Uber suspends driver who live-streamed St. Louis passengers

[Teh One Who Knocks]

FOX News


https://i.imgur.com/5pAJrDZ.jpg

Ride-sharing company Uber has suspended a driver who recorded hundreds of St. Louis-area riders without their permission and streamed the live video online.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported 32-year-old Jason Gargac, of Florissant, Missouri, has given about 700 rides in the area since March. Almost all have been streamed to his channel on the live video website Twitch, where he goes by the username "JustSmurf."

The paper reported that some of the passengers included children and drunken college students.

Gargac said he is just trying to "capture the natural interactions between myself and the passengers."

But some riders said they felt their privacy had been violated. Of about a dozen the newspaper interviewed, all said they didn't know they were livestreamed and wouldn't have consented.

After the story's publication, Uber said it was suspending his use of the app due to "troubling behavior."

One passenger told the paper, “I feel violated. I’m embarrassed. We got in an Uber at 2 a.m. to be safe, and then I find out that because of that, everything I said in that car is online and people are watching me. It makes me sick.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report

[RBP]

Interestingly, there is nothing illegal here.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

Interestingly, there is nothing illegal here.

Are you sure? Wouldn't being inside a vehicle (like a cab or an Uber) be a place where you could have a reasonable expectation of privacy and need to be informed that live recording was going on? To me, being in a form of transportation like that means you are no longer in a public place (like a city street) where you have almost zero right of expectation of privacy. :-k

[RBP]

Are you sure? Wouldn't being inside a vehicle (like a cab or an Uber) be a place where you could have a reasonable expectation of privacy and need to be informed that live recording was going on? To me, being in a form of transportation like that means you are no longer in a public place (like a city street) where you have almost zero right of expectation of privacy. :-k

a) recording without consent in MO is legal, and b) he has a sign on the rear door windows saying that recording is taking place and that entering his vehicle is assumed consent. So he's not doing anything illegal. Whether the rider has a civil claim is a little bit different, but the rider would have to get past the argument of whether a transportation service is an expectation of privacy on top of the signage.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

It doesn't state in the story that he posted a sign saying passengers were being recorded though :-k

[RBP]

It doesn't state in the story that he posted a sign saying passengers were being recorded though :-k

The NYT article I read had that in it.

Missouri law allows a person to record others without their consent, said Ari Waldman, director of New York Law School’s Innovation Center for Law and Technology. He said victims could theoretically sue for invasion of privacy, but “would need to show that the back of an Uber is a place where we can and should be expected to be private.”

Mr. Gargac had placed a small sign on a passenger window that said the vehicle was equipped with recording devices and that “consent” was given by entering the car.

“I think it’s a larger question about privacy and technology for society, what we do when the norms around a particular technology are violated,” Ms. Rosenblat said. “You may not have violated the law, but people certainly feel violated.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/22/technology/uber-lyft-driver-live-stream-passengers-nyt.html

[Teh One Who Knocks]

Much better article :thumbsup:

And there are details in that article which indicate he might have a large amount of legal trouble coming in the future. From that NYT article:


Now imagine finding out days later that those moments were being streamed live on the internet to thousands of people. What’s more, some of those people paid to watch you, commenting on your appearance, sometimes explicitly, or musing about your livelihood.

This was the reality for potentially hundreds of passengers of a ride-hailing service driver in St. Louis, according to a lengthy article published in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch this weekend.

In it, Jason Gargac, 32, a driver for Uber and Lyft from Florissant, Mo., described an elaborate $3,000 rig of cameras that he used to record and live-stream passengers’ rides to the video platform Twitch. Sometimes passengers’ homes and names were revealed.

Mr. Gargac told the newspaper that he sought out passengers who might make entertaining content, part of capturing and sharing the everyday reactions that earned him a small but growing following online. Mr. Gargac said he earned $3,500 from the streaming, through subscriptions, donations and tips.

While it is legal to record people in public without consent, it becomes totally different when you are doing it for commercial purposes. For that, you almost always, without question, need consent and I don't think his "small sign on a passenger window that said the vehicle was equipped with recording devices and that “consent” was given by entering the car" is going to cut it on this one.

[RBP]

It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it. Do you agree that it's only a civil matter?

[Teh One Who Knocks]

Yeah, I don't see anything criminal in the story. For it to border into criminal (IMHO) he would have needed to use their personal info in an illegal way or to have later defamed them in some regard in his videos, which doesn't appear to be the case.