Nowadays it doesn't seem like there are any more risks left to take. Countries are putting astronauts into space, dogs are rolling down the street on skateboards and students are substituting Netflix for homework. More and more does the phrase “you gotta risk it to get the biscuit” reign true.

Sophomore English and secondary education major Emma Califano never thought that an act she takes part in almost every other day, getting inside a car, was at all as risky as the above scenarios. So when she decided to take an Uber from her school, The College of New Jersey, to the train station in order to head home from an ever-coveted college spring break, she did not think twice. When the driver rolled up to the predetermined pick-up spot, he pulled out a phone that said “Uber” on the screen. It was not until the car was already moving that Califano realized that the name and destination on his dashboard were foreign to her.

“I told him, ‘Hey, I’m not Samantha. I must be in the wrong Uber’," says Califano. “He wasn’t responding and I thought I was being kidnapped.” The driver was deaf. After convincing him she was not the right passenger, she was let out of the vehicle and had to walk back to the original spot at night, by herself, to find the appropriate Uber driver searching for her.

For those who are not aware, Uber is one of the many ridesharing applications available today with the simple idea to make getting a ride easy. Tap a button, get a ride. The application was thought of in 2008 on a snowy Paris evening, according to the Uber Story page, by Travis Kalanic and Garret Camp. Since then the popularity of the application has skyrocketed, along with the net worth of its creators, and in 2015 it was ranked number 16 on “The Hottest Startups of 2015” list created by Forbes. The application has even broken into the Hollywood atmosphere, when in a 2014 episode of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” comedians Louis C.K. and Patton Oswalt hailed an Uber (with a close-up of Oswalt using the app) when their car broke down.

However, life using Uber is not all rainbows and comedic sketches. On February 20, 2016, Uber driver Jason Dalton shot eight innocent civilians, killing two of them in a shooting rampage in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The ridesharing company had confirmed that Dalton, age 45, had in fact passed a background check. The company does not require fingerprints during their screening process, therefore foregoing the ability to have access to the FBI’s criminal record database. In a 2015 article on the topic, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon said that a background check without fingerprints is “completely worthless.” The company does not even meet with its drivers before allowing them to take passengers. For an application that prides itself on “putting safety first for each of the one million trips,” their drivers give every day, there have been multiple accounts of harassment, assault, and overall uncomfortableness felt between passenger and driver.

The ridesharing application has conceptually provided a safer way home for its passengers than drinking and driving. According to the Uber website, the company is responsible for more than a 10 percent reduction in DUIs per day in Seattle, Washington. In a recent poll of 33 people, 94 percent of respondents have only had positive experiences with Uber, while only 21 percent of people reported having a negative experience with the company. But does the good outweigh the bad?

For years there have been multiple assault charges surfacing from an Uber passenger or driver toward the other party.

In November 2013, Uber driver Daveea Whitmire assaulted his passenger and called him a “faggot” - it was later discovered that Whitmire had served time for felony charges including drug dealing and misdemeanor battery.

In September 2014, journalist Olivia Nuzzi was stalked by her one-time Uber driver, who was able to access her full name through a “trip sheet” that Uber provides its drivers in compliance with regulations against gypsy cabbing.

In January of this year, a fourth-year neurology resident at Jackson Health system was suspended from clinical duties at the organization after a video of her kicking, hitting and yelling belligerent profanities toward her Uber driver surfaced.

“In the last couple of months we have seen something like eight or 10 Uber drivers that were robbed or shot,” says David Sutton, a spokesperson for Who’s Driving You? - a website dedicated to highlighting the risks of Uber and Lyft, another ridesharing application.

The website, which gets most of their information from news media, has reported that 21 alleged assaults by drivers, 63 alleged sexual assaults and harassments and six alleged kidnappings have occurred, with these numbers being shared between reported Uber and Lyft incidents. In a recent alert from Uber, the company claimed that their customer help desk has 175 emails involving separate customers who have experienced some form of sexual assault, three times the number the website has listed from Uber and Lyft combined.

Uber uses an online private security firm called Checkr, which conducts county and federal courthouse records, checks of a multistate criminal database and a national sex offender registry, motor vehicle records and a social security trace, but does not include fingerprinting.

Amanda DeSantis, Uber’s regional trust and safety chief, recently told The Record that the reason Uber does not fingerprint is because “We think our screening stacks up quite well against the alternative, which is discriminatory against minority communities. In communities of color, people are arrested at a higher rate.” Is this Uber being socially conscious, or just plain cheap?

The company is threatening to leave New Jersey because of attempts to pose insurance standards and include fingerprinting along with their background checks, according to the same Record article. In the New York City area, Uber decided not to be licensed by the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, which would also include them to fingerprint.

According to the Department of Banking and Insurance in New Jersey, the price to fingerprint one applicant in New Jersey is $65.45 - a small price for what Sutton says could prevent the multiple alleged assault incidents that have transpired between driver and passenger.

While Sutton believes that the lack of fingerprinted employees is the number one problem ridesharing applications need to address, he says that other issues like gaps in their insurance coverage and poorly marked vehicles (driver impersonator problems) are also very prevalent.

Uber does not provide insurance for its drivers when they are not logged in to the application, and suggest that their drivers purchase their own kind of personal car insurance since they do not offer complete coverage. However, wallethub.com claims most car insurance companies and state and local regulators disagree with this notion because personal car insurance can exclude coverage for any business use of the vehicle. Uber also does not provide guidance on what level of insurance to buy.

Just last year, a woman was picked up in Portland, Oregon by an Uber driver impersonator. Luckily, when she entered the passenger seat of the car and received a phone call from her real driver, the impostor let her out without incident. “The drivers have control of the vehicle, he can lock the doors, he can control the route,” says Sutton. “He has a special responsibility to be a safe person. It’s important to look at his history before a passenger steps in the car, not after.”

At the end of the day, the general public is split on the idea of ridesharing applications. “I think they’re very useful because at our age we go out, we drink, and I think it eliminates a lot of drunk driving situations,” explains Califano. “But at the same time, I think it’s a system that could be improved, and there should be more safety features."