Uber is rolling out a new feature that will require drivers to confirm their identities via a selfie before each shift
SAN FRANCISCO — Uber is rolling out a new feature Friday that will require drivers to confirm their identities via a selfie photo before each shift.
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2016, Uber's pre-shift selfie check was the earliest step in what became a decade-long expansion of identity verification across its marketplace. Three years later, Amazon Flex adopted the same mechanic, requiring delivery drivers to snap road-side selfies to prove who is behind the wheel — evidence that the practice had spread from rideshare into gig delivery.
The arc since then runs in the opposite direction too: by 2024, Uber was preparing third-party database checks on US passengers' accounts with blue badges visible to drivers, meaning verification that began as a one-way screen on drivers has become bidirectional.
First-order effects
- Every US Uber driver now faces a camera gate before earning: the selfie check blocks account sharing, where someone other than the registered driver works under another person's credentials.
- Drivers who lent out their accounts — or whose accounts were compromised — lose access immediately, while legitimate drivers absorb a small daily friction at shift start.
Second-order effects
- Amazon Flex copying the mechanic three years later shows rivals treating photo-based identity checks as table stakes rather than differentiators, pushing the whole gig sector toward the same operational baseline.
- Once drivers are verified per-shift, the asymmetry becomes conspicuous: riders remain unverified, creating pressure on Uber to extend checks upward — which it eventually did with its passenger account-verification plans.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, per-session identity verification becomes infrastructure across gig platforms, with each side of the marketplace checked against third-party databases — shifting trust from background checks done once at onboarding to continuous, app-enforced authentication.
- That normalization also raises the stakes for how platforms handle biometric data collected at this frequency, a governance question regulators would inherit as selfie checks become universal.
The trend: Gig platforms are moving from one-time onboarding checks toward continuous, app-based identity verification applied first to drivers and increasingly to riders as well.