In this case, the Uber driver was off duty, and poached a fare from an on duty driver, and raped her:

When your business involves connecting real people in the offline world, there’s a lot more opportunity for things to get messy than in an online-only business. It’s a painful lesson that sharing (or on-demand) economy companies like Uber, AirBnB, and others have been forced to learn repeatedly in recent months and years.

Thanks to the sheer size, ubiquity, and frequency of usage of its platform, Uber has emerged as the poster boy for such atoms-versus-bits reality checks. In what is becoming a recurring theme for the company, yet another of its driver-partners has been accused of sexual assault.

This time, a Los Angeles driver, who was off duty at the time of the incident, is accused of picking up a female passenger in her 20s who was waiting for another of the company’s drivers in LA’s Mar Vista neighborhood late on Saturday night and assaulting her before dropping her off at her destination.

“He said, ‘I’m actually not working as an Uber driver right now, but I am an Uber driver,’” LAPD Det. Kimberly Porter tells ABC7. “She got in the front seat. He then took her to a location where he did sexually assault her.”

Police have identified the suspect, who they describe as cooperating, but have not yet made any arrests. An Uber spokesperson said in a statement, “The driver in question has been removed from the platform while we gather the facts.”

There remain far more questions than answers when it comes to Uber’s culpability in this situation. For example, did the suspect have a history of this type of behavior or other criminal activity that should have precluded him from passing Uber’s (often-suspect) background checks? If so, then the company has some explaining to do, but if not, then there’s seemingly little the company could have done to prevent such an attack. Also, did the visibility of passengers on the company’s in-app map play a role in the suspect targeting the alleged victim, or was this an unfortunate coincidence of a roving driver offering a waiting pedestrian a ride? We’ve seen the company’s maps used in the past by police and auto-thieves to locate and target drivers; could it be that in this case they were used to target a waiting passenger? It’s too early to say, but the possibility is troubling.

Uber’s business model is not about improving the cab hailing experience.

It is about creating a platform, and structuring the business such that all of the liability and risk fall on someone else.

It’s a fundamentally abusive model. It abuses the drivers, and it abuses the passengers, and it is meticulously structured so that the millionaire founders of the firm can wash their hands of any and a liability.

For conventional cab companies, at the very least, they know if they employ criminals, their insurance will become unaffordable, but for Uber, it’s all on the induhividual drivers.

Nice racket there.