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)
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.
Is that the legal standard here? No.
How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
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.
I understand what's going on in your mind - everybody does. You're thinking:
"I wonder if I'm smart enough to defend a rapist and make people believe it wasn't his fault."
Intelligent people are usually attracted to the most horrific and evil things, just because it tickles their intellect to try to find ways to defend them, or even invert the truth. Even greater is if you can make other people believe it. Blaming an employer for a rape is probably up there, worse would only be blaming a child for being abused, which I am sure many hackers would find very amusing to do.
> the woman who was raped?
> the woman that was raped.
You're talking about this as if there was no agency involved, like an accident. Again, nobody is falling for this. Uber didn't send a driver to pick the "woman who was raped". A criminal raped a woman. There's the agency and there's the blame.
If you want to play blame games and transfer of responsibility, you've already been beaten thousands of years ago, when all blame past-present-future, was transfered unto Christ.
The rape was a crime.
Uber has civil liability for contributing to its occurring.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
>....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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> One of the things that we know this year in 2010, and I am going to stick to matters about now, is that sometimes cars mysteriously speed up and crash into things.
> That is not a disputed statement. Why they mysteriously speed up and crash into things raises all the usual kinds of difficulties of causation and proof you would expect when liability is a serious social matter. But let us just say that we know that cars mysteriously speed up and crash into things and it is reasonable to wonder about software in relation to the cause of those accidents. And wondering about whether there is software behind some of those accidents raises some important questions.
[1] https://softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/sscl/moglen-software...
Pwntastic•1h ago