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Uber Wants to Improve Its Service's Safety with a Google Street View-Like Feature

The giant transport company has just announced a new safety service that will use smartphone-cameras mounted on the exterior of the cars to take images of the streets at night. Developed in partnership with SafetiPin, a map-based mobile safety app that tags safety scores to locations on a map in a city, Uber says it will even collaborate with local authorities to improve the neighborhoods with things like additional street lightening.
Uber Wants to Improve the App’s Safety with a Google Street View-Like Feature 1 photo
Photo: Uber blog
The already existing free app was designed “to be the technology environment through which individuals, communities, researchers, NGOs, government, service providers can come together to share information via crowdsourcing and act to make our cities safer.” And this is allegedly exactly what Uber is looking for, especially since an Indian woman was reportedly raped by the Uber driver she was traveling with in New Delhi last year. The victim is now suing the company in the US.

Call it a coincidence or not, but the transport giant has now decided it’s time to act. The initiative will start as a pilot program in New Delhi, and will then continue out across other global markets in the coming months. Bogota, Colombia and Nairobi, Kenya are the next cities they want to develop a similar service, with the aim to cover approximately 20,000 km of city roads and areas.

The project in India will start in two days and will run for 5 months. According to Uber’s blog post, data of extensive city areas will be collected during the night using camera phones mounted on the exterior of the vehicles. The devices will take pictures at regular intervals with each photographs being tagged with a precise score based on predetermined parameters such as lighting, openness and other.

Apart from trying to improve the areas which get low scores collaborating with local governments, Uber claims they will re-assess the areas over time to see what the improvements were.

Long story short: they found a way to create a similar service to Google Street View only it’s using other people’s cars and was designed for safety only. Only thing we’re wondering is who will provide the phones.
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