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oh my god vice.com/en_us/article/… 
Lyft's statement is that ..... lots of women get raped in a society
Lyft says that when Alison Turkos originally reported the incident to them, she didn’t mention the rape and only sent a message to support asking them to look into the ride. They argue that they basically had no way of knowing she had been raped. We’ve read the messages she sent
It’s true that the first message is her basically asking the company to look into why she got taken on an hour-and-half trip across boroughs, through four tunnels (there and back) and into another state for what is normally a 10 minute cab ride
She then followed up with several additional messages and continued to get canned copy paste or “sorry for the inconvenience.” A few days later she explicitly sent them a message letting them know that she was looking into filing a police report and wanted help doing so
If Lyft’s response/statement/position that it didn’t know about the rape is given even the bare minimum of good faith scrutiny, it completely falls apart
You have a GPS-tracked app showing that a passenger was taken not to their house a few minutes away from their starting point but on an hour and a half long journey to another state in the middle of the night. This is, at bare minimum, kidnapping and should trigger investigation
Instead, Lyft treats this as a minor financial inconvenience and promises to not pair that driver and that rider.
This is not how this platform should work. Lyft (and Uber and Facebook and Google and everyone else) have completely abdicated the idea that they need to have humans doing customer service and instead rely on algorithms and automation. It’s disgusting and it results in real harm
Lyft could argue that at the scale they’re operating at, it can’t check every anomalous ride. But that presumes that Lyft (and Uber, and Facebook, and Google, and Amazon) have some right to operate at scale with blatant disregard for the harm that scale brings
Remember that Uber and Lyft achieved this scale with VC money (taking a loss on most rides) and by literally ignoring regulations all over the country. This is not a normal competitive market, it’s blatant fuck you capitalism
