[yapcguy]

Sophia Liu. 6 years old. Killed by Uber driver.

At first Uber denied the driver worked for them. Then they admitted the driver was with them but he wasn't "working" because he didn't have a passenger.

In constrast, some news reports claim that the driver believes he was working for Uber because he was searching for fares at the time of the accident.

[eridius]

I hadn't heard of this before. But I'm a bit confused, how does an uber driver hit someone while searching for fares? Searching for fares in Uber means sitting in your car waiting for your phone to ding. The only reason to be moving around without a passenger is if you think that a different neighborhood is a better place to be to find passengers (as distance to the prospective passenger is important), but driving to another neighborhood certainly doesn't qualify as "searching" for anything.

[placeybordeaux]

I would imagine that a large number of the drivers actually do drive around while searching as some areas are just awful to find parking in. Really the safest thing that Uber could do is to make it policy to only search over drivers that aren't in transit. Might hurt their buisness, but it is technically possible and most likely would give them a pretty strong defense against their product causing harm.