You may have been worried about your location being tracked five minutes post the completion of a ride, but Uber has today decided to address your privacy concerns. Through an official blog post, the ride-hailing giant has announced a new feature that allows you to travel from one point to another without having to share your personal information — especially your address with the Uber driver.
Called Cross streets, this feature was born out of the feedback collected from regular Uber passengers. Some of them were concerned about their privacy and requested for an option to help preserve the same when requesting a ride. Thus, the ride-hailing giant happily complied with a feature which now enables you to enter the nearest intersection as their pick-up or drop-off location instead of their actual addresses.
Cross streets, a product update that allows riders to enter in their cross streets as a pick-up or drop-off destination. We’re expanding this option to every city across the US so that riders who don’t want to share an address — or may not know their exact location — can choose not to.
While Uber had already made this possible by offering you, the passenger, the option to choose your pick-up and drop-off location by dragging the map itself. You could’ve used the same to change the pick-up location from pointing at your home’s address and the drop location to point at your workplace. But, Uber is simplifying the system as when you input your address it will auto-populate the list with names of major intersections nearby. In the blog post, Uber has included a pro tip for you and it instructs you do the same thing we just told you.
If your cross streets are not populating or you don’t know what they are, you can enter in your exact address and then simply move the pin in the map to your desired location before you request.
This feature has been under testing for quite some time and is now being rolled out to every Uber passenger in the United States. The ride-hailing giant does not mention when the said feature will be available to users outside the States, but we hope it comes soon. Else, we can continue to drag and adjust locations to protect our privacy.
But, this feature could prove to be quite instrumental for the safety of the masses, especially women, in a country such as India. With instances of rape, stalking and other forms of insistent nagging by drivers has previously been brought up individuals traveling via an Uber (or Ola) in the country. Being able to automatically choose the nearest cross-section from our house or work will help keep our addresses a mystery — a huge plus for a country where privacy is unknown to all.
This was also one of the reasons Uber had decided to anonymise rider and driver mobile numbers on their platform. It enabled both of them to operate on a level playing field, where they can contact each other without exchanging real phone numbers. Every phone call is bypassed through Uber, who hides the real digits and enables riders and drivers to contact each to arrange a smoother pick up.
Uber is steadily upgrading the safety standards of its platforms, but some passengers still remain concerned with their privacy on its platform. To make sure you’re riding with the correct driver, to whom the ride belongs to, Uber introduced real-time selfie ID checks for drivers in India earlier this year. They are now required to click a selfie multiple times during their active hours to confirm their identity and keep accepting rides. But, Lyft drivers are still not safe, courtesy of Uber’s secret internal programs.
