Ever notice that your Uber driver looks slightly (or glaringly) different than the person shown in-app, whom you thought was picking you up? Perhaps it’s happened to you, perhaps not. But, it happens more than you think.
In every American market, Uber is uploading a new selfie security measure to ensure that drivers pick up the correct customer. The added enhancement is ultimately to prevent driver fraud so that you can count on your driver to indeed be the one whose picture you see in your app.
Uber wants you to be able to rely on the business and its drivers.
That’s why Uber has added Real-Time ID Check, which uses Microsoft’s machine learning to ensure and compare a selfie taken in real time against a driver’s registered profile pic. This is to ensure safety for both the rider and the driver.
Here’s how it works. The driver periodically takes a selfie through the app prior to being able to accept any fares. If the photo isn’t a match to the photo on the registered profile, the account locks, and an investigation ensues.
For the rider, this all means that your driver is confirmed as the person who underwent the Uber onboarding process and, more importantly, has had a background check. Of course, this selfie layer is not a guarantee of safety, but Uber is hoping it helps foster that feeling.
As for the driver, Uber said it is rolling this out with its top drivers in mind, as it aims to protect them from identity theft.
For the past few months, Real-Time ID Check has been hovering in pilot mode. In that time, Uber said that more than 99 percent of drivers were verified, which means that 1 percent were pretending to be someone else.
Uber has not yet released a day for Real-Time ID Check’s rollout to international markets.