The Ridesharing Forum team felt goosebumps reading that headline alone. Did you? Well, if you didn’t, then you must have the courage to read on.
A Toronto woman who hailed a Lyft car was in a state of shock after she received a text message from a random person she did not know. The text message contained a transcript of what she and her friend talked about inside the car.
On the rarest of occasions, a Lyft passenger has been wiretapped, raising privacy concerns and doubts about the ridesharing platform. Here’s the scoop.
Goosebumps, goosebumps, goosebumps
The passenger, Anvi Ahuja, was having her moment in her Toronto apartment after her Lyft ride last month when her phone beeped for a text message from a number she did not know.
The text message contained the transcript of the exact conversation she had with her roommates during their few minutes of Lyft ride to her home from her friend’s place.
She was being tapped.
Immediately, she was brave enough to call the number the text came from only to hear this eerie, creepy lopping automated message, “We can’t connect your call because your driver is not available right now.”
That’s scary.
“It sounded like a pretty standard Lyft message, which raised a lot more questions,” she said.
She thought ahead and phoned Lyft that night to seek answers. In their call, the Lyft representative told her this was something Lyft was pilot testing.
But in an even scarier move, Lyft, a week later, sent her a written message penned by the company’s safety team, saying there was no pilot testing. Instead, it blamed the driver for recording her and said necessary actions were already being taken against the driver.
Ridesharing Forum’s interpretation
This incident is obviously raising more questions than answers. Here’s the take of the team:
- First, there was this unofficial looping message from the number saying, “… Your driver is not available right now.” Is the person who recorded their conversation and created the transcript working alongside the driver? Is the driver an accessory to the crime?
- Second, for one moment, Lyft said that this was part of a pilot program. But what pilot program would ever be intrusive to a private conversation? Even taxi drivers are trained not to eavesdrop on conversations inside their taxis. The media reported that Lyft has denied this kind of pilot testing taking place.
- Third, Lyft later denied their claims that a pilot test about this occurred and blamed the driver for recording the conversation. See the internal inconsistency there?
“These ride-sharing apps are big companies, and people have a lot of sensitive conversations within cabs, and they feel like they’re secure,” stated Ahuja. “To know that nothing – even beyond our app experience – in the real world is secure anymore is really freaky and uncomfortable to me.”