> If a Microsoft employee hacks your Windows computer and steals your data
That's a good point. I wonder though what we can actually discuss here.
Consider this, if a MS employee hacked you using say, company access to your hotmail account that only MS employees have, a system by design ripe for abuse, and therefore fixable by MS and therefore a MS responsibility, then that's relevant.
But if a MS employee hacked you on the job without anything special that makes him a MS employee (he could've been working for DELL, Apple or hell he could've been unemployed) and just happened to be a MS employee that hacked you, what's the relevance? It's just an incident that MS has no real responsibility for.
Even less responsibility if said employee wasn't an employee, but just a 3rd party freelancer.
I think it begs the question: 'what didn't uber do that they should have?'. Why are they at fault, why is this news? It sucks, yes, but as I posted earlier here, 17k kids under 5 will die today, and tomorrow, as they did yesterday. There needs to be some context, an angle on gender relations in india, a gender-violent culture at Uber, bad policies in keeping track of rides so abuse can go unpunished, for example. But I don't see it.
We've heard that the screening process is weak and I'll believe that. But I genuinely wonder what part of the screening process is missing that could've prevented this. I'm all for screening out repeat offenders for jobs like this (where a client entrusts a caretaker, like for doctors, police or indeed taxi drivers) but this feels like an incident that's only posted because it's good tabloid material considering Uber is now a $40 billion company with a possible rape case after tens of millions of rides.
> rapes occur all the time, not relevant if someone just happens to be employed by Uber
This isn't a story about someone who "just happens to be employed by Uber" committing a rape. This is a story about a woman who used the Uber app to find a ride and was raped by her driver (who is not actually employed by Uber).
Completely different. The Microsoft employee beating his wife would be analogous to an Uber driver beating his wife, neither of which has anything to do with their company's products or services and neither of which would be interesting to HN users. The point here is that this is a case of a driver raping a passenger, which immediately challenges the safety of Uber's model. This is now a component of Uber's perception, much like Elon Musk's blog posts are of Tesla's, and those make it to the front page of HN all the time.
rapes occur all the time, not relevant if someone just happens to be employed by Uber
if a Microsoft employee beat his wife should that be on HN? no. nor would it if he instead worked at a Texaco gas station