"Due process" is a legal standard that is present in US Constitutional amendments for a reason.
Now obviously Uber is a private company and is currently legally allowed to discriminate against customers with low ratings provided they are not discriminating along protected categories like race or gender.
BUT, ride-sharing apps tend to turn into natural monopolies or duopolies simply because of natural network effects, and effectively become part of a city's transportation system. I would argue that, with this, they should carry additional responsibilities to customers that a normal private company doesn't.
And one of them is that banning customers should involve "due process", e.g. standards for investigation, burden of proof, opportunity to contest, and resulting actions, e.g. a temporary suspension. A permanent ban should be reserved for only the most serious cases, e.g. where a customer has been convicted in a court of law for threatening violence and gone to prison. (And a temporary ban can be put in place while a court case in pending.)
A crowdsourced star rating is not due process. And with Uber and Lyft essentially part of public transport, this is a scary and deeply undemocratic path to go down.
In NYC it's illegal for a taxi not to pick someone up, because this can be the source of tremendous racial discrimination (and continues to be, despite its illegality). We don't want to let Uber do the same type of thing to another class of people.
Now obviously Uber is a private company and is currently legally allowed to discriminate against customers with low ratings provided they are not discriminating along protected categories like race or gender.
BUT, ride-sharing apps tend to turn into natural monopolies or duopolies simply because of natural network effects, and effectively become part of a city's transportation system. I would argue that, with this, they should carry additional responsibilities to customers that a normal private company doesn't.
And one of them is that banning customers should involve "due process", e.g. standards for investigation, burden of proof, opportunity to contest, and resulting actions, e.g. a temporary suspension. A permanent ban should be reserved for only the most serious cases, e.g. where a customer has been convicted in a court of law for threatening violence and gone to prison. (And a temporary ban can be put in place while a court case in pending.)
A crowdsourced star rating is not due process. And with Uber and Lyft essentially part of public transport, this is a scary and deeply undemocratic path to go down.
In NYC it's illegal for a taxi not to pick someone up, because this can be the source of tremendous racial discrimination (and continues to be, despite its illegality). We don't want to let Uber do the same type of thing to another class of people.