Uber has lost its license in London. For the second time. And this time getting back on the roads in London may not be an easy ride for the ride-sharing giant.

What’s led to the ban may prove to be a global malpractice by Uber drivers. This makes me believe that this might, in fact, be the start of a global backlash. Unless, of course, Uber and other ride-sharing companies choose to act immediately.

So what led to the London ban?

The regulator in London discovered that unlicensed users pretended to be Uber drivers by faking their identities in at least 14,000 rides. This unchecked malpractice puts passengers in enormous risk.

If passengers don’t feel safe, they will most likely reject that mode of transportation completely.

It’s hard to understand why an industry born out of disruptive innovation has been so slow to implement technology to improve passenger safety. Especially when it’s core to their very survival and the technologies have been available for some time now.

Tech can make Uber and their passenger safer

We’ve believed it for some time now that the Ubers of the world need to integrate Face Match and Liveness in their ‘Trip Start’ process.

Every time the driver starts a trip, the Uber app running on his smartphone can take his selfie and match it with the picture saved with them. Further, it can run a Liveness check to ensure that the selfie is ‘live’ and not a picture-of-a-picture.

The passenger can get an instant intimation about the FaceMatch and Liveness results, right at the start of the ride, putting them at immediate ease.

It’s as simple as that!

Our APIs for FaceMatch and Liveness give back these results in all of 3 seconds with a near 100% accuracy.

Yesterday’s Economic Times reported that the Indian Government is likely to propose a FaceMatch or Biometric authentication every 3 hours.

Good move. But why every 3 hours when it can be done at the start of every trip?


IDfy identifies and authenticates people to keep users safe when using on-demand services and P2P communities.