Whether you don’t own a car or want to enjoy a night out without worrying about how to get home, ride-share services come in handy. However, safety is always a concern with these services; to address that, Uber is adding new safety features to its app.
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On Wednesday, Uber unveiled safety preferences, a new feature on its app that enables riders to tailor their safety preferences automatically based on certain locations, ride types, and times of the day.
Set it and forget it.
You can now set up and customize your safety preferences in one place and schedule when you use those features – all the time or specific locations and times.
✅ Late-night rides.
✅ Bar and restaurant rides.
✅ Weekend rides.
Head to ‘Settings’ in… pic.twitter.com/JEjnfmYVQP— Uber (@Uber) April 10, 2024
The safety features users can choose to customize include RideCheck, PIN verification, audio recording, and Share My Trip.
The RideCheck feature can detect if a ride goes off the intended course, stops unexpectedly, or ends early. When it detects those behaviors, it will send an in-app check-in asking if everything is OK and offering helpful resources such as 911 assistance, reporting a crash, and more.
Pin verification allows customers to add another layer of verification to ensure they get into the right car by receiving a four-digit code that the driver will ask them about upon arrival. If the pin matches, you are getting into the right vehicle.
With the audio recording feature, riders can record trip audio from the Uber app. Those recordings are encrypted and stored on the device and are inaccessible to the driver or the user. Rather, only Uber can access the recordings when a rider reports a safety incident and chooses to share the recording with the company.
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Lastly, the Share My Trip feature enables riders to share their live location and trip details with a designated contact. With these safety preferences, all the above features can turn on automatically based on a schedule set by the user, ensuring they are always available when needed while circumventing the need to turn them on manually.
Safety preferences are available for users across the US, Canada, and Latin America, and will be expanding to more countries in the coming weeks.
