because not on topic for HN
rapes occur all the time, not relevant if someone just happens to be employed by Uber
if a Microsoft employee beat his wife should that be on HN? no. nor would it if he instead worked at a Texaco gas station
rapes occur all the time, not relevant if someone just happens to be employed by Uber
if a Microsoft employee beat his wife should that be on HN? no. nor would it if he instead worked at a Texaco gas station
The right analogy would be.. If a Microsoft employee hacks your Windows computer and steals your data, it should be a front page story.
That's a good point. I wonder though what we can actually discuss here.
Consider this, if a MS employee hacked you using say, company access to your hotmail account that only MS employees have, a system by design ripe for abuse, and therefore fixable by MS and therefore a MS responsibility, then that's relevant.
But if a MS employee hacked you on the job without anything special that makes him a MS employee (he could've been working for DELL, Apple or hell he could've been unemployed) and just happened to be a MS employee that hacked you, what's the relevance? It's just an incident that MS has no real responsibility for.
Even less responsibility if said employee wasn't an employee, but just a 3rd party freelancer.
I think it begs the question: 'what didn't uber do that they should have?'. Why are they at fault, why is this news? It sucks, yes, but as I posted earlier here, 17k kids under 5 will die today, and tomorrow, as they did yesterday. There needs to be some context, an angle on gender relations in india, a gender-violent culture at Uber, bad policies in keeping track of rides so abuse can go unpunished, for example. But I don't see it.
We've heard that the screening process is weak and I'll believe that. But I genuinely wonder what part of the screening process is missing that could've prevented this. I'm all for screening out repeat offenders for jobs like this (where a client entrusts a caretaker, like for doctors, police or indeed taxi drivers) but this feels like an incident that's only posted because it's good tabloid material considering Uber is now a $40 billion company with a possible rape case after tens of millions of rides.
This isn't a story about someone who "just happens to be employed by Uber" committing a rape. This is a story about a woman who used the Uber app to find a ride and was raped by her driver (who is not actually employed by Uber).
What if Microsoft's products or services sexually assaulted people? Yes, there would be an outcry.