Near the Georgetown Waterfront in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, two people were stabbed around 7:30pm. While details of the altercation are a little fuzzy, one of the fuller accounts comes from the local NBC4 affiliate:
Uniformed Division Officers of the Secret Service were conducting a routine patrol in the 3000 block of K Street when they came across the incident at around 7:30 p.m.
There’s no word on what led to the stabbing, but authorities say Yohannes Deresses was taken into custody. Police say Deresses is “some sort of taxi or sedan driver.”
“Some sort of taxi or sedan driver” is what catches the eye here. Were the stabber using some sort of digital dispatch system to pick up fares, you can be fairly sure we’d be reading breathless headlines akin to this one that graced Valleywag in July: “When Your Smartphone Chauffeur Becomes a Stalker.” That story is of a passenger who got way-over-the-line texts from a driver she arranged to connect with through the ride share app Lyft.
“San Francisco, like the rest of our planet is a human crapshoot,” writes Valleywag’s Sam Biddle. “[T]he guy who picks you up with a fistbump could turn out to be a kind, interesting stranger, or a complete nutcase.” Right, like it might even turn out that he stabs you.
At least if he did, we’d know a great deal more about him than the police have been able to figure out about Deresses. Lyft requires users to log in through their Facebook profile, so everyone participating in the system is tied to his or her real-life identity, or at least whatever version of it you’ve convinced Mark Zuckerberg to let you use. The technology layer of programs like Lyft, Sidecar and Uber means that there’s a tremendous amount of meta-data cushioning everyone’s participation. GPS tracking, for one thing, would give the Secret Service an exact route that Deresses took, which is information that you can easily imagine would come in handy should a ride turn hairy.
Data alone don’t guarantee that ride sharing is a perfect system, as evidenced by those creepy Lyft texts. But in making sense of the new ways people hire cars to take them places, it doesn’t seem like perfection is the right standard to use. As Joe Biden is fond of saying, “Don’t compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative.”
Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.
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