For many of us, booking a Rapido to work and back home is a daily ritual, and we don’t even think about those rides much, but we really have to. A woman in Ghaziabad booked a Rapido ride home, and after the ride ended, her driver started messaging her on WhatsApp. He told her she was looking beautiful in traditional clothes and asked if she’d like to meet. She did what most women in 2026 know to do: screenshotted everything, posted it on social media, and tagged Rapido. The company replied, asking her to share her details via DM so they could look into it. But there’s one question the Ghaziabad Rapido news makes us ask: how did he have her number in the first place? 

Is passenger safety a lie?

Ride-hailing platforms first came under serious scrutiny for passenger safety in India with the 2014 Delhi Uber rape case. Delhi banned Uber and other platforms for several months. However, the industry responded by adding a feature called number masking. With number masking, when a driver is assigned your ride, your actual phone number is never revealed to them. Instead, all calls are routed through a cloud telephony system using a temporary virtual number, so both parties can coordinate a pickup without either ever seeing the other’s real contact details. Ola introduced this feature in India in September 2015, Uber followed within days, and Rapido is listed among the platforms that have since embedded the same cloud telephony infrastructure.

On paper, this should make post-ride harassment via WhatsApp technically impossible. The driver was never given a number to save. He should have no way to reach you once the app closes the trip. The system was designed specifically to prevent what happened to the woman in Ghaziabad and to the dozens of others who have come forward with near-identical stories. And yet, here we are.

What the Ghaziabad Rapido news has brought to light

The uncomfortable reality is that number masking only holds as long as every part of the system works perfectly, and in India, it frequently doesn’t. The Hyderabad Police issued a public advisory on this problem. The police noted that the app’s in-built calling feature sometimes fails to connect, and when it does, drivers share their personal numbers in the app’s chat box. The passenger, trying to sort out a pickup, calls them back from her own phone and, without realising it, hands over her real number in the process.

Being a Rapido user, I too have done this multiple times because when you’re getting late for work, you simply can’t wait for the app features to work again. The masking is bypassed not through any well-planned hack, but through a failure of the app’s own calling feature.

But there’s something more troubling than the workaround. In a Reddit thread, many passengers have shared similar incidents. One woman shared the screenshots of the messages the Rapido driver sent her. When the woman interrogated how he got her number since Rapido masks the number, he replied, “Rapido me kayi baar show hojata hai” (Sometimes the number is visible on Rapido).

On the same thread, somebody also shared that a person who worked with Rapido once admitted on a Reddit thread that the platform doesn’t mask the numbers. We don’t know if this information is accurate or not, but it sure is scary. Because if these glitches, as the driver mentioned, are happening, they are a serious threat to women’s safety.

The Ghaziabad Rapido incident isn’t an anomaly

The script barely changes across cities or months. In Delhi, in early 2025, a woman posted on Reddit that her Rapido driver, who had spent the ride telling her she was too young and beautiful to be engaged, and asking her to share her socials, called her dozens of times and messaged her on WhatsApp the next day.

In Gurugram, a woman’s husband confronted a driver who had texted his wife asking for her flat number and offering to come upstairs and discovered the driver wasn’t even operating under his own verified Rapido account. He’d been using someone else’s ID for two years. This is a privacy failure sitting on top of a verification failure, with a woman’s home address now in the hands of someone operating outside the system entirely.

What do these platforms owe us?

Rapido’s safety guidelines tell us that drivers are onboarded only after identity verification, police background checks, and mandatory behaviour training. It tells us that verified safety breaches lead to immediate deactivation. It tells us the company has full visibility into every ride and rider interaction. Given all of that, when these drivers contacted these women on WhatsApp, where did that number come from?

In ascending order of seriousness, three possibilities explain the issue: the passenger may have inadvertently shared the number through the app’s broken calling feature. Flaws in the cloud masking system may allow people to bypass it without detection. Or, in some cases, as at least one driver has openly stated, the system may not apply masking at all. None of these scenarios is reassuring. If the last one is true, the app may be giving drivers your personal contact details every time you book a Rapido ride while claiming that it protects your privacy.

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