It’s pretty frustrating to follow the press coverage of Uber rape case in India on both sides of the world. What is a terrible tragedy — the details are awful and stomach churning — has played out in the press along three very predictable directions.
在一位使用Uber打车服务的印度司机强奸女乘客之后，东西方世界的媒体报道读起来都令人沮丧。多惨的一桩悲剧啊，案件的细节令人不忍卒读。媒体的解读也基本上是沿着三个非常容易预期的导向来进行的。Meme #1 — Uber is a company that likes to play loose with the rules and this is yet another example (mostly tech press in the U.S.)
导向1：Uber是一家喜欢把规则当游戏的公司，这桩悲剧只是又一个例子（大多数美国的科技媒体）。
Meme #2 — India is a country which has a problem with women’s safety (both press here and in India)
导向2：印度是一个存在女性安全问题的国家（大多数美国和印度媒体）。
Meme #3 — This is another example of why “foreign” companies can’t be trusted in India (from Delhi government, various Indian influencers)
导向3：这个例子再次说明为什么“外国”公司在印度得不到信任（新德里政府、在印度有影响力的人士）。All of these are loose caricatures playing to existing biases and it’s frustrating because it ignores the underlying realities of these parts of the world and what could have been done to prevent this.
所有这些观点都是在迎合已有的偏见，是非常不严谨的漫画手法。由于它忽略了这些地区的一些基本事实，和人们本可以采取哪些手段来预防这种悲剧，这真的令人非常沮丧。First, some history. India has had a string of similar tragic incidents for many years. When I was at Microsoft Hyderabad in 2005, we started having security guards accompany women home late at night after a string of incidents where women in tech companies were assaulted by their shuttle drivers. As I was writing this post, I found more incidents as recent as 2013. This has been happening for a long time now and India has been grappling with some hard social/cultural questions on why it has been unable to stop this. This is why a lot of us tell women traveling to India to be much more aware of their surroundings — the social calculus you employ when you do something as trivial as jumping into a cab or asking a stranger for a favor isn’t the same in every part of the world.
首先要普及一些历史知识。多年来，印度已经发生了一连串类似的悲剧事件。2005年,我还在微软海德拉巴分公司(Microsoft Hyderabad)工作，由于当时接连发生科技公司女性员工被通勤班车司机性侵的事件，我们开始派保安护送下班晚的女性员工回家。就在我写这篇文章的时候，我发现就在不久前的2013年，也发生了很多类似事件。在印度，这类事件早已有之，印度为什么不能制止类似悲剧的发生，也与一些深刻的社会和文化问题有关。这就是为什么我们许多人都会警告去印度旅行的妇女一定要注意周围安全。坐进出租车或请陌生人帮忙这样的小事，可能会导致跟世界其他地方不一样的后果。The idea of Uber doing background checks and “filtering out” this driver with an arrest record is laughable for anyone who has dealt with government records in India. First, there is no reliable way to run a check on someone in most parts of the world and second, even if they did, a small bribe in the right place will fix most records.
只要你曾经跟印度政府部门打过交道，你就会知道，质疑Uber为什么没有做好背景调查，从而“过滤掉”这样一个有犯罪前科的司机，是一个多么可笑的想法。首先，在全球大多数地区，并没有可靠的方法彻查某人的历史记录。其次，即便他们有这种方法，一笔小小的贿赂就能把大多数记录改过来。A side anecdote on how such records work. Most of my school friends didn’t have to go to the Indian equivalent of the DMV to get a license when they hit the right age — they just got a “friend” to get it for them for around $10. I remember being grumpy with my dad when he made me actually take the test. Not because my dad had some moral high ground but more because he didn’t want to spend the money on a bribe (note — that’s my dad in a nutshell for you). India is trying to fix this and anti-corruption has really captured the public’s imagination in the last few years but it’s a long road. Paying off a government official is still very much the status quo (as I find out every time I need something from them).
说一个关于这些记录的故事。我的大多数同学在到了合法驾车年龄之后，并不会去印度的机动车辆管理部门申领驾照——他们会去找一个“熟人”花大约10美元弄一张。我记得当年我父亲逼我参加考试的时候，我甚至还发了脾气。我父亲倒不是有多高的道德水平，只不过他不愿意花贿赂的钱。印度政府也试图改变这种风气，近几年印度的反腐行动也引发了公众的不少想象，但这个国家仍然有很长的路要走。花钱贿赂政府官员仍然是一件非常平常的事（每次我去政府机关办事时都会发现这一点）。A reasonable person may ask — shouldn’t Uber have covered their bases anyway and asked the police? In a twist that is probably going to embarrass the Delhi cops, it turns out that Uber actually did get a police “character certificate” for the driver. But as I said above, no one really takes this seriously and Uber shouldn’t have either (more on this later).
自然有人会问，Uber难道不应该调查自己的人，并且问问警察吗？这个问题可能会让德里警方感到尴尬，事实上Uber还真有一张警方为那个司机开具的“无犯罪记录”。但就像我上文说的那样，没人真把它当回事，Uber本来也不应该把它当回事。（稍后再进一步谈论这个问题）The Delhi government banning Uber as “unsafe” smells of a knee-jerk PR reaction against a company perceived to be “foreign.” Delhi has thousands of taxi drivers, cab companies and private transport vehicles — no one bothers asking for any sort of real background check for anyone driving these things. I have friends who own cab companies — their “driver check” is asking the driver whether he has a license. And even if everyone suddenly had great checks, let’s not forget that a lot of the recent assault cases in India were first-time offenders. This is just the way business is done in other parts of the world and people generally accept this as the status-quo and guard against it.
德里政府以“不安全”为由封掉Uber，透出一丝针对“外国”公司近乎本能的公关反应。德里的出租车司机、出租车公司和私人运营车辆成千上万，几乎没有人要求对任何驾驶这些车辆的人做任何严肃的背景调查。我有朋友就是开出租车公司的，他们的“驾驶员调查”就是询问司机有没有驾照。如果哪家公司真的做了很好的背景调查，我们也不要忘了，印度最近发生的很多性侵案的嫌疑人其实都是初犯者。在世界其他一些地方，生意就是这样做的，人们也基本上接受了这种现状，并对此保持警惕。Uber with its use of technology is way safer than any other cab company or any generic cab driver who hustles you at the airport. I would ask anyone in India or visiting there to trust it (and other startups like OlaCab that use tech to power transport) way more than some cab driver off the street or some company which has three beat-up cars and a phone number in the yellow pages.
凭借它所用的技术，比起其他任何出租车公司、或者挤在机场拉客抢客的出租车司机，Uber其实要安全得多。对于任何一个在印度居住和旅游的人，我会请他们相信Uber（以及其它利用科技促进交通的初创公司，比如OlaCab等），而不是街上随便一个出租车司机，或是那些只有三辆老爷车，而且只在黄页本上有一个电话的出租车公司。What really happened here is a tragedy due to India’s inherent social dynamics and problems with sexual assault as well as it’s inability to have a efficient ID system. *That* is why a young woman was harmed and that’s what we should be focusing the spotlight of mainstream attention on.
事实上，这出悲剧之所以会发生，根源是印度固有的社会因素导致的性侵问题，以及印度没有能够建立一个高效的身份证系统。这才是这名年轻女性受害的原因，这也是社会主流应该关注的焦点。However, there are still several questions we here need to answer.
不过我们还是需要回答几个问题。For us in the tech world — How do we scale services that we take for granted when the social/cultural foundations don’t exist in other nations or there are other social dynamics at play? Do we say “Customers need this service even if we can’t guarantee what we can in the first world?” Or do we take a more nuanced approach (and what does that even mean)? I don’t know.
对科技界来说，当有些社会和文化基础在某些国家不存在，或者这些国家存在其它社会问题时，我们又该怎样扩展我们认为是理所当然的服务？我们是说“顾客需要这项服务，即便我们不能保证我们在第一世界国家能做到的事，在这里也能做到”？还是我们应该采取一种更微妙的方法（这到底意味着什么）？我不知道。For Uber — They must be feeling under siege now in a situation where they did more than any Indian cab company (and way, way more in working with law enforcement promptly). Props to them but they could/should have done more. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in India would know that background checks just don’t work and a certificate from the cops is just paperwork. How do you actually protect your riders in these parts of the world by going above and beyond what law enforcement can do? Someone suggested that Uber adopt a “more Indian way” of background checking by asking a few neighbors of each driver — as silly as it sounds, a crazy, unscaleable, localized approach like this might yield way better results.
Uber现在肯定觉得自己身陷重围，哪怕他们做得比任何一家印度出租车公司都多（也更为迅速地配合执法部门方面）。这一点值得鼓励，但是他们本可以，也本应该做得更多。任何在印度待过一段时间的人都知道，背景调查根本不管用，警方开的无犯罪证明不过是浪费纸张。那么在这个地区，你如何在执法部门的能力范围之外保护乘客的安全？有些人建议Uber可以采取“更具印度特色”的背景调查方式，比如询问每个司机的几个邻居——虽然这个点子听起来似乎愚蠢，但像这样貌似疯狂、不容易大规模推广的“土办法”很可能会带来更好的结果。If you can’t actually have effective background checks in less developed parts of the world, how do you tell your riders that before they step into a car? Culturally, how do you react to this by actually looking into doing more than just set up a bunch of meetings with the Delhi home ministry/ police department which establishes a process that looks great on paper? How do you build this concern into your company DNA? It’s way easier to get big numbers to go up (riders, trips, passengers, cities) than protect against the rare, catastrophic incident. I don’t know but I hope Uber uses the same ingenuity it has shown in developing their core service in tackling these questions.
如果你在欠发达国家无法进行有效的背景调查，那么在乘客踏进出租车之前，你应该告诉他们什么呢？从文化角度上，除了和新德里的内政及警务部门开一堆会议，建立一套纸上谈兵的流程之外，你还得怎样应对？你如何把这种对安全的关注植入企业的DNA？让大数字（司机、行程、乘客、城市数量等）涨上去，要比预防这种罕见的灾难事故简单得多。我也不知道这些问题的答案，但是我希望Uber能发扬它在开发核心服务时展现出的智慧，来解决这些棘手的问题。The real media tragedy here is the burial of the core story. A young woman was viciously assaulted and still managed to show incredible bravery in the seconds (taking a photo, recording the number) and hours afterward. Society failed her.
真正的媒体悲剧在于，他们埋藏了这个故事的核心：尽管惨遭施暴，这位年轻女子依然在随后的几秒钟和几小时内展现出非凡的勇气（拍照、记下车牌号）。但是社会令她失望了。（财富中文网）Sriram Krishnan currently works on mobile monetization products for Facebook, and previously worked on cloud solutions for both Yahoo and Microsoft.
本文作者Sriram Krishnan目前为Facebook开发移动货币化产品，此前他曾为雅虎和微软提供云解决方案。