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A year after taking office as Uber's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi is committed to making safety a priority for the carpool company, announcing on Wednesday a series of new security features designed to protect drivers and passengers.
These new in-app features include accident detection, use of GPS to identify a real-time crash, and the Ride Check feature, which allows Uber to contact drivers and riders via a notification. if a vehicle has been shut down for a long time. period of time, offering the option of an emergency button.
The company has also announced some new privacy features for motorcyclists, including address anonymization, which will obscure the exact address and password removal and delivery addresses of a driver's password and a two-factor authentication option.
After the announcement, Khosrowshahi met with Rebecca Jarvis, ABC News' chief business, technology and economics correspondent, for a broad interview to discuss these novelties. , culture, responsibility of technology companies and data protection.
Khosrowshahi says that the 9-year-old company is finally able to make safety a priority.
"We are a young company and we have focused on the creation of the basic service and its expansion around the world.We can now focus on the most personal details and security, and we finally believe that we can establish the standard for safety in the transport sector. "
And he does not just talk about cars. Uber recently teamed up with Lime to add electric scooters to his app and bought the JUMP Bikes company to offer electric bikes, currently available in San Francisco.
Khosrowshahi tells Jarvis that the company is also working on technology to connect users with subway systems to alert them if an Uber is not the most efficient mode of transportation.
"We want to be your one stop shop for transport or delivery … so if you want to go from point A to point B in any city … you come to Uber and we you will say, maybe you should take a subway on that ride instead of taking an Uber. "
Khosrowshahi says that he thinks about these decisions in the long run.
"Even if it costs us in the short term, in the long run if we serve the consumer, we will become the platform to which you will come back again and again."
And while the company is struggling to make a profit, recording a $ 891 million loss in the second quarter of 2018, this is still a 16% improvement over the previous year.
The new CEO has taken over the company in a climate of controversy. Former CEO Travis Kalanick has resigned as a result of allegations of corporate culture tainted with sexual harassment, discrimination and harassment as a result of numerous lawsuits and an internal investigation. Khosrowshahi, who stepped down as CEO of Expedia, says joining Uber has set a goal of "redefining the culture of society" by creating new cultural norms through employee ideas. .
"We celebrate the differences, we do what we need as a business.This is only the first step.These are incredibly important standards on how we want to behave. We have made improvements but the work on culture never stops, I think we still have some way to go, but as a company, we want to do what's right and we improve every day. " , did he declare.
The biggest cultural change in the business so far is the idea of "doing what's right," according to Mr. Khosrowshahi, which concerns the responsibility of being a leader in the transport sector, not only in terms of growth but also of transparency and partnership.
"It's a $ 6 trillion transportation pie and there can be a lot of winners and we can be the leader, but that does not mean that our win must come at the expense of others. and we can win with a lot of other players and that means dialogue and transparency, and I think we're going in the right direction, "he said.
Uber also seeks to dominate the transport sector, including air transport. With Uber Elevate, the company hopes to offer a demand-based air transportation service called UberAIR by 2023. Earlier this year, the company announced that Dallas and Los Angeles would be its first two launching cities.
Khosrowshahi says that people can expect them to fly "in five to ten years" and insists that it will not be an "elite product".
"We want to market it [uberAIR] for the masses … Uber speaks of availability for all and affordable for all. It is our goal and here five to ten years, I think we will get there … autonomous cars and, hopefully, autonomous flying cars. "
But if people have to wait a few years for flying cars, the Uber IPO is an event they can expect a little earlier. Khosrowshahi tells Jarvis that next year, Uber will be either a public company or "terribly close".
At the IPO, he said: "Everything is on track. There are tons of people working on the process. It's a stepping stone for us, but it's a milestone.
Khosrowshahi also stressed the importance of technology companies to protect the data and information of users.
"I think a lot of technology companies, including ours, have considered, and it may not have been a good idea, that" we're building platforms and ultimately what users are doing with these platforms. "Our platform is transportation and we could have said" security is not our job ", but we actually say" our security does not depend on our work. "We need to make sure that our content, the runners and the drivers on our platform act in a safe way, in the same way that Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. must take more and more responsibility for the security and the content of their platform. "
"I think what the regulators should demand is to show me the action," he added.
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