Uber in France has joined the British branch of the company in introducing a new anti-discrimination button on its popular ride-sharing app
The new option is listed in the “help” section of the app, which then allows the customer to report if they have been the victim of verbal or physical abuse based on gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or disability, French newspaper Le Parisien reports.
A 20-year-old young man told the newspaper that he could have used such an option last weekend after a poor experience with an Uber driver in Rennes.
“I asked Uber after a party. I was with my friend and we had a very banal conversation with the driver when he suddenly asked us: are you married? We answered: no. Then, he added: you are in a relationship? We said yes,” the man said.
“He became hyper-aggressive and asked us to get out of his car. It was the first time that it had happened to me. I did not want a problem, we went out and we had to finish the last kilometre of the walk. It was 3 am,” he added.
Similar discrimination has been reported in other countries like the United States, where a Palestinian Uber driver was accused of kicking out passengers in Los Angeles because they were Jewish.
The move comes after the company’s branch in the United Kingdom also installed a new anti-discrimination button after a 2016 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US claimed that black passengers were forced to wait 35 per cent longer for rides, while women were taken on longer routes.
Uber has seen a myriad of problems over the years, including several cases of rapes by drivers on vulnerable young women, including at least two cases this year in the United States in Ohio and another in Pennsylvania.
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