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Ride-hailing service Uber received 400,181 reports of sexual assault and misconduct between 2017 and 2022, according to sealed court documents viewed by The New York Times.
These documents are part of a mass class-action lawsuit filed against Uber. Per the LA Times, over 1,600 cases were merged into one earlier this year, and hundreds of customers accused Uber of improper driver background checks, failure to report incidents to the police, and letting sex offenders stay on the platform.
In its biennial safety reports between 2017 and 2022, Uber only disclosed 12,522 of these incidents. Clarifying the discrepancy, the company's US safety head, Hannah Niles, said that a vast majority of the reported 400,000+ cases are unaudited and don't necessarily qualify as sexual assault. Many of the actions reported are less serious and non-physical in nature, "such as comments about someone's appearance, flirting, staring, or inappropriate language."
(Credit: Uber)Over the years, Uber has released several features intended to improve safety for riders and drivers (image below). Most recently, it began testing a "women preferences" feature in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit, which lets female riders match with female drivers and vice versa. However, the extent of safety provided by these features is unclear.
Niles cited a study claiming over half of women in the US have experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes, and stated that the company "is not immune to this deeply ingrained and troubling problem." She also mentioned that 6.3 billion trips were completed in the US between 2017 and 2022, so the reported cases only account for 0.006% of those. However, "there is no 'tolerable' level of sexual assault," she tells the NYT.
Uber has already settled many of these sexual assault cases individually, but its first trial for a sexual assault case is set to begin in September this year, the Times says.
In a transparency report that covers 2020 to 2022, rival Lyft reported "2,651 instances of the five most serious categories of sexual assault." Most were "Non-Consensual Touching of a Sexual Body Part," but there were 365 reports of "Non-Consensual Sexual Penetration."