If the drivers are harmed, why not just allow people to use their name regardless of offensiveness and then just display it to drivers as "Professor F*". Sure, it's not ideal but it prevents people arbitrarily being kicked off the system and from drivers being offended by their passengers' names.

Or, perhaps people just shouldn't be offended by names. There are more important things in life.

If your driver’s name was Hitler Did Nothing Wrong Nazis Rule, would you want to drive with them? I think name filtering like this is incredibly dumb and have never seen a good implementation of it. But “don’t be offended” is rarely the blanket answer people seem to think it is.

Don’t know much about Lyft in particular, but with the amount of reports and cancellations you get with a name like that you’d get booted of the platform pretty quickly, no?

It is not the same for drivers though. Drivers have to use their real name as in their driving licence . I doubt that a registered legal name is going to be that kind of offensive.

If that's the person's name, should they be excluded from those apps? Also: shouldn't they change their names in those extreme cases?

I'd want to know if that was their name, so I could not get into their car.

Drivers have to go the in-personal approval thing first though, and they'd present their driver's license that would have their name on it - so the Lyft/Uber/etc employee who approves their driver status would presumably also verify that their name is real.

zulln isn't saying drivers are spoofing their names. zulln is saying drivers are being harmed by riders spoofing their names.