Drivers are only independent contractors due to poor employment policy from Uber. They work for Uber, therefore Uber do have a duty of care to the users of their service. Now some may say that they only provide the platform similar to Silkroad, however the key difference is that the drivers are representing Uber, in Silkroad's case the sellers were not representing silkroad.
If Uber wish to be seperate from those drivers, they need to provide the customer the chance to choose the driver, and have an appropriate review system.
Uber isn't a marketplace like say Ebay. As such I expect them to be responsible for the actions of "contractors" they appointed to do the job. As the buyer couldn't freely choose the contractor.
From the article, it was reported to the police. The lawsuit came later and Uber didn’t try to deny it happened.
From a civil law perspective, it doesn’t matter who did it.
The police report is substantial evidence that the event wasn’t made up for the purposes of the lawsuit. Her story was credible to the jury. And Uber’s own algorithms showed significant increased risk for that ride. In other words, Uber knew this could’ve happened and deliberately did not do anything to mitigate the risk.
Even if a rape didn’t really occur in this specific case, Uber knows it has happened many times before. This isn’t a criminal case and they don’t get the assumption of innocence when they have a pattern of guilt.
Let’s put it this way, it’s wrong to assume that an innocent man is always going to be abusive. It is reasonable to assume that someone with a long history of abuse will continue to be abusive.
> The driver acknowledged he knew she was drunk, and that he didn't get explicit consent.
Lots of riders are drunk; it's evidence of nothing. Are you in effect saying the driver admitted to raping her?
> Uber had already flagged it internally as a high-risk ride
Irrelevant. Numerous rides could be flagged as high-risk without any incident. I am not excusing it, just saying that it doesn't in itself prove rape. As for security measures, the sensible thing is to not allow such matches at all.
"In a deposition for a federal sexual assault lawsuit against Uber, former driver Hassan Turay admitted that Jaylynn Dean could not consent when he had sex with her in the back of his car in 2023. 'I had a responsibility to make sure she was in a right state of mind, and I did not do that,' Turay said in a video deposition played in court Wednesday afternoon."
"'Honestly, I didn’t do too much to make sure that she could consent,' Turay said when asked. He never checked in with her or asked if she was OK. 'You’ve just made me see another aspect with the whole thing of consent.' By the end of his deposition, Turay said he was wrong to have had sex with Dean."
> 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.
Thus, civil liability. The rapist still goes down for the crime part.
> 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. Risk factors include location and time of day, but SRAD also considers a driver’s weekend and nighttime request rate, scoring them as more risky because they may be more likely to be searching for easy victims.
> The SRAD score for Dean’s trip with Turay was 0.81, which was higher than the late-night average for the Phoenix area. Uber said it never informed Dean of its risk assessment. “We did not, nor would it be practical to provide that information to riders,” Sunny Wong, Uber’s director of applied science, said in a deposition played for the jury earlier in the day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.ph/5wF6Z
If Uber can be held liable for driver's actions then Tesla can be held liable for "Full Self Driving" cars that aren't.
Let’s uh not change the subject.
Let's hope.
Uber was found liable of "apparent agency" if you are interested: https://legal-resources.uslegalforms.com/a/apparent-agency
Drivers are only independent contractors due to poor employment policy from Uber. They work for Uber, therefore Uber do have a duty of care to the users of their service. Now some may say that they only provide the platform similar to Silkroad, however the key difference is that the drivers are representing Uber, in Silkroad's case the sellers were not representing silkroad.
If Uber wish to be seperate from those drivers, they need to provide the customer the chance to choose the driver, and have an appropriate review system.
Uber isn't a marketplace like say Ebay. As such I expect them to be responsible for the actions of "contractors" they appointed to do the job. As the buyer couldn't freely choose the contractor.
I think this is exactly the point that GP commenter is making.
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This is a civil case.
Do you think he knows the difference? Or cares?
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He has tried to act on state level cases before, though not successfully yet.
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From the article, it was reported to the police. The lawsuit came later and Uber didn’t try to deny it happened.
From a civil law perspective, it doesn’t matter who did it.
The police report is substantial evidence that the event wasn’t made up for the purposes of the lawsuit. Her story was credible to the jury. And Uber’s own algorithms showed significant increased risk for that ride. In other words, Uber knew this could’ve happened and deliberately did not do anything to mitigate the risk.
Even if a rape didn’t really occur in this specific case, Uber knows it has happened many times before. This isn’t a criminal case and they don’t get the assumption of innocence when they have a pattern of guilt.
Let’s put it this way, it’s wrong to assume that an innocent man is always going to be abusive. It is reasonable to assume that someone with a long history of abuse will continue to be abusive.
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The driver acknowledged he knew she was drunk, and that he didn't get explicit consent.
Uber had already flagged it internally as a high-risk ride (drunk female, alone) and didn't take additional security measures.
> The driver acknowledged he knew she was drunk, and that he didn't get explicit consent.
Lots of riders are drunk; it's evidence of nothing. Are you in effect saying the driver admitted to raping her?
> Uber had already flagged it internally as a high-risk ride
Irrelevant. Numerous rides could be flagged as high-risk without any incident. I am not excusing it, just saying that it doesn't in itself prove rape. As for security measures, the sensible thing is to not allow such matches at all.
> Are you in effect saying the driver admitted to raping her?
https://www.courthousenews.com/in-sexual-assault-trial-uber-...
"In a deposition for a federal sexual assault lawsuit against Uber, former driver Hassan Turay admitted that Jaylynn Dean could not consent when he had sex with her in the back of his car in 2023. 'I had a responsibility to make sure she was in a right state of mind, and I did not do that,' Turay said in a video deposition played in court Wednesday afternoon."
"'Honestly, I didn’t do too much to make sure that she could consent,' Turay said when asked. He never checked in with her or asked if she was OK. 'You’ve just made me see another aspect with the whole thing of consent.' By the end of his deposition, Turay said he was wrong to have had sex with Dean."
He admitted to having sex with her without explicit consent.
Then perhaps Uber should find a new business model? Lyft lets women specifically request a female driver.
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Sure. But:
> 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.
Thus, civil liability. The rapist still goes down for the crime part.
The fact that Uber has a system that flags "RAPE LIKELY" and still picks "make the cash" is appalling.
I really would like to know what that means in actuality.
It sounds scandalous here but what does it mean on the ground?
Obviously diff interpretations and practice mean widely diverging truths on the ground with diverging responsibilities.
https://www.courthousenews.com/in-sexual-assault-trial-uber-...
> 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. Risk factors include location and time of day, but SRAD also considers a driver’s weekend and nighttime request rate, scoring them as more risky because they may be more likely to be searching for easy victims.
> The SRAD score for Dean’s trip with Turay was 0.81, which was higher than the late-night average for the Phoenix area. Uber said it never informed Dean of its risk assessment. “We did not, nor would it be practical to provide that information to riders,” Sunny Wong, Uber’s director of applied science, said in a deposition played for the jury earlier in the day.
The killer was the bullet, not the person who held the gun.
Did you stretch before that reach?
I agree, both of our arguments are ridiculous.
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Exactly. Also curious how the NY Times names the woman and the company reps but never names the rapist. This article does name him: https://www.nbcrightnow.com/online_features/press_releases/j...
> that drivers are independent contractors.
Yeah sure. Totally independent from Uber.
If the state knew the guy was a rapist, then Uber could have too, had it done due diligence prior to putting the guy in the car with someone else.
The contractor is acting on behalf of the company though? We don't need yet more magical liability protections for billionaires, we need fewer.
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.
> No idea how you can hold a company liable for the crimes committed by employees
This is quite standard actually, and there's a long common law tradition around this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior).
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)
Respondeat superior and vicarious liability don’t specifically require an employer-employee relationship.
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.
> According to the article you linked to
The article goes on to explain that the 1838 view has been adjusted over time, and the linked source discusses this in better detail.
https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
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.
>Do you think Uber instructed their drivers to rape people?
Is that the legal standard here? No.
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.
> Only the rapist is guilty of rape.
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:
https://www.courthousenews.com/in-sexual-assault-trial-uber-...
> 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.
> 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.
Are you trying to imply that the driver was not instructed by Uber to pick the woman who was raped?
> How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
The company is responsible for sending a rapist to pick up the woman that was raped.
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No one is defending the rapist.
The rape was a crime.
Uber has civil liability for contributing to its occurring.
That Uber is liable does not imply that the driver is not also liable.
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.
Wouldn't they then expose themselves to discrimination and loss of revenue lawsuits from targeted drivers?
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.
If Uber knew but did not warn her, then it's certainly correct that they were convicted.
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.
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.
If you go into Walmart and one of its employees assaults you, Walmart can be held liable.
The same companies claim ownership for their employees‘ inventions. So …
Is an owner of a dog that mauls someone responsible for damages to the victim?
Extremely strange analogy. Uber drivers aren't per dogs. They are adult humans you can make them liable for shit they do.
You can make both liable, too.
Do companies own their workers?
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.
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?
There are jobs where anything the employee does on company time is owned by the company.
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.