Uber, Lyft driver creepily livestreams videos of his passengers on Twitch
UPDATE: July 21, 2018, 5:03 p.m. EDT A spokesperson for Uber informed us that Jason Gargac's behavior was not in line with its Community Guidelines and has been suspended from driving for Uber. The article has been updated to reflect that.
UPDATE: July 21, 2018, 10:37 p.m. EDT The article has been updated to include a comment from Twitch.
If you're in the St. Louis area, you may be getting filmed by this guy who drives for Uber and Lyft.
Hundreds of Uber and Lyft rides have been broadcast live on Twitch by driver Jason Gargac this year, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Saturday, all of them without the passengers' permission.
Gargac, who goes by the name JustSmurf on Twitch, regularly records the interior of his car while working for Uber and Lyft with a camera in the front of the car, allowing viewers to see the faces of his passengers, illuminated by his (usually) purple lights, and hear everything they say. At no point does Gargac make passengers aware that they are being filmed or livestreamed.
Due to Missouri's "one-party consent" law, in which only one party needs to agree to be recorded for it to be legal (in this case, Gargac is the consenting one), what Gargac is doing is perfectly legal. That doesn't mean it's not 100 percent creepy.
Sometimes, to confirm who they are for their driver, the passengers say their full names. Not only that, Gargac has another video that shows the view out the front of his car so that people can see where he's driving, giving away the locations of some passengers' homes.
All the while, viewers on Twitch are commenting about things like the quality of neighborhoods, what the passengers are talking about, and of course, women's looks.
Gargac himself is openly judgmental about the women he picks up, commenting to his viewers about their appearances before they get in his car and making remarks after he drops them off. He also regularly talks about wanting to get more "content," meaning interesting people, and is open about the fact that he doesn't want passengers to know they are on camera.
Twitch isn't exactly known for this kind of content. In fact, most people use it as a platform to livestream themselves playing video games, although in recent years Twitch's IRL (In Real Life) brand of content has been growing.
There are a handful of other Twitch steamers who record their Uber and Lyft trips, but most of them tell their passengers that they are on camera, which is better than nothing.
We reached out to both Uber and Lyft to see if they had any rules about this for their drivers, and Uber responded with a statement saying Gargac's status as a driver has been suspended.
"The troubling behavior in the videos is not in line with our Community Guidelines," a spokesperson for Uber said. "The driver’s access to the app has been removed while we evaluate his partnership with Uber."
Lyft has not responded to our request for comment.
We also reached out to Twitch for clarification on whether or not Gargac's behavior violates the site's terms of service, and a Twitch spokesperson noted that while the company does not comment on individual terms of service violations, Twitch does not allow streamers to invade other people's privacy.
"Under our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service, we do not allow people to share content that invades others' privacy. If reported to us by the person whose privacy was invaded, we would take action under our Community Guidelines to remove the content."
