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>Google is absolutely not responsible for the rapes and muggings perpetrated by users of Adwords or Waze. If you or a family member used Waze Carpool, and got

>Google is absolutely not responsible for the rapes and muggings perpetrated by users of Adwords or Waze. If you or a family member used Waze Carpool, and got raped or murdered, are you going to sit there quietly and say "oh well, not Google's fault"? As a engineer providing a software solution, it's great to sit in an office desk and say "there are precise legal limits", it's exact, precise, formal, and correct. Like a math problem almost. This is the exact line. But imagine if you used somebody else's service, and you got raped. Or your family member got raped. Are you really going to not sue and let the newspapers know what happened? It's not just 1's and 0s anymore, it becomes a moral/emotional issue.

cornholio 9y ago
Could ask the same question to an auto engineer who's relative dies in a car crash. Should he quit his job, should we ban cars? While auto safety is important, cars save much more lives than they take - and the economic opportunities they enable drastically change the median quality of life in societies where they are used. In the same way, carsharing is not an enabler of crime, it's much safer than hitchhiking and would be a drastic improvement in the lives of people who are economically dependent of hitchhiking. A good example is the Highway of Tears murders - in the last 40 years 20 to 40 women disappeared or were found dead hitchhiking the same stretch of highway in Canada. They were typically underprivileged and of aboriginal origins, and lacking other forms of transportation. The vast majority of cases remained unsolved. Should something like internet carsharing had been in use by a victim, the police would have had acces to a vast trove of forensic data, including their last match to a known Waze user, identified by credit card, phone fingerprint and cell tower and GPS location history, as well as the victims own location trail up to the point where her phone is taken away/shut down. While a determined high tech killer could operate with these constraints, it's orders of magnitude more difficult. A determined killer is by definition unstoppable by any service or company.
- confiscate 9y ago
  Yes but if your relative dies in a car crash, you can sue for damages. And you probably would, even if, say, you signed some kind of safety agreement before buying the car waiving the right to sue. Just because the law "precisely" says it's not the carmaker's fault, doesn't mean the carmaker is not "on the hook" or share some of the legal burden. I am not saying that we should ban cars or ban carsharing. I am saying, if you offer carsharing as a software service, and something goes wrong during that service, you are involved legally. It's not a precise "on/off" switch like launching a software product.
michaelmrose 9y ago
They ought to blame the murderer/rapist since people using an app to connect individual consumers aren't employees or customers of said business. They will probably try to blame whomever has the deepest pockets but that doesn't mean that we ought to or that the law will.

cornholio 9y ago

Could ask the same question to an auto engineer who's relative dies in a car crash. Should he quit his job, should we ban cars? While auto safety is important, cars save much more lives than they take - and the economic opportunities they enable drastically change the median quality of life in societies where they are used. In the same way, carsharing is not an enabler of crime, it's much safer than hitchhiking and would be a drastic improvement in the lives of people who are economically dependent of hitchhiking. A good example is the Highway of Tears murders - in the last 40 years 20 to 40 women disappeared or were found dead hitchhiking the same stretch of highway in Canada. They were typically underprivileged and of aboriginal origins, and lacking other forms of transportation. The vast majority of cases remained unsolved. Should something like internet carsharing had been in use by a victim, the police would have had acces to a vast trove of forensic data, including their last match to a known Waze user, identified by credit card, phone fingerprint and cell tower and GPS location history, as well as the victims own location trail up to the point where her phone is taken away/shut down. While a determined high tech killer could operate with these constraints, it's orders of magnitude more difficult. A determined killer is by definition unstoppable by any service or company.

confiscate 9y ago
Yes but if your relative dies in a car crash, you can sue for damages. And you probably would, even if, say, you signed some kind of safety agreement before buying the car waiving the right to sue. Just because the law "precisely" says it's not the carmaker's fault, doesn't mean the carmaker is not "on the hook" or share some of the legal burden. I am not saying that we should ban cars or ban carsharing. I am saying, if you offer carsharing as a software service, and something goes wrong during that service, you are involved legally. It's not a precise "on/off" switch like launching a software product.

michaelmrose 9y ago

They ought to blame the murderer/rapist since people using an app to connect individual consumers aren't employees or customers of said business. They will probably try to blame whomever has the deepest pockets but that doesn't mean that we ought to or that the law will.