Faced With Harassment, Female Uber Drivers Often Left To Fend For Themselves

Several women have also complained that a feature created to protect drivers, the anonymized number Uber provides to passengers, opens them up to harassment from passengers because they are not deactivated weeks later.

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Laurie N. had only been driving for Uber for three days when she was confronted with a female driver's nightmare scenario: a drunk and upset male passenger showed up at her doorstep, pounding on her door. Even worse, she hadn't given him the address. He'd gotten in touch, and then located her, using a combination of Uber's lost and found system and Apple's Find My iPhone. Yet while the passenger was able to track her down, she was unable to do the same with anyone at Uber, leaving her feeling exposed and vulnerable.

Typically, it's Uber's passengers' safety that both the media and the company itself have spent considerable time expressing concern over. Yet some of Uber's female drivers have complained about safety issues as well, specifically citing the company's lost and found feature, which connects riders directly to drivers when they believe they left behind their belongings. While Uber has previously claimed that those lost and found numbers, provided by a third party, are dynamic so as to only allow passengers to contact drivers shortly after a ride to retrieve lost items, BuzzFeed News has found that they in fact persist, and allow passengers to make contact with drivers long after a ride.

At 4:29 p.m. on Dec. 28, Laurie (who asked that BuzzFeed News not use her last name) picked up a passenger from the Apple Store where he worked, close to her home in the San Francisco Bay Area, and dropped him off a few miles away in Oakland. The ride, as most do, went off without a hitch. But about 30 minutes later, Laurie received a call from the passenger via Uber's lost and found feature, who said he lost his cell phone and needed it immediately.

Laurie initially offered to bring it to the Apple Store where he worked first thing in the morning. But he insisted that he needed it right away, so Laurie offered to bring it to his home, where she had dropped him off. She arrived at 7:30 p.m. and knocked several times, rang the bell, and asked other tenants in the building where he was, but there was no answer. The area, she told BuzzFeed News, was "dark" and "weird."

Before giving up, she emailed Uber seeking advice and guidance. Uber currently provides neither drivers nor riders a number to call, leaving both parties without any option but to interact directly or email the company. When no one answered right away, she returned to her home. Within an hour, the customer was back in touch again.

"About 8:30 p.m. he called me and he said, 'I thought you were coming to my home,'" Laurie told BuzzFeed News. "You could tell he had been drinking, but he was definitely slurring his words; it was not the careful speech I noticed during the ride. He said, 'I need my damn phone.' I said, 'I just left your house and I'm home now. I can bring your phone first thing in the morning.' He goes, 'I know where you live. I found my iPhone, I know everything.'"

She emailed Uber again at 8:52 p.m. with the following: "Passenger called me to say he is coming to my home to get his iPhone. I want to get him his iPhone but I am uneasy with this plan. Please advise. I have received no reply to my note below from you."

Frightened, Laurie eventually offered again to take the phone to the Apple Store first thing in the morning, but the passenger said he could not wait that long. Unsure of her options, Laurie relented and told the passenger that if he was going to pick it up from her home that night he had to come immediately. She also set ground rules for the transaction, telling him to be on time and to stay in his vehicle so that she could bring the phone out to him upon his arrival.

"He didn't come until quite a bit later and he pounded on the door. I got my husband and he stood behind the door with a Taser." When she at last opened the door, the passenger simply took the phone and walked away, she says.

Laurie told BuzzFeed News she suspects that her passenger had used Uber's lost and found service, which gives passengers an anonymized Twilio number that forwards to the driver's Uber phone. She then surmised that he used the Find My iPhone app on his phone to pinpoint her location.