Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> So through suggestive ads hinting at hookups through driving, Didi pushed Hitch’s romantic possibilities. In a 2015 interview with the Chinese online portal NetEase, Ms. Huang compared Hitch cars to cafes and bars.
And:
> While it wasn’t obvious to female passengers that their drivers might want to hook up, the drivers knew. Until Didi deactivated Hitch, the car-pooling service allowed drivers to share comments with other drivers on the looks of their passengers, leading some male drivers to seek out the ones others had declared attractive.
Murder is very rare in China. Very few Western countries have a lower intentional homicide rate (America's is 8.5 times higher), and I believe other violent crime is similarly low.
(I hope this comment is okay.)
That blows my mind. I guess it's one way to get drivers for less money. But damn, what horrible selection.
I think I read in the FT that Didi has booked a few billion rides in that period. How many people (and women) would normally be murdered in cabs?
The stories cited are obviously horrific and it sounds like Didi could have prevented them with a better system. But, I'd nonetheless be interested to know how safe this is to the alternative, and also how many murders we would expect in a few billion human interactions.
At that scale all our intuitions are off and we need to look at stats.
Also, Chinese police are overworked (China is extremely under policed ironically enough) and so tend to focus on seemingly easy but impractical solutions to fighting crime.
Most famously this leads Japanese departments to label difficult murder cases as suicides.
Perhaps suggesting that the Japanese need more guns to be polite wasn't the best example. Japan is already one of the most (the most?) polite society in the world - at least talking about how strangers interact.
Example: anthropologists believe that on the whole, more polite societies typically murder each other at a higher rate than less polite societies.
*An armed society of rational people is a polite society. And people tend to slip in and out of a rational state depending on their emotions, pride, sobriety, etc.
"Polite" just means "in keeping with cultural norms". If it's polite to deal with disagreements, injuries and insults by pulling a gun, that's still polite but I certainly wouldn't feel safe.
If you believe that, you've never lived in Atlanta (or Japan for that matter).
And with taxi-hailing apps' commence, this is becoming really rare since the driver can easily pin-pointed (by cross-referencing ubiquitous street cams). Actually in this case the murderer got arrested soon afterwards.
While I agree China is under policed, they are generally more effective in body offenses and thanks to street cams (again). These years even home break-ins are rare. As who lived in SF for a year, it's definitely better than SFPD.
The "heard of often" just means it gets plastered on the news / social media when it does happen.
If it could have been prevented, it is the right reaction.
Besides, this is how China works most of the time. Pressure (boycot) on companies leads to results... or put them out of (nearly) business.
Ride sharing and taxi hailing apps have definitely made taking a taxi mug safer. Conserving how didi has replace black cabs, that is definitely a good thing. I’m not sure why the government wants didi to shutdown its ride sharing business rather than rely on it as a sure fire way of at least solving murders after the fact. Even full background checks won’t solve murders 100%, and knowing you’ll get caught is a great deterrent.
Property crimes are still a huge problem in China, there is a reason all 2nd tier apartments are still barred like crazy. Chinese police don’t really care, they are not using the CCTVs to actually fight property crime, rather for other things.
You finally mention it. Without the government wanting it, this story wouldn't have broken. It seems like the c. gov could easily hide hundreds of murders.
I’m actually writing this from Didi at the moment. It’s quite irrational to overhype these didi-murders since China is a country of about 1.4 billion people and statistically these incidents are pretty much meaningless. I guess it’s same kind of irrationality like in the west, when people try to come up with problems about Uber that have always existed in other contextes.
1. another customer reported the murder a day before for harassment, Didi refused to look into the case
2. when the victim's family & friends reach out to Didi after receiving messages from the victim asking for help, Didi refused to do anything other than asking them to wait.
3. when the victim's family & friends reported the incident to the police, the police immediately contacted Didi but again Didi refused to provide any help.
Just last week I got woken up at 3 AM by a distraught housemate being dropped home by the police because a cabbie sexually assaulted her. It's fucking disgusting what cabbies manage to get away with and then claim "Uber is bad because it's unregulated". Uber's self regulation has proven to be vastly superior to the taxi industry.
Meanwhile with Uber, my experience has been 90% positive. It's incredibly rare to have a driver try to rip me off and it's a lot safer in general. I'm absolutely sure that the cabbie who assaulted my friend has done it before to other people, and will do it again to some other poor drunk girl. I live in a Australia, this shouldn't be an issue we're facing, but it is.
I don't know what Didi is like compared to Uber, but I'm absolutely sure that it's better than cabs, especially in developing countries.
Coupled with lackluster driver screening, and the non-responsiveness to complaints, this essentially created a platform for sexual predators to thrive. As my wife put it, the driver app was basically Tinder for perverts.
I think the argument that at a scale of billion of rides, assaults can fall between the cracks is downplaying the magnitude of the negligence. The police force can handle much higher rates of all kinds of emergency calls. Uber has literally tens of thousands of customer service reps and entires teams dedicated to harassment reports stationed across the globe. If there were 50 harrassment reports as the article claims, surely Didi could afford to have 3 people on rotation looking at a queue of reports, preemptively disabling accounts. There's absolutely no way Didi can make a believable excuse for keeping a criminal in the system after having received complaints about him being involved in a sexual assault.
That's pretty fucked up for Didi. Do you know if these "features" for the drivers were on versions of the app outside of China (i.e. in Australia)?
It seems like the kind of idea you’d throw in, if you absolutely did not care about any amount of success.
Something like that is bound to blow up sooner or later, and destroy confidence in professionalism. It goes against an almost universal idea, cutting across all cultures, that customers shouldn’t be judged if you expect to do business with them.
With Uber, I at least know what I'm going to be charged
The only related data that I (as a citizen, not insider) can found is in the annual report published by the local court, which basically just a statement on how many criminals the court have prosecuted, only a number, no detailed categorization.
I also searched for the "population" of the local prison, the only data I can found is inside a news article about prison location transfer published on the Ministry of Justice's website few years ago, which stated "All XXX prisoners are successfully transferred".
None of the data is reliable enough to calculate the real crime rate of our city, as the local and prison may also handle cases from other cities, vice versa.
Because of all that, the value of my little "research" is far less than having a small chat with a friend of mine who work for the local police department.
Maybe this also the reason of why rumours in China got it's charm.
People are boycotting not because there’s a higher chance of being murdered/kidnapped with Didi, but that the company was unresponsive, did not have proper procedure/policy for vetting drivers, and took way too long to get even basic info about the suspect driver.
What the stats say here, higher or lower, is moot. Because the issue is that Didi does not give a shit about passenger safety.
Didi intentionally setup the system this way to promote its rideshare as a hook up service for its drivers. When describing the service, its top management made it clear that such a service in which drivers and passengers are locked up in a moving car provides a "sexy scenario" and thus Didi must take the opportunity and try its best to promote such hook up experience.
It is not like Didi doesn't care much about passenger safety, Didi actively puts passenger into danger for its own financial gains and knowingly denied police intervention when its passenger was in danger.
I can't imagine that Lyft or Uber could have done something like this. But maybe I'm just too naive.
But when we look from outside in at the significance of this, it's nonetheless worth thinking of it in the context of its scale. That's not to justify anything, but merely to understand.
And one million users in a country with a billion people is nothing, statistically. Didi can deal with that, but the publicity is still bad.
But, I'd say Didi is at least 50% responsible for this tragedy.
1. The killer was reported sexual harassment by another female customer one day before the girl got killed. Didi still lets him drive.
2. The girl's friend called the police when she realized the girl was missing. The police called Didi's customer service. The guy who answered the phone refused to provide the driver's info, (license, phone number, location, etc.) and said that he needed to report to Didi's safety department. Then he even called the driver himself, asking: do you have the passenger on your car? did you kill her? The driver said no and hang up the phone.
3. The police finally got the driver's information from Didi almost two hours after they requested. But it was too late.
Didi's poor background check on drivers and unprofessional customer service killed the girl. I don't think it would happen if it's uber.
The violent crime here and in China in general from western point of view is almost non-exisistent.
Imagine, day after day, the news saying, "and another 47 people were murdered today in America, including 13 in Chicago, and 4 each in Baltimore and Houston".
While the homicide rate in the United States is dropping, there were still ~17000 of them in 2016.
The 'west' isn't JUST America.
But India is a country where honor killing, and the caste system are outlawed, yet, honor killing and discrimination by caste still exists outside of major cities.
I feel much safer now after moving back to Shanghai from Sydney. There is no shooting in Shanghai whatsoever, but that seem to be pretty common in the western part of Sydney. Melbourne is now on another completely different level, you have gangs attacking each other using grenade.
One thing I really like is the fact that I can safely walk on any street of Shanghai at 1:00am and without the fear to be attacked or robbed, I won't be stupid enough to do that in Sydney or Melbourne.
Peter Dutton is a moron, he couldn't even manage the trans tasman relationship well with kiwis. What you can possibly expect from him.
I'm not talking about China. China is weird when it comes to crime, like the case of the guy welding a sword in public and no one battered an eyelid. Because violent crime like that just doesn't occur in China.
I live in Singapore, where you can leave your phone in a public bathroom for an entire day and no one will touch it.
Most Chinese people I know feel much safer in their homeland than in the west. Funnily enough some of them even prefer eastern parts of Europe for the same reason.
Most Chinese people are not boycotting the Rideshare as a way of transportation, they are claiming Didi is not working effectively in this case.