The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Sexual Assault Uber Data

Uber refutes leaked sexual assault data, claiming typos and driver names are behind high stats

Author

By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

March 7, 2016 | 2 min read

Uber has refuted leaked company data published by Buzzfeed claiming there have been thousands of instances of “sexual assault” and “rape” reported to its customer services. But, it has admitted that there is a legitimate claim of a sexual assault in roughly one in every 3.3 million trips.

Screenshots of Uber's customer service reports suggested there had been 6,160 recorded uses of the word “sexual assault” in complaints filed with the company and 5,827 uses of “rape” in data spanning from December 2012 and August 2015.

However, Uber has since claimed that the data was not an “accurate representation” of its complaints and that the figures were “highly misleading because of customer typos, driver names containing certain letters and customers using its complaints service to talk about media reports rather than their own experience.

“Riders routinely misspell “rate” (as in the fare) as ‘rape’, or use the word ‘rape’ in another context. For example, ‘you raped my wallet’," Uber said.

It added that: “Any email address or rider/driver last name that contains the letters R, A, P, E consecutively (for example, Don Draper) are included. After analyzing the data, we found more than 11,000 rider names and 17,500 rider emails with the letters ‘rape’" would also be reflected in the data.

“The results also showed tickets from passengers who got into cars not on the Uber platform, or who were discussing unsubstantiated media reports of sexual assaults.”

Uber concluded that in reality, there was an alleged rape in 0.0000009 per cent of rides and a legitimate claim of a sexual assault in one in every 3.3 million trips.

To put the figures into perspective, the company reached its one billionth ride in Christmas Eve 2015.

Sexual Assault Uber Data

More from Sexual Assault

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +