[Mickydtron]

While this is statistically true, people don't act as if this were the case. While trusting someone with your physical safety should be a high-trust decision, we treat it cavalierly enough in our day to day lives that most people clearly don't worry about it.

Maybe it makes sense, though, because the other person in the interaction has more incentive to defect when given access to all of your possessions than when given control over you yourself. That is, you have little reason to think that the Uber driver is working at cross purposes to you, and mainly just have to take their competence on faith. With something like Homejoy, it is their character and motivation you are gambling on moreso than their competence.

I haven't heard of people abusing Homejoy to rob houses or anything, but it seems not entirely stupid that someone would worry about bad actors more than incompetent ones.

[JohnBooty]

     While trusting someone with your physical safety should be a 
     high-trust decision, we treat it cavalierly enough in our day 
     to day lives that most people clearly don't worry about it.

We just can't avoid it. We assume that nobody's poisoned our food, we assume that nobody is going to go suicidal on the roadways and ram themselves head-on into our car, we don't wear body armor to work because we assume our coworkers won't shoot us. We even assume that the anestheseologist at the hospital isn't housing a wicked hangover that will prevent him from doing his job.

Essentially our lives are in other peoples' hands pretty much 24/7!

[Mickydtron]

Right, exactly. I didn't put enough conditions on my "should". I meant that in a crazy utopia, we would never be put at risk because of others, the real world is very very far from this utopia, and we put high levels of implicit trust in other people all the time. There's nothing wrong with this, given the world as it is.

Going back to Uber vs. Homejoy, the level of risk differential is much higher with Homejoy, because when using an Uber, you are probably not assuming much extra risk compared to what else you would do to get where you are going. For a cleaning service, then the risk differential is noticeable ('someone has access to my house' vs 'Only I and my family have access to my house') when jumping up from "doing the cleaning yourself". If you're comparing Homejoy to other cleaning services on a risk basis, you'd have to actually look at the numbers. I'm really not trying to bash Homejoy or cleaning services here.