IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 38

opinion

Chris MacDonald

ber isn't in the taxi
business. It's not
really in the dispatch
business, or even in
the tech business.
It's in the "trust" business. That is,
it's in the business of building trust
between strangers. And if it can't
figure out how to do that, it will fail.
Uber's "UberX" program hit a
horrifying bump back in December of 2014 when one of its drivers
in Delhi allegedly raped a female
passenger. The incident earned the
company a complete ban throughout the Delhi region, and is sent
shockwaves through a much broad-

U

Uber
Is Built on Trust

Some of these problems can be
overcome through smarter use of
technology - and after all, that's
what Uber is supposed to be good
at. But it's important to see that the
key to Uber's success isn't
its mobile app, which is pretty easy to replicate. The key
is the company's ability to
get strangers to trust each
The key to Uber's success is the
other. If Uber wants to keep
its recent $40 billion valucompany's ability to get strangers
ation, it's going to have to
to trust each other.
figure that out.
This is because commerce - all commerce -
relies upon trust. When I
er global community of users and
hop into a taxi, I'm not just buying
potential users of UberX.
a ride to a destination. I'm engagFor all its success, Uber has had
ing in an exchange of trust. Think
plenty of troubles. It's been accused
about it: I'm getting into a car with
of anti-competitive behaviors. It's
a stranger. And the driver is letting a
been accused of privacy violations.
stranger into his car. But the branding of the cab company, plus the
municipal licensing, give me as pasDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2554440
senger some assurance that a) I'm
Date of publication: 2 June 2016

38

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

going to get where I ask to go; b) I'll
arrive there alive; and c) I'll be given
the correct change even if I fail to
count it. We all take this for granted.
Uber got big by leveraging that preexisting trust that most of us have
in taxis. And what it added was its
third-party geographical and financial
tracking, which allows us to trust not
just branded taxi drivers, but "amateur" UberX drivers too. I can, with
a relatively high degree of personal
and financial safety, climb into the
unmarked car of an amateur driver,
and both of us can be assured that
the financial end of the transaction
will be smooth, all because Uber's
app makes it so.
The key question, then, is whether
Uber will be able to sustain that trust.
I should add that it's not just about
customers. Trust has to be built and
maintained between the company
and its drivers, too. I spoke to one
Uber driver recently who said that
some drivers have left Uber because
∕

june 2016



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