

Uber Confirms It Is Assisting Police in India Following an Alleged Rape - pajtai
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/06/uber-confirms-it-is-assisting-police-in-india-following-an-alleged-rape/

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plinkplonk
ha I like the phrasing. Instead of "Uber Driver rapes Woman" you have this.

Let me try. "Policeman shoots unarmed teenager" vs "The policeman who shot a
teenager in Ferguson is co-operating with the investigation, his attorney
says"

PS:This exact news item was submitted some time ago and flagkilled

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711222)

~~~
baddox
The title in your analogy should be "The _police department_ is cooperating
with the investigation."

~~~
plinkplonk
Sure. it wasn't meant as an exact analogy. More just an exercise in weaselly
slanted phrasing. Point taken.

~~~
baddox
No matter. This story seems to have been removed from the front page, although
it's not dead.

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dmishe
This probably would not help in _this_ case, but, the app should have an
emergency button that'll call the police and provide vehicle info and driver
details with a real-time coordinates to them. It really is a no-brainer from
tech point view, they have all the data.

Or if you want to go even deeper, make drivers install tamper-proof hardware
with a big red button. But there a lot of small details and likely regulations
in this approach

------
CodeWriter23
> However, media report that the driver is missing. He had allegedly
> registered to use the Uber service in a false name and disabled the GPS
> functionality from his smartphone during the incident.

I'll just skip over the background check failure here, and ask why doesn't the
Uber Rider app keep the GPS function going during the ride? The server could
compare notes and detect a bad operator whose Driver app has gone offline.

------
auser678
My Post comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711960)
downvoted on Hackernews

I wear it as a badge of honor. Unethical and unsustainable companies like Uber
get USD 40 Bil valuation by being led by arrogant misogynistic CEOs when they
condone looking up user data including journalists

[http://pando.com/2014/11/17/the-moment-i-learned-just-how-
fa...](http://pando.com/2014/11/17/the-moment-i-learned-just-how-far-uber-
will-go-to-silence-journalists-and-attack-women/)

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/emil-michael-of-
ube...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/emil-michael-of-uber-
proposes-digging-into-journalists-private-lives/)

Two reputed (understatement) publications decrying them, while CEO is arrogant
and still does not fire Emil

And then this happens [http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-
pacific/2014/12/indian-wo...](http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-
pacific/2014/12/indian-woman-raped-uber-cab-driver-201412771324100241.html)

While they claim they have extensive background tests for drivers. Investors
reward with a 40 Billion valuation, which is more than Infosys valuation a 33
year old company employing 200,000 people, bringing a lot of poor people out
of poverty and into middle/upper middle class (and many such companies like
TCS, TechM etc)

SV VCs and in general VCs if you are focussed on companies which are cool and
provide high growth and high rates of signups (the new eyeballs) refer to what
happened to secret [https://gigaom.com/2014/12/05/whats-happening-with-
secret/](https://gigaom.com/2014/12/05/whats-happening-with-secret/) and pile
on in news companies (dude you guys are like retail investors, Zynga,
Groupon...unsustainable companies but a pile on)

I believe in building sustainable businesses which provide employees,
founders, and eventual shareholders consistent returns over a period of time

I will never put a Zynga founder Marc Pincus in the same league as NRN. The
difference they made to the world is levels (think exponential) apart

I would rather drill, toil, sweat it out than just hype out, I say with
conviction as many companies in my space (mobile, cloud, Big data) did fail or
sold out after creating a hype

@Uber with 40 Bill ur not going to make a mark in India.

------
bob917
For all of you cracking jokes about this story. Rape is no laughing matter.

------
sarnowski
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711284)

600+ upvotes, top #1, vanishes from one second to another - whats up HN?

~~~
dang
I answered the question and buried the story for what should be an obvious
reason: meta support questions are not on-topic for HN, let alone belong on
the front page, let alone at #1. The guidelines explicitly ask you not to post
them. I'll add this info to my comment there as well.

~~~
pajtai
Why did this thread disappear from the front page? It has 45 upvotes and was
on the front page initially with just 5 or so upvotes.

~~~
dang
The only thing affecting these stories is that many users are flagging them.

Edit: perhaps more detail would help. The story was initially flagged by
enough users that it was killed. We unkilled it for reasons I described here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711660).
That caused the process which is affecting all these stories to pick up where
it left off: lots of upvotes and lots of flags, with the flags winning over
the upvotes. As a result, the story fell in rank again—but didn't get killed,
because once we unkill something flags no longer have the power to kill it.

~~~
pajtai
thanks for the explanation

