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Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

theatlantic.com

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Re: Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

#31

Post by dis-sys »

illuminati1911 wrote: post #17
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, and before that taxi driver murderers were also heard of often in China (though I’m not sure if they were more likely to be murderers than average). 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.

China has one of the lowest intentional homicide rates in the world. 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 exis…

well done on defending the company with zero social responsibility in mind. the problem is never about the murder itself, it is all about the fact that didi worked extremely hard to intentionally prevent any help that can be offered to save the victim -

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.

Re: Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

#32

Post by lhorie »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #19
graeme wrote: post #3

Has anyone worked out what the base rate expectation of murder would be? 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…

I've personally had enough problems with taxi drivers (and I live in a developed country) that I will only take a taxi as a last resort. They overcharge, they demand cash because apparently their EFTPOS machine is broken, they drive you on the scenic route to increase the fare, or they'll try to set a fixed price when you know it's cheaper to run the meter, half the time the driver doesn't even know how to get there…

As I understand, people are outraged because Didi built the ability to "rate" passengers in terms of their looks, i.e. whereas riders would rate drivers in terms of "fast, professional, etc", drivers could share ratings of riders in terms of "young, sexy, cute, etc". This last murder also apparently happened a mere day after Didi's decision to re-enable drivers' abilities to see riders pictures (a feature which had been disabled as a response to the previous murder). The straw that broke the camel's back was the surfacing of another girl's report that she was harassed the day before by that same person and only got out safely because she dashed away when she got the chance (and her complaints were largely ignored by Didi).

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.

Re: Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

#33

Post by dis-sys »

philliphaydon wrote: post #24
person_of_color wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 10x lower than the West. Do you think the number being unreported accounts for that order of magnitude?

Higher than the 'West' being what? In regards to 'intentional homicide'. America? Sure it's lower... UK, Australia, NZ? Nope it's higher. What about rape? Yup lower than America, again, but still higher than UK, Australia, NZ, etc. 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 c…

> UK, Australia, NZ? Nope it's higher.

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.

Re: Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

#34

Post by JimmyAustin »

dis-sys wrote: post #33
philliphaydon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher than the 'West' being what? In regards to 'intentional homicide'. America? Sure it's lower... UK, Australia, NZ? Nope it's higher. What about rape? Yup lower than America, again, but still higher than UK, Australia, NZ, etc. 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 c…

> UK, Australia, NZ? Nope it's higher. 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…

I think you've been listening a little to much to Peter Dutton.

Re: Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

#35

Post by torgian »

I live in China currently and teach at a University. Students and others I have met here in Chengdu use taxis and Didi on a daily basis. Yes, they know what happened, but murders are so rare in China.

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.

Re: Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

#36

Post by graeme »

fantasticsid wrote: post #23
graeme wrote: post #3

Has anyone worked out what the base rate expectation of murder would be? 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…

Yeah, that’s what companies do : look at the stats. And as long as stats say it’s rare enough, it’s not that bad. 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,…

I didn't speak clearly enough perhaps. It sounds like Didi could have prevented these murders. So, they should have, both morally and from a self interest perspective.

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.

Re: Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

#37

Post by philliphaydon »

dis-sys wrote: post #33
philliphaydon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher than the 'West' being what? In regards to 'intentional homicide'. America? Sure it's lower... UK, Australia, NZ? Nope it's higher. What about rape? Yup lower than America, again, but still higher than UK, Australia, NZ, etc. 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 c…

> UK, Australia, NZ? Nope it's higher. 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…

> I feel much safer now after moving back to Shanghai from Sydney.

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.

Re: Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

#38

Post by nyolfen »

dis-sys wrote: post #30
fantasticsid wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that’s what companies do : look at the stats. And as long as stats say it’s rare enough, it’s not that bad. 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,…

> 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 pro…

can you link a write-up about this?

Re: Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

#39

Post by dis-sys »

JimmyAustin wrote: post #34
dis-sys wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UK, Australia, NZ? Nope it's higher. 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…

I think you've been listening a little to much to Peter Dutton.

> I think you've been listening a little to much to Peter Dutton.

Peter Dutton is a moron, he couldn't even manage the trans tasman relationship well with kiwis. What you can possibly expect from him.

Re: Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

#40

Post by dis-sys »

nyolfen wrote: post #38
dis-sys wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pro…

can you link a write-up about this?

if you google for the terms "滴滴 sexy" in which "滴滴" is the Chinese name of Didi, you get tons of reports.
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