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Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

85 points by danso 8y ago

joeythedog 8y ago
True - there are millions of passengers every day using didi. True - people got murdered in cabs too. But, I'd say Didi is at least 50% responsible for this tragedy. 1. The killer was reported sexual harassment by another female customer one day before the girl got killed. Didi still lets him drive. 2. The girl's friend called the police when she realized the girl was missing. The police called Didi's customer service. The guy who answered the phone refused to provide the driver's info, (license, phone number, location, etc.) and said that he needed to report to Didi's safety department. Then he even called the driver himself, asking: do you have the passenger on your car? did you kill her? The driver said no and hang up the phone. 3. The police finally got the driver's information from Didi almost two hours after they requested. But it was too late. Didi's poor background check on drivers and unprofessional customer service killed the girl. I don't think it would happen if it's uber.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
graeme 8y ago
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 how many murders we would expect in a few billion human interactions. At that scale all our intuitions are off and we need to look at stats.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  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.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    There’s often political pressures on police departments to fix unpopular statistics, and not the actual issue. Most famously this leads Japanese departments to label difficult murder cases as suicides.
    - 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
      Excellent point. This is a prime example of how government intervention mucks things up by setting up relatively benign goals, but in practice leads to an outcome that is unchanged, or perhaps even worse. What if all Japanese citizens were allowed to carry guns out in the open? An armed society is a polite society.
      - EliRivers 8y ago
        An armed society is a polite society "Polite" just means "in keeping with cultural norms". If it's polite to deal with disagreements, injuries and insults by pulling a gun, that's still polite but I certainly wouldn't feel safe.
      - baybal2 8y ago
        You can legally own an artillery piece in Pakistan, but I can't vouch for manners of locals
      - jstarfish 8y ago
        > An armed society is a polite society. If you believe that, you've never lived in Atlanta (or Japan for that matter).
      - jchb 8y ago
        > An armed society is a polite society. Perhaps suggesting that the Japanese need more guns to be polite wasn't the best example. Japan is already one of the most (the most?) polite society in the world - at least talking about how strangers interact.
      - village-idiot 8y ago
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  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 and I have to navigate them. Just last week I got woken up at 3 AM by a distraught housemate being dropped home by the police because a cabbie sexually assaulted her. It's fucking disgusting what cabbies manage to get away with and then claim "Uber is bad because it's unregulated". Uber's self regulation has proven to be vastly superior to the taxi industry. Meanwhile with Uber, my experience has been 90% positive. It's incredibly rare to have a driver try to rip me off and it's a lot safer in general. I'm absolutely sure that the cabbie who assaulted my friend has done it before to other people, and will do it again to some other poor drunk girl. I live in a Australia, this shouldn't be an issue we're facing, but it is. I don't know what Didi is like compared to Uber, but I'm absolutely sure that it's better than cabs, especially in developing countries.
  - puranjay 8y ago
    Not to mention malfunctioning meters, especially around tourist spots when you don't speak the language. With Uber, I at least know what I'm going to be charged
  - lhorie 8y ago
    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.
- rqs 8y ago
  I once trying to dig out the crime rate (not murder rate) of our city in South China, at least trying to have a grasp on what's going on. (TL;DR: and failed) The only related data that I (as a citizen, not insider) can found is in the annual report published by the local court, which basically just a statement on how many criminals the court have prosecuted, only a number, no detailed categorization. I also searched for the "population" of the local prison, the only data I can found is inside a news article about prison location transfer published on the Ministry of Justice's website few years ago, which stated "All XXX prisoners are successfully transferred". None of the data is reliable enough to calculate the real crime rate of our city, as the local and prison may also handle cases from other cities, vice versa. Because of all that, the value of my little "research" is far less than having a small chat with a friend of mine who work for the local police department. Maybe this also the reason of why rumours in China got it's charm.
- fantasticsid 8y ago
  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, is moot. Because the issue is that Didi does not give a shit about passenger safety.
  - dis-sys 8y ago
    > 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 promote such hook up experience. It is not like Didi doesn't care much about passenger safety, Didi actively puts passenger into danger for its own financial gains and knowingly denied police intervention when its passenger was in danger.
    - nyolfen 8y ago
      can you link a write-up about this?
      - dis-sys 8y ago
        if you google for the terms "滴滴 sexy" in which "滴滴" is the Chinese name of Didi, you get tons of reports.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      That is insane. They deserve to go out of business. I can't imagine that Lyft or Uber could have done something like this. But maybe I'm just too naive.
  - graeme 8y ago
    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.
qwerty456127 8y ago
What is the logic in this? How could the company behind the app possibly prevent this and what is it meant to do now? What if a librarian would go nuts and kill somebody, would they burn the library to ashes?
- danso 8y ago
  The story mentions that someone claimed prior harassment by the driver in the most recent case. The appearance of non-responsiveness or a coverup can catalyze people's opinions.
- azurezyq 8y ago
  In this case, the driver is already reported in another misbehaving. But Didi still allows the driver to take more passengers. Most Chinese people are not boycotting the Rideshare as a way of transportation, they are claiming Didi is not working effectively in this case.
person_of_color 8y ago
Western media loves reporting on instances of rape, murder in India, China even though statistics reveal they are lower per capita than in the West. Hegemony in action.
- icebraining 8y ago
  The western media also loves to report instances of rape and murder in the West.
- illuminati1911 8y ago
  This. I moved to to Shanghai from North Europe and while there are dangers here in the traffic, food safety etc. violence is not one of them. The violent crime here and in China in general from western point of view is almost non-exisistent.
  - Markoff 8y ago
    i will rather take my chances with violent crimes in west than with pollution affecting everyone, accidents affecting everyone, subpar ingredients in restaurants affecting everyone etc
  - mb_72 8y ago
    Or is is that such crimes are under-reported by the state-controlled media? Or that statistics for such crimes cannot be easily located, or at all? Someone else has posted on this thread stating they couldn't find relevant statistics easily. What you are saying may well be correct, it just seems that it's hard to verify with hard information.
    - cbhl 8y ago
      Murders are under-reported in the mass-media in America because it would make for boring news. Imagine, day after day, the news saying, "and another 47 people were murdered today in America, including 13 in Chicago, and 4 each in Baltimore and Houston". While the homicide rate in the United States is dropping, there were still ~17000 of them in 2016.
07d046 8y ago
I thought this NYT article gave some good context. Didi promoted the ride sharing service as a way to meet people and for hooking up: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/technology/china-didi-chuxing-women-killed.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/technology/china-didi-chu... > So through suggestive ads hinting at hookups through driving, Didi pushed Hitch’s romantic possibilities. In a 2015 interview with the Chinese online portal NetEase, Ms. Huang compared Hitch cars to cafes and bars. And: > While it wasn’t obvious to female passengers that their drivers might want to hook up, the drivers knew. Until Didi deactivated Hitch, the car-pooling service allowed drivers to share comments with other drivers on the looks of their passengers, leading some male drivers to seek out the ones others had declared attractive. Murder is very rare in China. Very few Western countries have a lower intentional homicide rate (America's is 8.5 times higher), and I believe other violent crime is similarly low. (I hope this comment is okay.)
- Apfel 8y ago
  I'm not saying that you're wrong, as it does feel like an incredibly safe country, but most statistics published by the Chinese government range from questionable to outright fabrications.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Seriously, "Hitch"? That blows my mind. I guess it's one way to get drivers for less money. But damn, what horrible selection.
torgian 8y ago
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.

85 points by danso 8y ago

True - there are millions of passengers every day using didi. True - people got murdered in cabs too. But, I'd say Didi is at least 50% responsible for this tragedy. 1. The killer was reported sexual harassment by another female customer one day before the girl got killed. Didi still lets him drive. 2. The girl's friend called the police when she realized the girl was missing. The police called Didi's customer service. The guy who answered the phone refused to provide the driver's info, (license, phone number, location, etc.) and said that he needed to report to Didi's safety department. Then he even called the driver himself, asking: do you have the passenger on your car? did you kill her? The driver said no and hang up the phone. 3. The police finally got the driver's information from Didi almost two hours after they requested. But it was too late. Didi's poor background check on drivers and unprofessional customer service killed the girl. I don't think it would happen if it's uber.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

graeme 8y ago

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 how many murders we would expect in a few billion human interactions. At that scale all our intuitions are off and we need to look at stats.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
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.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  There’s often political pressures on police departments to fix unpopular statistics, and not the actual issue. Most famously this leads Japanese departments to label difficult murder cases as suicides.
  - 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
    Excellent point. This is a prime example of how government intervention mucks things up by setting up relatively benign goals, but in practice leads to an outcome that is unchanged, or perhaps even worse. What if all Japanese citizens were allowed to carry guns out in the open? An armed society is a polite society.
    - EliRivers 8y ago
      An armed society is a polite society "Polite" just means "in keeping with cultural norms". If it's polite to deal with disagreements, injuries and insults by pulling a gun, that's still polite but I certainly wouldn't feel safe.
    - baybal2 8y ago
      You can legally own an artillery piece in Pakistan, but I can't vouch for manners of locals
    - jstarfish 8y ago
      > An armed society is a polite society. If you believe that, you've never lived in Atlanta (or Japan for that matter).
    - jchb 8y ago
      > An armed society is a polite society. Perhaps suggesting that the Japanese need more guns to be polite wasn't the best example. Japan is already one of the most (the most?) polite society in the world - at least talking about how strangers interact.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
toomanybeersies 8y ago
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 and I have to navigate them. Just last week I got woken up at 3 AM by a distraught housemate being dropped home by the police because a cabbie sexually assaulted her. It's fucking disgusting what cabbies manage to get away with and then claim "Uber is bad because it's unregulated". Uber's self regulation has proven to be vastly superior to the taxi industry. Meanwhile with Uber, my experience has been 90% positive. It's incredibly rare to have a driver try to rip me off and it's a lot safer in general. I'm absolutely sure that the cabbie who assaulted my friend has done it before to other people, and will do it again to some other poor drunk girl. I live in a Australia, this shouldn't be an issue we're facing, but it is. I don't know what Didi is like compared to Uber, but I'm absolutely sure that it's better than cabs, especially in developing countries.
- puranjay 8y ago
  Not to mention malfunctioning meters, especially around tourist spots when you don't speak the language. With Uber, I at least know what I'm going to be charged
- lhorie 8y ago
  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.
rqs 8y ago
I once trying to dig out the crime rate (not murder rate) of our city in South China, at least trying to have a grasp on what's going on. (TL;DR: and failed) The only related data that I (as a citizen, not insider) can found is in the annual report published by the local court, which basically just a statement on how many criminals the court have prosecuted, only a number, no detailed categorization. I also searched for the "population" of the local prison, the only data I can found is inside a news article about prison location transfer published on the Ministry of Justice's website few years ago, which stated "All XXX prisoners are successfully transferred". None of the data is reliable enough to calculate the real crime rate of our city, as the local and prison may also handle cases from other cities, vice versa. Because of all that, the value of my little "research" is far less than having a small chat with a friend of mine who work for the local police department. Maybe this also the reason of why rumours in China got it's charm.
fantasticsid 8y ago
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, is moot. Because the issue is that Didi does not give a shit about passenger safety.
- dis-sys 8y ago
  > 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 promote such hook up experience. It is not like Didi doesn't care much about passenger safety, Didi actively puts passenger into danger for its own financial gains and knowingly denied police intervention when its passenger was in danger.
  - nyolfen 8y ago
    can you link a write-up about this?
    - dis-sys 8y ago
      if you google for the terms "滴滴 sexy" in which "滴滴" is the Chinese name of Didi, you get tons of reports.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    That is insane. They deserve to go out of business. I can't imagine that Lyft or Uber could have done something like this. But maybe I'm just too naive.
- graeme 8y ago
  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.

qwerty456127 8y ago

What is the logic in this? How could the company behind the app possibly prevent this and what is it meant to do now? What if a librarian would go nuts and kill somebody, would they burn the library to ashes?

danso 8y ago
The story mentions that someone claimed prior harassment by the driver in the most recent case. The appearance of non-responsiveness or a coverup can catalyze people's opinions.
azurezyq 8y ago
In this case, the driver is already reported in another misbehaving. But Didi still allows the driver to take more passengers. Most Chinese people are not boycotting the Rideshare as a way of transportation, they are claiming Didi is not working effectively in this case.

person_of_color 8y ago

Western media loves reporting on instances of rape, murder in India, China even though statistics reveal they are lower per capita than in the West. Hegemony in action.

icebraining 8y ago
The western media also loves to report instances of rape and murder in the West.
illuminati1911 8y ago
This. I moved to to Shanghai from North Europe and while there are dangers here in the traffic, food safety etc. violence is not one of them. The violent crime here and in China in general from western point of view is almost non-exisistent.
- Markoff 8y ago
  i will rather take my chances with violent crimes in west than with pollution affecting everyone, accidents affecting everyone, subpar ingredients in restaurants affecting everyone etc
- mb_72 8y ago
  Or is is that such crimes are under-reported by the state-controlled media? Or that statistics for such crimes cannot be easily located, or at all? Someone else has posted on this thread stating they couldn't find relevant statistics easily. What you are saying may well be correct, it just seems that it's hard to verify with hard information.
  - cbhl 8y ago
    Murders are under-reported in the mass-media in America because it would make for boring news. Imagine, day after day, the news saying, "and another 47 people were murdered today in America, including 13 in Chicago, and 4 each in Baltimore and Houston". While the homicide rate in the United States is dropping, there were still ~17000 of them in 2016.

07d046 8y ago

I thought this NYT article gave some good context. Didi promoted the ride sharing service as a way to meet people and for hooking up: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/technology/china-didi-chuxing-women-killed.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/technology/china-didi-chu... > So through suggestive ads hinting at hookups through driving, Didi pushed Hitch’s romantic possibilities. In a 2015 interview with the Chinese online portal NetEase, Ms. Huang compared Hitch cars to cafes and bars. And: > While it wasn’t obvious to female passengers that their drivers might want to hook up, the drivers knew. Until Didi deactivated Hitch, the car-pooling service allowed drivers to share comments with other drivers on the looks of their passengers, leading some male drivers to seek out the ones others had declared attractive. Murder is very rare in China. Very few Western countries have a lower intentional homicide rate (America's is 8.5 times higher), and I believe other violent crime is similarly low. (I hope this comment is okay.)

Apfel 8y ago
I'm not saying that you're wrong, as it does feel like an incredibly safe country, but most statistics published by the Chinese government range from questionable to outright fabrications.
mirimir 8y ago
Seriously, "Hitch"? That blows my mind. I guess it's one way to get drivers for less money. But damn, what horrible selection.

torgian 8y ago

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.