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Comment by sshconnection | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the government shouldn't have pervasive access to the records, but I WANT Uber to track my rides. That's how I can have recourse if a driver takes me for a spin. I WANT my driver to be identified and for them to track who picks me up. He claims that it's troublesome for a female passenger to be identifiable to a driver. How about if you're a female (or male) driver driving in your spare time? Would she not feel safer picking up someone who is at least somewhat identified versus a shady looking stranger?

One of the crucial components of sharing apps is the building of trust and accountability. Identification is part of that.

This list of complaints doesn't hold water for me.

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Granted there are several items that ... detract from the point, but there are some real problems here and I don't think it does them justice to gloss over them because of some errant points at the beginning.

We don't see eye to eye on the identification issue, but even if we put that one issue aside I can't agree that the list of complaints doesn't hold water for me personally.

Executives stalking passengers and trolling through passenger ride data to ferret out alarming narratives crosses a line in my opinion. This starts to get into discussions of which data belongs to whom, which is a discussion that I don't think has been had yet, and I don't like the assertion of ownership over my data that many companies are making.

We agree that part of building sharing apps is building trust and accountability, but I disagree that Uber has done a good job of earning our trust or demonstrating accountability.

Edit: changed some loaded phrasing

The first half of the post is RMS's usual loaded rant on what 'freedom' means. He's a weird brand of anarchocommunist, and axiomatically doesn't believe in running any code that you can't see the source to and haven't compiled yourself. That sets him up to start off most of his rants that might otherwise have a point with a bunch of bullshit that we've all seen and laughed at before.

I like him around just because he expands the Overton window. In the last 10 years the conversion around proprietary (which includes web and mobile apps) vs. open-source software has really taken a back-seat.

> that we've all seen and laughed at before

Let's be fair, he's been right about a LOT of things. Things that we did laugh at him for saying.

Maybe we shouldn't have laughed so hard.

> I agree that the government shouldn't have pervasive access to the records, but I WANT Uber to track my rides. That's how I can have recourse if a driver takes me for a spin.

Why would that require the passenger to identify themselves? You can have one without the other. Where I live, most taxis are organized in cooperatives. Drivers pay monthly for access to dispatch and are held to certain quality standards beyond the legal requirements.

Drivers are tracked by dispatch and expected to take optimal routes. If they deviate too far from that route on a fare, they have to explain themselves to dispatch. Simple as that, and it works extremely well.

If one wants to individually have recourse, then the ride needs to be identified. You are right that there can be systemic ways of addressing this issue other than individual recourse.

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