Hyderabad: Telangana Police and Uber on Monday announced a tech integration that will provide public safety authorities with real-time data in case of an emergency on the ride-sharing platform.
As part of this collaboration, riders or drivers will be able to share their live location, name, and contact details at the swipe of a button on the Uber app with the police.
The integration has been taken live in Hyderabad for Uber riders and drivers starting today. The ride-sharing app said that it plans to expand this integration with other state police departments and take this tech-enabled safety integration live to multiple cities across India.
Sharing his views on the partnership, Director General of Police, M Mahendar Reddy, Telangana, said, “We are committed to ensuring public safety at all times. We are pleased to partner with Uber and make use of its global experience to help the public travel hassle-free and feel more secure. Partnerships with private partners and using new-age technology is a key focus for us to further enhance our efforts to ensure safety in our city.”
Sharing his views on the integration, Shiva Shailendran said, “We believe that ‘safety never stops’ and we are continually looking at solutions to improve safety on our platform. We are proud to introduce this new and improved tech-integration and hope to use this as a model that can be replicated across different cities.”
How it works
The new feature can be used by accessing the safety toolkit (the blue shield icon).
On reaching the ‘100’ assistance, the user will be prompted with the location and user contact details and will be notified that these details will be shared automatically when they swipe to call 100. After the user’s ‘swipe to call’, by default, trip and other contact information will be shared with the police in all cases.
If the user doesn’t want to share their location with the police, they will have an option to turn off the share feature. In this case, the SOS signal will not be shared with the control room but the user can still reach out to 100 through their phone.
The police will then receive the user’s live location, which is updated every four seconds, name, contact number, and e-mail address.
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