TAXI FIEND
Uber driver BANNED after secretly livestreaming female passengers so internet could rate their looks
The 32-year-old shared live videos of women in the back of his car that would sometimes inadvertently include their address
An Uber driver has been suspended after he secretly live-streamed hundreds of women passengers online so people could rate their looks.
Jason Gargac, 32, shared live broadcasts of around 700 rides in Missouri on the Amazon-owned video platform Twitch since March 2018.
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The majority of the clips were aired without permission from his passengers.
But, shockingly, his broadcasts are legal as they take advantage of Missouri's one-party consent laws, which essentially allows a party in a conversation (in this case, Gargac) to record it without the other person's consent.
Gargac, who drives for both Uber and rival Lyft, was suspended by both companies following an expose on his antics by the .
The driver, known as "JustSmurf" on Twitch, had set up cameras on his dashboard and outside the car so people could see the faces of the passengers in his neon-purple-lit backseat and where they were heading.
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During the streams, viewers would rate the women based on attractiveness while others would disparage what they were talking about or the neighbourhoods where they lived.
Sometimes the recordings would even catch full names and addresses of the passengers without Gargac ever notifying them that they were being filmed.
The Uber driver often commented on his riders before they got in to his car and after he had completed the trip.
He referred to the live-streams as "content".
"This better be content, I swear to God. This better be content, that's all I'm saying," Gargac tells viewers of two female passengers he picked up.
"I mean, the blond girl looks kind of cute, if they're together. The blonde is cute. The one who ordered is not."
Talking to the St Louis Dispatch, Gargac said that his wife would help remove any racist, homophobic or overtly sexual comments.
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"Saying she was an 8 out of 10 or a 9 out of 10, that's cringe-y to a point, but I don't think it goes over a line," he said.
"But if you go over the line of like: 'Oh, I'd do such dirty things to her,' something like that, I don't want that at all."
Gargac's Twitch channel, home to 4,350 followers, has since been completely deactivated, though Twitch told the Post-Dispatch that it was uncertain as to why the channel was no longer online.
"We do not comment on Terms of Service violations in regards to specific individuals", said Twitch in a statement, adding "we do not allow people to share content that invades others' privacy".
The driver had tweeted on Saturday that he had removed videos from his Twitch channel to "calm everyone down".
Despite the fact that the practice is legal, both Uber and Lyft have now suspended Gargac from operating as a driver.
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"The troubling behaviour in the videos is not in line with our Community Guidelines. We have ended our partnership with this driver," an Uber spokeswoman told .
Lyft, too, confirmed that it had parted ways with the driver.
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