Are Cab Apps safe?
Cab services are increasingly relying on mobile apps to book, track and charge you for journeys. While tech watchers say there is a digital trail.
Originally published by IBNLive on December 8, 2014. Sunil Abraham gave his inputs.
"You can always share your location, the app has a feature for you to share your location through the way to whoever is waiting at the other end," said Aprameya Radhakrishna, CEO Taxi For Sure.
There's also a major safety loopholes. "We have more complicated technological safegaurd. All the cab driver has to do is use a very primitive technique. He just has to pull off his battery and can ensure that he throws away the phone of the traveller, and no one would know," said Sunil Abraham, Head, Centre For Internet And Society.
So can you trust technology to safeguard you? Rest assured that someone will be monitoring your journey back in some control room?
People feel that there should be some kind of an automatically generated alert system. Had the tracker been switched off, that could have been a point of loophole.
Great degree of automation is possible here but finally it is the human oversight which is critical eventually, in any technology.
Technology, ultimately, doesn't have all the answers, can't provide all solutions against crime prevention. We have seen instances when criminals have attacked women in ATMs knowing full well they are caught on camera, we have seen attacks by unruly drivers at road toll booths, regardless of the surveillance cameras.
While technology helps in tracking digital footprints that a criminal has taken, it hasn't deterred the criminal from doing what he wants to. For that, we have to be on guard.
Filed under:
Internet Governance
