Uber and Lyft will work together to share information about U.S. drivers and couriers accused of physical and sexual assault to ensure that these individuals are banned on both platforms, the two companies announced on Thursday in separate posts. HireRight, a company specializing in conducting background checks, will oversee the Industry Sharing Security Program database. Other shipping and delivery companies in the United States will have a chance to contribute and access the database, as long as they follow the same data accuracy and privacy policies that Uber and Lyft must follow.
“We want to share this information with each other and, hopefully, in the near future with other companies, so that our colleagues in this space can be informed and make decisions for their own platforms to keep them safe,” Jennifer Brandenburger, head of Lyft policy development, said NBC News.
The database will not include information about the victims. In addition, the incident that placed a driver in the database will fall into broad categories.
The creation of a joint database of physical and sexual offenders is an important step for both companies. Both Uber and Lyft have often and consistently been criticized for doing too little to protect their passengers, especially if they are women, from predatory drivers. When Uber published its first safety report in 2019, the company revealed that it had received nearly 6,000 reports of sexual abuse reports between 2017 and 2018. In 2019, 14 unidentified women sued Lyft, claiming that the company had not carried out checks on adequate background on their drivers. Finding a way to share the identities of contractors he removed from his platform was one of the actions Uber said it would take in its safety report.