
Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China - danso
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/08/didi-murder/568660/?single_page=true
======
07d046
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-
chu...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/technology/china-didi-chuxing-
women-killed.html)

> 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
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.

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graeme
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
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.

~~~
azurezyq
Do you have data supporting data for your claim? I'm a Chinese and this kind
of murders are really rare. The last one I heard in my hometown (a small
costal city) is over 10 years ago.

And with taxi-hailing apps' commence, this is becoming really rare since the
driver can easily pin-pointed (by cross-referencing ubiquitous street cams).
Actually in this case the murderer got arrested soon afterwards.

While I agree China is under policed, they are generally more effective in
body offenses and thanks to street cams (again). These years even home break-
ins are rare. As who lived in SF for a year, it's definitely better than SFPD.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
In Beijing it wasn’t uncommon to hear of a PKU student every few years being
murdered by a taxi driver (especially black taxis), once they went full in on
satellite campuses causing lots of transit headaches. And like I said
originally, I don’t know if it was higher than average or just well publicized
when it happens.

Ride sharing and taxi hailing apps have definitely made taking a taxi mug
safer. Conserving how didi has replace black cabs, that is definitely a good
thing. I’m not sure why the government wants didi to shutdown its ride sharing
business rather than rely on it as a sure fire way of at least solving murders
after the fact. Even full background checks won’t solve murders 100%, and
knowing you’ll get caught is a great deterrent.

Property crimes are still a huge problem in China, there is a reason all 2nd
tier apartments are still barred like crazy. Chinese police don’t really care,
they are not using the CCTVs to actually fight property crime, rather for
other things.

~~~
solarkraft
> I’m not sure why the government wants didi to shutdown

You finally mention it. Without the government wanting it, this story wouldn't
have broken. It seems like the c. gov could easily hide hundreds of murders.

------
torgian
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.

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joeythedog
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.

------
person_of_color
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.

~~~
illuminati1911
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.

~~~
mb_72
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
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.

~~~
jessaustin
When you put it like that, it doesn't seem so bad? Less than half the number
of car crash fatalities, anyway. Past a certain age, we're more likely to die
from any number of different health reasons...

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qwerty456127
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?

~~~
azurezyq
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.

