Uber has had five claims of rape and "less than 170" cases of sexual assault reported to its customer-service database concerning Uber rides between December 2012 and August 2015, the company confirmed to Business Insider.

Uber was responding to an investigation by BuzzFeed into reported sexual assaults involving the ride-sharing service.

BuzzFeed says that employees had shared data with BuzzFeed about reported rapes and sexual assaults from its customer-service databases numbering in the thousands.

Searches for those terms revealed around 6,000 tickets, which BuzzFeed published as screenshots on its site. As BuzzFeed reports:

The screenshots obtained by BuzzFeed News show at least nine complaint tickets with the subject line of “sexual assault” and at least nine results out of 382 with subjects for “sexually assaulted,” including “uber driver sexually assaulted me,” “sexually assaulted by Uber driver in SF,” “Uber driver sexually assaulted my girlfriend,” and “my daughter sexually assaulted by drive”.

BuzzFeed also reported on Uber's system for escalating such incident reports in which customer-service reps discuss if these complaints will involve reports to law enforcement or the media.

When Business Insider contacted Uber and asked for more information or a statement about Uber and sexual-assault data, the company sent us their full response to the BuzzFeed article, published below. Uber also published it on Medium.

Uber says that:

Our analysis for all of these results shows five tickets that allege an actual rape occurred (0.0000009% of rides in the three years from December 2012 to August 2015) and 170 tickets with a legitimate claim of sexual assault (1 in every 3.3 million trips). Bear in mind that when serious incidents occur, people often report them directly to law enforcement. Therefore, those incidents may not be reflected in the numbers above.

And it explains that thousands of tickets can use the word "rape" as a typo for the word "rate," or if it's included in a name like "Draper" or is used as a metaphor, for example, "you raped my wallet." (Uber now says that names like "Draper" would not be included in the search results.)

Uber also said that because of those problems it does "manual audits of every ticket sent to Uber, not audits of key words."

Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber. Uber

BuzzFeed's article also indicated that Uber had tried to discover the employees who had been working with BuzzFeed by looking for employees who had recently searched for keywords like rape and sexual assault.

Uber freely admitted that it did try and discover those employees.

Ride-sharing company Uber has come under increasing pressure over the safety of its services. Last month, an Uber driver with a high customer-satisfaction rating who had reportedly passed a background check allegedly opened fire on eight people in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Still, these are big allegations about how many sexual assaults have been reported to Uber regarding its ride-sharing service, and Uber's response indicates that it is taking such questions seriously.

Here's the Uber's full response:

Safety at Uber

Ben Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Buzzfeed News

Mat Honan, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, Buzzfeed News

John Paczkowski, Managing Editor, Buzzfeed News

Dear Ben, John and Mat,

We have worked with your team over the last week to answer questions about safety at Uber, but the story you have just posted fails to take into account the many facts we have provided to Buzzfeed. Given that our business depends on accountability and transparency, we are now sharing that information publicly so that our riders and drivers have the facts and can judge for themselves.

Getting people from point A to B safely and reliably is the single most important thing Uber does. It’s why we have a dedicated Trust and Safety team, overseen by Joe Sullivan (whose entire career has been focused in this field, first as a federal prosecutor and then at eBay, Facebook, and now Uber) and run by Phil Cardenas (the former head of Trust and Safety at Airbnb).

This team exists to reduce safety incidents, and its success is judged on that one metric. Because even one incident is too many. It’s why Uber has invested heavily in technology to improve safety for everyone before, during, and after each ride. Every Uber trip is GPS-tracked and passengers can share their route in real time with family or friends, as well as rate their drivers at the end of each trip (and vice versa). This is on top of a robust system of background checks.

Sadly, no means of transportation is 100 percent safe today. Accidents and incidents do happen. It’s why we are working to build an exceptional customer support team that can handle problems when they occur, including working with law enforcement.

You asked about screenshots in your possession (and since published) showing that if a customer service representative types “rape” or “sexual assault” into our database, they will see more than 5,800 results (i.e. customer support tickets) for rape and 6,160 for sexual assault over a period of three years. These results are highly misleading because:

Riders routinely misspell “rate” (as in the fare) as “rape”, or use the word “rape” in another context. For example, “you raped my wallet”;

Any email address or rider/driver last name that contains the letters R, A, P, E consecutively (for example, Don Draper) are included. After analyzing the data, we found more than 11,000 rider names and 17,500 rider emails with the letters “rape”;

The results also showed tickets from passengers who got into cars not on the Uber platform, or who were discussing unsubstantiated media reports of sexual assaults.

Our analysis for all of these results shows five tickets that allege an actual rape occurred (0.0000009% of rides in the three years from December 2012 to August 2015) and 170 tickets with a legitimate claim of sexual assault (1 in every 3.3 million trips). Bear in mind that when serious incidents occur, people often report them directly to law enforcement. Therefore, those incidents may not be reflected in the numbers above.

When serious incidents are reported to us, we always reach out to the person who filed the report and, where appropriate, engage with law enforcement. We also temporarily suspend the driver or rider (if it is a question of violence by a passenger) during the investigation.

You asked to have one of your reporters sit with Uber’s customer service team so they could review these types of tickets and validate our numbers. It is entirely fair to ask questions of Uber — it is the purpose of a free press. But it is unfair to suggest that you cannot trust the veracity of the numbers Uber has provided without personally verifying them, which would be a serious breach of our riders’ and drivers’ privacy.

In addition, you have asked if this is the first time we have audited the data behind the screenshots in your possession. Because of the flaws highlighted above, we do manual audits of every ticket sent to Uber, not audits of key words. It’s why it took us more than two days to answer your questions in detail. It is entirely untrue to conclude that we do not audit safety on our platform. We do, regularly. As we said earlier, our Trust and Safety team is measured internally on one metric: whether it has cut safety incidents on our platform.

Finally, you asked yesterday if Uber had contacted customer service representatives who had recently queried the terms “rape” and “sexual assault” in our database. The answer is yes. We are unsurprisingly concerned that sensitive, personal and confidential data has been shared with people outside Uber. We believe that any company in a similar situation would do exactly the same.

Uber is a relatively young company and we’re the first to admit that we haven’t always gotten things right. But we are working hard to ensure passengers everywhere can get a safe, reliable ride, as well as to provide great customer service when things go wrong. It’s a shame that your article does not reflect much of the substance we have provided.

Sincerely,

Joe Sullivan, Chief Safety Officer

Jill Hazelbaker, Vice President, Communications & Public Policy

Tim Collins, Vice President, Global Support