---
layout: default
title: "Are Cab Apps Safe?"
description: "An IBN Live report on the safety promises and limits of app-based cab services, with comments from Sunil Abraham on how easily basic tracking systems can fail."
categories: [Media mentions]
date: 2014-12-08
source: "IBN Live"
permalink: /media/are-cab-apps-safe-ibn-live/
created: 2026-05-24
---

**Are Cab Apps Safe?** is an *IBN Live* report published on 8 December 2014. The piece looks at the safety claims of app-based cab services and includes comments from [Sunil Abraham](/sunil/) on the limits of technological safeguards when simple physical actions can disable them.

## Contents

1. [Article Details](#article-details)
2. [Full Text](#full-text)
3. [Context and Background](#context-and-background)

## Article Details

<dl class="media-details">
  <dt>📰 Published in:</dt>
  <dd><em>IBN Live</em></dd>

  <dt>📅 Date:</dt>
  <dd>8 December 2014</dd>

  <dt>📄 Type:</dt>
  <dd>News Report</dd>

  <dt>📰 Article Link:</dt>
  <dd>Not available online</dd>
</dl>

## Full Text

<div class="highlighted-text" id="fulltext">

<p>Cab services are increasingly relying on mobile apps to book, track and charge you for journeys. While tech watchers say there is a digital trail.</p>

<p>"You can always share your location, the app has a feature for you to share your location through the way to whoever is waiting at the other end," said Aprameya Radhakrishna, CEO Taxi For Sure.</p>

<p>There's also a major safety loophole. "We have more complicated technological safeguard. All the cab driver has to do is use a very primitive technique. He just has to pull off his battery and can ensure that he throws away the phone of the traveller, and no one would know," said Sunil Abraham, Head, Centre For Internet And Society.</p>

<p>So can you trust technology to safeguard you? Rest assured that someone will be monitoring your journey back in some control room?</p>

<p>People feel that there should be some kind of an automatically generated alert system. Had the tracker been switched off, that could have been a point of loophole.</p>

<p>Great degree of automation is possible here but finally it is the human oversight which is critical eventually, in any technology.</p>

<p>Technology, ultimately, doesn't have all the answers, can't provide all solutions against crime prevention. We have seen instances when criminals have attacked women in ATMs knowing full well they are caught on camera, we have seen attacks by unruly drivers at road toll booths, regardless of the surveillance cameras.</p>

<p>While technology helps in tracking digital footprints that a criminal has taken, it hasn't deterred the criminal from doing what he wants to. For that, we have to be on guard.</p>

</div>

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## Context and Background

This report was published in December 2014, when public attention to the safety of app-based cab services had intensified sharply in India. Debates about whether technology could make urban transport safer were increasingly tied to questions of platform accountability, monitoring and emergency response.

Sunil Abraham's contribution is sceptical of purely technical fixes. His point is that digital systems can create trails and enable oversight, but they remain vulnerable to simple real-world acts that disable devices or break the chain of monitoring.

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