This caught my eye:
> I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to
I’m wondering what we lose as a society if people never have to be in even a mildly uncomfortable situation. There’s a book called The Comfort Crisis about this topic.
EDIT: The full quote is “I get privacy, time back, a safe ride, and I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to.”
In her quote she chose to separate safety and having a conversation with a stranger as two separate issues.
As a gay dude I experienced my fair share of "uncomfortable" Uber rides from or to various places. No thanks. I don't need to stimulate those kinds of social skills or whatever.
Can't even imagine what women go through.
Now the human supervisors in the Philippines watch you through the Waymo cameras and talk about you.
I don't care what people think about me. I care about the guy who has Jesus hung in every nook and cranny with a candle lit in his front cupholder telling me that I need to repent. In San Francisco, I might add.
I couldn't care less what people in the Philippines - one of the most gay-friendly countries in Asia - think of me through a camera stream.
Some regulation that limited the operators to work in the city they supervise would be an easy job win for some politicians. Create some jobs and look like you’re standing up to big tech.
> the human supervisors in the Philippines watch you through the Waymo cameras and talk about you
Literally don't care. What I don't need is to be evangelised with whatever conspiracy theory or fringe religion my driver just joined the entire way back from JFK.
Are you kidding me? That's like my favorite part about landing at JFK. How else am I supposed to keep up with the latest crypto developments?
Yes, and? What is your threat model here?
No one cares if you're gay dude.
Gay here, but I've only experienced a concerning conversation once, and that was a longer trip where sometimes you find out too much. I took an exit ramp away from that topic of conversation and it was fine. Otherwise everyone has been decent to downright pleasant.
I'd feel like I'm losing something by giving up that human interaction, such that it is.
One time I hopped in an Uber and got a missionary-like lecture on Islam and an invite to go to a mosque.
More typical of Christians so it kind of threw me off.
But anyway, a paid service shouldn't be starting that kind of conversation unless for some reason I started it and even then that'd make it just as uncomfortable for the driver.
This is the real issue:
"Uber received over 400,000 sexual assault and misconduct reports between 2017 and 2022"
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/uber-liable-pay-8-5-million-...
That averages out at 220 reports a day, which kind of sounds like a lot to me.
I'm a man, and I've been using Uber since it launched. Most rides are fine, but there are enough weirdos on the platform that 220 incidents per day that are serious enough to report seems reasonable to me, even if you don't consider that they operate internationally.
I once had a driver pick me up in downtown Seattle, and it turned out to be that he was driving for Uber as a tactic for his entrepreneurial venture developing antimicrobial and hydrophobic coating. He claimed to have applied it to the fishing boat from Deadliest Catch. He was specifically circling downtown to try to pick up someone who could get the ear of someone in Amazon's grocery division that he could pitch to (which I was not). At a red light in a nightmarish seven-way intersection, he took out a square of cheesecloth that had apparently had the coating applied, and attempted to demonstrate its effectiveness by pouring water onto it. It worked, and the water got all over his passenger seat and center console instead while the light turned green and cars behind us honked.
A few months later, Uber tried to match me with that same driver, and I cancelled it and walked instead. I have to imagine that if a guy with that level of high-preparation social ineptitude can stick around in their system, that the number of people making offhand inappropriate moves or remarks must be reasonably high.
I think "people should just deal with uncomfortable situations" (while in a vehicle that they have no control over!) is not a winning argument, but the continuing march toward tech-enabled isolation is absolutely bad.
It can be annoying to have to deal with irrational humans who make mistakes, but that really is just part of life! I'll take some cumbersome conversations over conducting my entire life via corporate app interfaces.
This is a male perspective.
My wife will not ride alone in Uber's because she's had one too many uncomfortable -> possibly dangerous situations.
This appears to be true for all of her friends as well.
And this is hilarious anecdata. I also know lots of women who use Uber all the time and have no issue with it.
It sounds like your wife is overly sensitive and I honestly don't believe you know the attitudes of all of your wife's friends with regards to Uber. This is classic "make up some rubbish to prove my point online."
Well, my wife was in an Uber ride where the driver asked her on a date, got rejected, and then started slaloming the car while complaining that he was so lonely he might as well drive the car into a wall ending his life, no wait, both their lives
She had to de-escalate the situation like a hostage negotiator would and assure him he was going to find love, and she was only not going out with him because she was already engaged, showing him her ring, but he seemed like a great guy
So, idk, maybe look the stats up.
There are uncomfortable situations that you can walk away from like a checkout counter, and then there are uncomfortable situations where you are in a car in an unfamiliar location driven by the person making you uncomfortable.
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Yes, some people apparently can't figure out that if you sit in the back of the cab, the driver doesn't talk and probably also prefers it that way.
They need a technical solution for issues that a 10 year old can figure out.