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