In a bid to ensure billions of its riders a safe and secure journey, ride-hailing platform Uber on Tuesday said the company may allow people to request drivers with higher ratings.
The company will “do much more with driver ratings… and have users be able to opt in to a higher level of service,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said during a panel discussion during the World Economic Forum (WEF) here.
“We don’t mess around with drivers’ ratings. But a 4.9 rating out of 5 does not reflect a driver’s state of mind. There are bad people out there. That only explains how he drove till date. but we are doing our best to make rides safer,” Khosrowshahi added.
Uber is currently providing four billion rides a year globally.
Khosrowshahi, however, did not elaborate further on whether users would have to pay a premium for requesting drivers.
While the company is so concerned about the personal safety, what it reportedly ignored was a security flaw – discovered by a New Delhi-based security researcher – that allows an attacker to hack into user accounts via bypassing its two-factor authentication feature.
The security bug works by exploiting a weakness in how the app authenticates a user when they log in to the platform, thereby letting the user log in to an account and easily defeat the two-factor prompt, without entering the correct code.
Uber reportedly said the security bug “is not a particularly severe” issue.
(Written with inputs from IANS)