Research Summary for Ethics

Insights

Concern of Safety

• Crime

  • Hate crime

  • Sex crime

• Injury

  • Company support

  • Immature technology

• Health problems

  • Physical environment

  • Unsupportive regulations

Infringement on human rights

• Privacy loss

  • Unawareness about data collection

  • Data misuse

  • Data safety

• Inaccessibility

  • Inaccessible booking tools

  • Poor riding experience with accessible transit

• Discrimination

  • Mechanism loophole

  • Controversial race-based policy

  • AI bias

• Environment impact

  • Emission pollution

  • Power consumptions

Disruption to established industry

• Lack of regulation

  • Unfair competition

  • Vicious competition

Erosion of social & democratic structure

• Transportation inequality

• Worker's right

• Income inequality

Opportunities

Worker rights

Opportunity: Gig worker's Their rights, benefits, and health are not protected.

Hypothesis: We believe gig workers' rights, benefits and health being tied to individuals instead of work will solve their unfair treatments, and be valuable for them when they are working.

Transportation inequality

Opportunity: Poor communities get fewer and worse services. (get less, suffer more)

Hypothesis: We believe poor communities are frustrated when they get fewer and worse services because the distribution of public transportation design is unfair.

Unawareness about data collection

Opportunity: Users don't know what information is being tracked and have little control over how it's used.

Hypothesis: We believe being transparent about data collection and usage and allowing them to opt out will empower users to have better control over their data

Poor riding experience with accessible transit

Opportunity: Despite effort to improve accessibility, the user experience of accessible services is substandard compared to services for fully abled users.

Hypothesis: We believe users with disabilities are frustrated when having trouble using existing accessibility services because the resources are limited

Mechanism loophole leading to racist behaviours

Opportunity: There are loopholes in the service system that enable discrimination.

Hypothesis: We believe users who suffer from discrimination are frustrated when they expect an inclusive experience because of the loopholes in the service systems

Sex crime

Opportunity: Females are under high risk of sex crimes

Hypothesis: We believe female users are frustrated when they use the service alone because of having a high risk of being sexually assualted

Driver multitasking

Opportunity: In order to accept orders, multitasking drivers often get injured

Hypothesis: We believe multitasking drivers are frustrated when switching on multiple devices because of the distractive way of accepting orders

Capture anything meaningful

We conducted secondary research to collect articles and news related to ethical issues of ride-sharing services and built an evidence file.

Tag, discuss and organize the data

We used affinity diagramming to categorize and analyze the collected information. And we used the Assessing Harm guidebook ( designed by Microsoft) as the framework to organize the categories of ethical issues.

The first round of categorization:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WFlDTchRnXauEPG8EwkIXdKKJTDKxeX8lk__Pq-hDQE/edit?usp=sharing

Final Categories:

https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lW9zq4s=/