Uber checks {that a} driver’s face matches what the corporate has on file by means of a program known as “Real-Time ID Check.” It was rolled out within the US in 2016, in India in 2017, after which in different markets. “This prevents fraud and protects drivers’ accounts from being compromised. It also protects riders by building another layer of accountability into the app to ensure the right person is behind the wheel,” Joe Sullivan, Uber’s chief safety officer, stated in an announcement in 2017.
But the corporate’s driver verification procedures are removed from seamless. Adnan Taqi, an Uber driver in Mumbai, bumped into hassle with it when the app prompted him to take a selfie round nightfall. He was locked out for 48 hours, an enormous dent in his work schedule—he says he drives 18 hours straight, typically as a lot as 24 hours, to have the ability to make a dwelling. Days later, he took a selfie that locked him out of his account once more, this time for a complete week. That time, Taqi suspects, it got here right down to hair: “I hadn’t shaved for a few days and my hair had also grown out a bit,” he says.
More than a dozen drivers interviewed for this story detailed situations of getting to search out higher lighting to keep away from being locked out of their Uber accounts. “Whenever Uber asks for a selfie in the evenings or at night, I’ve had to pull over and go under a streetlight to click a clear picture—otherwise there are chances of getting rejected,” stated Santosh Kumar, an Uber driver from Hyderabad.
Others have struggled with scratches on their cameras and low-budget smartphones. The downside isn’t distinctive to Uber. Drivers with Ola, which is backed by SoftBank, face comparable points.
Some of those struggles will be defined by pure limitations in face recognition expertise. The software program begins by changing your face right into a set of factors, explains Jernej Kavka, an unbiased expertise marketing consultant with entry to Microsoft’s Face API, which is what Uber makes use of to energy Real-Time ID Check.
SELVAPRAKASH LAKSHMANAN
“With excessive facial hair, the points change and it may not recognize where the chin is,” Kavka says. The identical factor occurs when there may be low lighting or the cellphone’s digital camera doesn’t have a superb distinction. “This makes it difficult for the computer to detect edges,” he explains.
But the software program could also be particularly brittle in India. In December 2021, tech coverage researchers Smriti Parsheera (a fellow with the CyberBRICS undertaking) and Gaurav Jain (an economist with the International Finance Corporation) posted a preprint paper that audited 4 business facial processing instruments—Amazon’s Rekognition, Microsoft Azure’s Face, Face++, and FaceX—for his or her efficiency on Indian faces. When the software program was utilized to a database of 32,184 election candidates, Microsoft’s Face didn’t even detect the presence of a face in additional than 1,000 photographs, throwing an error fee of greater than 3%—the worst among the many 4.
It could possibly be that the Uber app is failing drivers as a result of its software program was not educated on a various vary of Indian faces, Parsheera says. But she says there could also be different points at play as effectively. “There could be a number of other contributing factors like lighting, angle, effects of aging, etc.,” she defined in writing. “But the lack of transparency surrounding the use of such systems makes it hard to provide a more concrete explanation.”