Zero-interaction Ride Verification: Need of the hour for the mobility industry

Author: Harshvardhan Takawale, Sensing and Security Team @ Silence Laboratories

Ride-Hailing Services and Trip Verification:

Urban mass mobility, ride-hailing service, and micro-mobility modalities have witnessed exponential growth in the last decade. Private companies in the market have come up with various ideas to cater to users with services like car-sharing, bike-sharing, shared office cabs, car rentals, etc. There have also been government interventions to facilitate the simultaneous movement of several passengers by means of public transport. The overall global Mobility Services revenue is expected to grow to US$ 1,394.6 billion by the year 2025.

But the mobility ecosystem, in general, faces a challenge- to verify the correctness of the ride and the passenger taking a ride to save not just the passenger but also the driver from any fraudulent activities. These activities include, but are not limited to — travelling without a ticket, getting into the wrong cab, fraudsters posing as legitimate drivers, etc. To overcome this issue, companies currently employ OTP or QR code-based methods. But they add friction to the entire experience and result in delays and can lead to unnecessary passenger annoyances. Thus, there is a trade-off between usability and security for these methods of verification. Some security issues have also been discovered that affect these methods and are well-known to the tech community. Therefore there is a growing need for a solution that not only solves the security issues but also makes sure that no additional steps are required to be done by the passenger. Silence Laboratories introduces Silent Ride, a variant of our in-house contextual authentication framework Silent Auth.

What is Silent Ride?

Silent Ride is an end-to-end authentication solution that is easy to integrate with the mobile applications that ride services currently use. Our patented multi-modal co-location-based authentication system has been proven to be more secure and usable than the OTP-based systems currently in use. What is even more exciting is the fact that Silent Ride is a zero-interaction system. What it means is that it works passively in the background, senses the context, and starts authentication at the right moment. Imagine a passenger trying to take a cab ride. When the passenger has booked the ride hops onto the ride, the system kicks in. He is authenticated in seconds and both the driver and the passenger are notified on their devices. The applications are endless — from bus companies checking their passengers without manually checking each ticket, or bike-sharing companies unlocking their bikes as soon as the valid user approaches the bike.

This is how is the experience with Silent Ride looks when integrated with cab ride-hailing rides.

The user journey with Silent Ride looks as follows:

1. Book a ride.
2. Wait for the ride to come.
3. While you are hopping in, the verification is confirmed in the background, and both the driver and passenger are notified.

What happens in case of a fraud?

If someone tries to commit fraud, authentication fails, and based on the type of ride, the further steps can be customized. For example in case of failed authentication, if it is a cab service, the driver’s phone is notified who then asks the passenger to de-board; if it is a bike service, the bike does not unlock, thus averting any further damage.

With the recent pandemic, ride-sharing companies are trying to find ways of authentication with minimal human interaction, Silent ride is here to solve just that. Also, as the authentication happens in the background, it does not add any extra steps and thus provides a seamless experience. The system does not require any additional hardware, it can work on the mobile phone of the passenger and a mobile phone or a point-of-sale(POS) device of the driver. Thus, Silent Ride is changing the way ride authentication takes place and is the step toward a future where journeys would be pass-less, where the passenger would not be required to buy a ticket to go from one place to another. He would just board a vehicle and get down to the destination of his choice. Everything else, from authentication to payment will happen in the background seamlessly.

So just hop-in and relax while Silent Rides does the rest for you.

Feel free to contact us at info@silencelaboratories.com for the demo, further details on SDKs, and APIs.