This particular situation, at face value at least, sounds like a good outcome. Kids had a gun, someone noticed, called police, situation handled without escalation or violence or something tragic happening.
But this doesn't generalize. Another incident described in the article was when some kids were drinking in the car and shooting toy guns. What if they hadn't been drinking? What if they were just holding toy guns, innocently going from one kid's house to another? What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids? These sorts of escalations aren't imaginary; they happen, and they end in tragedy.
The article is also a little cagey on how this "detection" happened. Was it a human spot checking cameras in vehicles? I doubt it. Most likely it was some sort of computer vision algorithm that flagged something. Perhaps a human was in the loop to verify and be the one to call the cops, but humans seem to be increasingly shutting off their brains and trusting the machine. (I recall a recent incident where someone was wrongfully arrested because one of the companies that run the license-plate reader machines flagged their car as stolen. The machine screwed up the image recognition, but the cops blindly trusted it and arrested the guy.)
What happens when cops are allowed real-time access to Waymo's in-car video footage? Maybe they even have it already. This is just more pervasive, always-on surveillance, and this will only get worse as autonomous vehicles become more popular in the taxi scene.
Would you do any of those things in a regular taxi or subway car?
Imagine the alternative headline saying the murderers used Waymo for their drive-by assassination. There is only one option for Waymo here, and the idiocy of the US police is not within their power to solve.
That could be a funny-or-die kind of script. They find a Waymo car that is feeling outcast and looking for friendship so it joins a gang. The Waymo car is constantly looking out for rival gang members while on the job, then swings by to pick up its fellow gang members for the hit, but then must obey all of the traffic laws during the get away.
YA example of there is no original idea left. However, I'm not a gamer and had no idea what Cyberpunk 2077 is/was without having to look it up. So at least I'm not guilty of absorbing all content on the planet and regurgitating it as if it were an original idea while charging you $20/month.
Or worse the waymo gets put in to 'gang mode' by someone bribed on the inside, the car rolls the window down for the drive by, delivers the duffle bags of drugs, auto darkens the windows for a drive by kidnapping, think of the UX possibilities!
Even in the analog world, every situation can be exploited for criminal purposes. The Waymo initiative initially reduces the potential for harm. Is everything else just speculation?
Well you can go in the direction of Cory Doctorow's Attack Surface where self driving cars are hacked to attack people, or openBSD is the OS of self driving cars and crime only receives placid self driven transport from the nice self driving cars and the proceeds and weapons of crime are carried in a way to avoid the scrutiny of the car's internal cameras. Or... there's so many cameras that crime evolves into micro-crime: the gamBean-o family resorts to fraudulent video surveillance attestation so they can build and use unauthorized micro drones to slip laxatives into the meals of their sworn enemies and rivals. It's fun to speculate :D
What part of funny-or-die suggested anything following should be taken seriously? You might be interested in reading about creative licensing, make believe, parody, or any other style.
We used to do this and more with nerf guns, laser tag, and then paintball guns. You're not going to believe this but we even used to be able to ride our bikes 30 miles away from home without our parents being arrested. We played with fire in the park too. One time we even found porn there dude
The 90s were lit
Nah you're right tho let's imagine the worst case scenario. What if that person in the waymo had a nuclear bomb in their suitcase? There's only one option
Don't talk to me about the 90s if you weren't soaking a tennis ball in lighter fluid and firing the flaming missile out of a "potato gun" made out of beer cans... in the 70s. Also something about all the kids trying to imitate Evil Knievel and jumping their bikes off ramps made out of planks and milk crates... Without protective gear of any kind.
Everyone who got out of that decade alive and with at most minimal brain damage thinks that we're too obsessed with safety today.
Don't worry we know you were alive in the 70s just from you including a hyphen in that emoticon (and everyone knows I was alive in the 90s because I said emoticon and not emoji) ;)
The most I will say about the bullshit we got up to, as "the last chopper out" before literally everyone had CCTV, is that we made it our personal goal to get everything we did listed in the local newspaper's crime blotter
11 yr old me bought canned hairspray in the drug store, walked straight to the payphone 12 feet outside the drug store, ignited the hairspray and torched the phone until it didn't work anymore.
Considering how to deal with people brandishing weapons in a Waymo is not just imagining a scenario, since it has already actually happened.
I also grew up in the 90s and did things like throw eggs out of cars. We wouldn't have done it from a taxi or Uber. Your comment really makes no sense.
I grew up in the 90s too, and I’m fairly certain that shooting paintball guns out of a taxi would have been generally frowned upon even during that halcyon era.
We used to raid the "dumpster" of nearly expired hostess products at the local hostess factory, and no bullshit fill the back of a jeep with twinkies and ho-hos and king dongs, then go drive on two lane roads and throw them out in front of oncoming traffic to try and get them to chase us.
I made the mistake of using my car as a paintball tank at an unofficial range. That stuff never came out of weather stripping on the windows and left streaks every time the windows rolled for years.
I lived next to the ghetto as kid in the 90s and my mom was driving me by a car of ghetto dudes and I absolutely blasted them with a super soaker as an 8yo. They also had super soakers we got hosed back. Greatest decade ever!
So murderers put their guns in a bag and get away with it, normal people who have "nothing to hide" leave their guns out in the open and get the police called on them.
I am going to say the question is the wrong way to look at this. People behave differently in different situations. While I am very conflicted like the GP about this specific case. I don’t think it’s as simple as - don’t do anything you won’t do in a human driven cab, and if you do those things, then calling cops should be acceptable.
Among the reasons are that kids (and some adults) are idiots. That's it, it's not income inequality or rage at the system, some people just break things because they think it's funny. That's not something you can fix, so you have to guard against it in other ways.
Is't that just bad education or parenting in the end ? I don
t think many people with good parents & education would be essentially insane to break thinks just for fun.
In general, I think you kinda need to fix people rather than make the environment basically so hostile to everyone, to prevent a small group of people from breaking it. Not saying its easy, but in my the only correct way.
I don't agree with your claim, but assuming you're right: Do you think that trying to solve "bad parenting" is less intrusive than cameras in robotaxis?
I hope so, but at the same time - I'm not sure how to best do it without ending up with some different authoritative issues.
Like, in general, you kinda want people to be good parent so their children end up as decent humans (that for example don't vandalize public restrooms for fun). But any direct attempts to control that process, even if well meant, would be rightfully considered a horrendous form of government/societal meddling. So it is definitely hard.
In any case, I think removing as many sources or uncertainty and stress as possible (stable income, affordable housing, no naked corruption visible day by day, etc.) could hopefully have positive outcomes on parenting without direct interference with the process. And I guess a better founded & more prestigious for the teach school system could also help.
As much as I disagree with it, graffiti is an interesting topic. A lot of graffiti proponents fully believe that they are beautifying the environment by making it human, and even continue doing it as the level of effort to bypass the consequences go up. They don't believe it to be an awful thing (though I'm sure some do, plus some have other motivations, plus some are lying to themselves about their motivations, etc, I just mean what they say and do).
Yes. Well, not exactly wave guns around, but say and do stupid stuff? Not in a taxi around a human driver, no. And not in a subway car with people other than me and my friends, no. But your question had an “or” in it. If we had nerf guns and no one else was there to witness? It’s not unimaginable that someone might get a nerf dart to the ear when they didn’t expect it.
My wife and I like watching real-life police detective shows. Sometimes we discuss mistakes the killer made, and how we’d avoid them. “I wouldn’t kill anyone, but if I did, I wouldn’t cheap out and keep the clothes I wore to do it instead of tossing them into a river.” Of course we’re not going to do that, but it’s a puzzle to solve, so we try to solve it. We would not have those conversations around a taxi driver or a crowded subway, lest someone overhear and get the wrong idea. On an empty subway or Waymo? Yeah, sure. And if BART or my cab reported us for planning a murder, I’d be livid enough to plan how to murder the computer that made the decision to rat me out.
And the sign along the highway says my speed might be monitored by airplane, but I don’t want to live where that means a surveillance drone is flying along side me at all times. Consenting to let a taxi record me in case it comes up later that I did something bad and they want to have footage of it is one thing. But now we know Waymo is a little Flock tattletale, and people generally aren’t ok with their robocab proactively narcing on them.
Every uber driver I’ve been ive been in has an inside dashcam to protect themselves and their property. I would do the same thing if I were them.
Waymo has every right to monitor their property and if someone does something illegal in their car why would they not report? An Uber driver would do the same, as would I. Otherwise you are an accomplice.
This comparison to Flock is bunk. Flock cameras are in public places and paid for with public dollars. I don’t want that.
But in a surveillance state, every private citizen should be keeping their own footage. Nobody is going to share theirs with you.
It depends on if you think private surveillance should exist to help the property owner in court, after something happens to them, e.g. the taxi driver getting robbed or the Waymo getting vandalized, or if you think private surveillance should exist solely to pipe any and all actual or imagined crimes to law enforcement in real time.
Private surveillance that immediately sends any and all crimes to law enforcement is indistinguishable from government surveillance and should treated the same way.
> Private surveillance that immediately sends any and all crimes to law enforcement is indistinguishable from government surveillance and should treated the same way.
> I’m anti surveillance but I don’t get this take.
Some people foresee a future where self-driving cars are the norm. The big prize being fewer deaths on the road (about 40k people per year in the USA) which is a pretty big prize.
If today's self-driving cars are heavy on the AI surveillance of passengers, and you foresee self-driving cars doing 90% of journeys within your lifetime, that's a pretty ominous situation.
Especially if you interpret it in light of EU driver-facing-camera mandates.
I would love it if self driving cars became the norm, and I could just hop into my car, doze off, and arrive at my destination. Key word being my car, and not Waymo's car. A future where every car is self driving is a utopia, but a future where every car is hired and actually owned by a company (spying on you) is a dystopia.
We should try to separate "self driving" from "owned and operated by someone else." One is good and one is very bad.
Again, I believe every private citizen should keep their own footage for exactly this reason.
Other people’s footage will only be used against you.
It is a real big shame that Meta is the only one pushing personal video capture right now. It has tainted the idea of personal surveillance as a counter to all this madness.
So don't use it? You seem to want the benefits of the service but without having to comport your behavior accordingly.
Other countries already have highway cameras track speed and automatically issue citations. I am happy for Americans to petition their government against implementing that, but I won't pretend it's anything other than a desire to break the law for personal gratification.
I own airsoft (pellet) guns people have confused for real ones when I left them on a shelf in my house. If you don't know what to look for they look quite convincing these days. Take a look around https://www.evike.com/airsoft-guns/ - everyone deletes or spray paints the orange tips because they make you really visible on the airsoft field.
It's not like you can allow kids to shoot pellet guns out of a car indefinitely in a metro without substantial risk of something going wrong.
We need to (be able to) trust the police to not escalate irresponsibly and to deal with situations with nuance. Declining to escalate to authorities because we're scared of what they may do is not great.
Absolutely not. A human driver has to watch the road and can’t scrutinize a gun.
And it’s also not easy to tell toys from real guns. Many cities illegalized toy guns on public transit because people were putting orange tips on real guns to make them look like toys. 3D-printed guns rarely look like they can actually fire, even though they can.
A human driver can't tell. I've had gun guys mistake my airsoft guns for real ones. Average person who isn't familiar with both real guns and airsoft has no chance.
You literally can't tell. You can tell by touching or by extreme close inspection if you have had held examples of both by subtle process/cultural differences, or by racking if you have done so in the past in either or both, due to major internal differences. But if you think toy guns are like nerf guns painted in black, then you just can't. It's not an easy tell like wrong corner rounding on Apple lookalike aluminium chassis.
Maybe I would change my mind if I were an actual Uber driver, but I'm thinking that I don't care if my passenger has a gun, as long as they're being safe and not pointing it at me. I've been around guns. They don't scare me. My job is to drive them from point A to point B. Why should I care if they are packing, or if they're underage drinking a beer, or if they're texting a mob boss about money laundering?
Really only airsofters know telltale signs of toy guns. Guys into real guns can't instantly tell them apart.
It's that way because real guns weren't available in Japan but real-ism wasn't defined, so Japanese toy gun brands just turned that volume up to 1100 without allowing toy guns take pressure bearing gun parts. And then those toy guns got exported and copied, leading to the present status.
So? In the real scenario, the underage passengers were drinking alcohol. Also, the 14-17 teen accounts are supposed to be monitored by parents, otherwise all riders need to be adults or their guests. That means they need to exercise judgment not brandishing what might look like weapons. The same way you need to exercise that judgment in a public park.
And I'm not even convinced that human drivers would be more discerning or rational about it. They could easily overstate the issue to police and create a more biased situation.
Any gun shooting projectiles out of a moving vehicle is dangerous. Pellet guns and paintball guns are less dangerous than “regular” guns, but they’re not really toys.
> and the idiocy of the US police is not within their power to solve.
Given how much money Google gives to electoral campaigns, I'd argue that it is in their power but that's the least of their problems when they interfere with the democratic process. They are too busy voting for less taxes and regulations on their business.
>>> What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids? These sorts of escalations aren't imaginary; they happen, and they end in tragedy.
I take this seriously, but I think this a problem with the cops. Even regular people hesitate to report problems if they think the police might overreact.
Please do not encourage your children to carry and brandish replica guns. This is never a good idea. Unfortunately I see this more frequently than I like. Kids don't just carry, they aim and pretend to shoot. Even in an open carry state like Florida brandishing a gun is illegal.
I know, it's a different world. I'm 62. As a kid, my friends and I chased one another around the neighborhood with toy guns for hours, raising a racket. My kids are 24 and 26 now, but it would have been unthinkable to let them have toy guns.
I'm in my 50s and did the same. But even then the toy guns were often bright orange.
Nerf guns are the modern equivalent of our dart guns and kids run around with them today all the time. They are pretty unmistakeable, I'm sure by design.
Clearly toy guns. Gun-like, but nobody with the slightest understanding of guns would think they were real. I have no problem with kids having toy guns. I do have a problem with kids in public having realistic replica guns. Bright orange isn't enough.
I think the answer is that other than in organized events realistic replicas should be subject to the same restrictions on actions that real guns are.
> Even regular people hesitate to report problems if they think the police might overreact.
I can’t think of any instance I would call the police except to satisfy the requirements of an insurance claim. I was in a car accident in an Uber last year and left before the cops came.
> What happens when cops are allowed real-time access to Waymo's in-car video footage? Maybe they even have it already. This is just more pervasive, always-on surveillance, and this will only get worse as autonomous vehicles become more popular in the taxi scene.
Yea, what's disturbing about this article isn't what happened in the article--it's what will happen in the future.
Today, a corporation transmits to the police "user in possession of what appears to be a gun." Tomorrow, what will that message contain?
2. this is hardly a waymo/autonomous car/big tech thing. covid came with "vaccine passports" in some jurisdictions. there's no reason why it couldn't be enforced by human taxi drivers.
> The article is also a little cagey on how this "detection" happened. Was it a human spot checking cameras in vehicles? I doubt it. Most likely it was some sort of computer vision algorithm that flagged something. Perhaps a human was in the loop to verify and be the one to call the cops, but humans seem to be increasingly shutting off their brains and trusting the machine
I think there's a middle ground between those that's possible that you might not be considering.
A while back I was in a Waymo and someone I was with dropped one of their Airpods and it went under the seat. They took off their seatbelt to dig under the seat and the car started beeping since we were driving. After about a minute of that someone came over the speaker and asked what was going on and told him he needed to get up and put the seatbelt back on or Waymo would end the ride right there.
I'm sure these cars are full of other sensor based triggers like seat belts being taken off, doors being opened, people messing with the steering wheel, etc that alert a human to come take a look. I know that the cars have cameras and microphones and it wouldn't surprise me if they are or are planning to use that for monitoring the cars, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the people in the car just triggered some other unrelated sensor and then the human stepped in to review and noticed the gun.
The article says they violated the TOS relating to the firearm, but that doesn't mean that Waymo initially started looking at the car because of that. It's possible that they were looking at the vehicle for something much more inane initially, discovered the firearm by chance, and are now using that to ban them since it's the most obvious TOS violation.
The size and scale of that problem absolutely pales in comparison to the number of people who will be screwed by a better ability to enforce unpopular or rarely enforced laws.
And the sick part is how many useful idiots will go to bat for all of it because "well they broke the law after all"
No, I know this is a minority opinion on HN but I think violence towards women is a larger problem than seldomly enforced laws being enforced more often.
You can repeal a law. The courts can strike it down. The same cannot be said about cops abusing women, which is statistically well established.
Whatever appeal to emotion crime you want to cook up, violence toward women, unfair targeting of minorities, etc, etc. That's all already not allowed either by law or rule.
Fixing that stuff by enforcing the existing rules against it wouldn't make these systems fine. The fundamental point of these systems is to let the government screw the people.
Sure, but the quote I was responding to was not "what will the government do", it was "what will cops do". Well, Flock and countless other examples have shown us exactly what cops will do.
That would taught those kids a lesson. There is a certain way to behave in a car regardless if it belongs to them or not. Getting drunk and trashing the inside of the car is not acceptable just because someone is a minor
> What if they were just holding toy guns, innocently going from one kid's house to another? What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids?
I'm always confused by how lines are drawn in scenarios like this. if calling cops makes waymo culpable, why not also blame parents buying kids guns? Toy stores selling the guns? Where does the chain of events start?
It would be good to know more about the detection mechanism, if it wasn't computer vision it may well have been audio monitoring - a kid is perhaps more likely to brag / talk about what they're doing, which gets flagged to a live monitor who can intervene in real time.
> What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids?
Waymo is not the one to solve your policing problem. The root issue is that your police shoot to kill first, and investigate or make stuff up to get themselves off later.
the police's job is to analyze reports and actually figure out if theyre correct or not. If theyre failing at that, the rest really doesnt matter. Theyre gonna take some other stranger's report or false report and go shoot those kids for the love of the game anyways, regardless of if waymo is involved
> Most likely it was some sort of computer vision algorithm that flagged something.
Possible, but probably more likely they weren't wearing their seatbelts and then a Waymo remote support person saw the gun and immediately called police.
If we are going to privilege privately operated transportation providers like Waymo with special access to streets relative to individually operated vehicles, we need to rethink whether a private company's terms of service should govern the rights and privileges of users of such services or if users should have more substantial protections.
Waymo has chosen to monitor travelers in a way that drivers of their own cars would not be monitored, while the government has chosen to ban privately owned vehicles from some spaces (like Market Street in San Francisco). This coerces individuals into sacrificing privacy and other rights.
Imagine if your phone company listened to all your calls and reported you to the police if it didn't like something you say.
And what happens when a private company like Waymo partners with a municipality to integrate into its transportation network? Is that now privately operated vehicle or part of a public space system like a sidewalk or the road itself?
Waymo is not like mass transit or even a taxi: only one group of passengers are in the vehicle at a time. Subway and bus rules don't cleanly apply. It's closer to a rental car that drives itself.
We as a society are turning to rely on or even require private companies for much of our essential infrastructure and interpersonal fabric: communications, payments (decline of cash) transportation, surveillance (Flock), places of congregation (virtual town squares), etc. Meanwhile because they are private they are not bound to privacy and other protections like the state itself.
> What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids?
See this is only an issue because that is a plausible situation. The actual problem is on the police/cultural side, not the waymo side. No one should even have to think about this when calling the cops. And I can't think of 1 other western society where they do
This is America though. The mere presense of a gun shouldn't involve calling the cops unless there is a bigger reason to expect something nefarious. US cops being thugs and aggressive is a known fact so I find it hard to say Waymo isn't part of the problem, they have the best view of the situation after all and are initiating the call/report of armed criminals.
If that was truly the only issue then it is a civil matter and the cops have no jurisdiction without a ruling from a judge. If I walk into a store with no shoes despite them requiring shoes, the first action isn't call the police and have the person arrested without saying anything.
Exactly. If Waymo wants to be weird and disallow people from legally or even illegally open carrying, then that should be between the customer and Waymo. They should not get to call the police.
I was going to say that this is the only surveillance that I would be OK with, considering the users are not on public property. However, I hadn't considered that calling the police on anyone in the US (especially for carrying a firearm) does not carry the same consequences as elsewhere...
Yeah, most (but perhaps not a super majority of) people in the US know calling the cops has a large chance of excalating a situation and making it deadly, especially if a gun is mentioned in any context.
There's no reference to a "ghost gun" in the LA Times text. It's only in the headline. In the text, the weapon is referred to as an AR-15. SFGATE, though, quotes cops as saying "AR-styled assault rifle also known as a ghost gun.”
The "ghost gun" thing refers to guns without serial numbers. For an AR-15, that usually means something assembled from an "80% lower receiver", a part which exists purely to evade US gun laws. [1] It's not quite complete; it takes some final machining. This can be done by hand with modest machine shop tools, or there's a special-purpose 3-axis CNC mill to do it for $4000, available from Ghost Gunner.[2] (They used to sell a simpler device for $1200 which was only useful for the single task of finishing "80% lower receivers", but the current $4000 unit is halfway respectable as a desktop CNC mill. It understands a subset of G-Code. Nobody seems to use it for general CNC work, though. A good desktop CNC mill for $4000 would be useful, but they'd need to get serious about cooling and chip removal.)
Unless it was edited after your comment, it's mentioned in the first paragraph:
> Two young people riding in an autonomous vehicle were arrested in San Francisco after authorities allegedly found them in possession of an illegal “ghost gun.”
As far as I can tell here the ghost portion is basically a non-sequiter. The waymo vehicle called the cops because it detected e passengers had a gun. The vehicle did not know or care about its status as a ghost gun or not. I'm sure that the Waymo terms of service prohibit carrying weapons into the vehicle. I'm pretty sure that if you were brandishing a realistic looking enough gun, an Uber driver would kick you out and call the cops as well.
There's a big difference between a human present who can make a decision based on a situation literally in front of their eyes, and a computer flagging a video feed for someone in what amounts to a call center to look at and decide on.
Not to mention the mass surveillance this sort of stuff continues to help enable.
I'm not a fan of expanding surveillance but the alternative of unmonitored transit seems worse.
Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain. Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints. Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure. Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.
These are just a few situations any human driver would obviously react to. And a modicum of detection and human review could solve in an autonomous vehicle.
This is a problem that autonomous vehicles created. Why should we not complain that its solution is worse than non-autonomous travel, given it carries risk that doesn't exist today? Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
And what surveillance or other risks does this introduce outside of the cabin, and why should society allow that? What is the definition of modicum of detection, and who is drawing that line?
Citation needed. Assaults and abuse against public transit and taxi drivers is a common workplace hazard. Why are we subjecting humans to that? Why are we ok expecting them to decide if a gun is fake or not and call the police?
>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
>>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
>Absolutely.
Citation needed.
Why stop at Waymo? The entirety of your digital activity happens on private property. You should have no expectation of privacy, and your attempts at privacy should mark you as a higher risk subject. We should algorithmically police your digital life in case you start showing signs of anti-social behavior. I don't want to wait until you get your gun into a Waymo to have the cops handle you. I want you to be caught much earlier. This will make the world much safer.
There are other ways to solve safety issues, but they are harder and more expensive - civic education and a government invested in incentivizing a productive life, better law enforcement training, freely available mental health services etc.
No? The Fourth Amendment only grants you protections that apply to government action. The police are allowed to accept evidence gathered voluntarily by private citizens or corporations.
Maybe we shouldn't put the whole burden of world justice on Waymo, this allowing it a complete invasion of the privacy of both the people who use it and those who don't? Guy takes a drugged up girl on the train, should we hold the train responsible for the outcome also?
That's the key question: whose laws are Waymo enforcing? ICE and Flock's extra-constitutional policies? City ordinances? A future eco-radical government's laws?
How about things taking place outside the car?
Can Waymo mount a robotic machine gun next to the LIDAR and snipe suspected terrorists? Release tear gas? Self destruct, killing several nuns to protect s CEO?
Yes? I am pretty sure they don't do algorithmic policing. Fwiw, they probably don't do any policing, but that is a different subject.
I am not against monitoring for safety - I am against deploying a sophisticated network of automated monitoring that covers all digital and soon physical aspects of my life for my "safety" by for profit companies.
Public trains are covered in camera surveillance and that footage is very often used in conjunction with tracking down and prosecuting criminals. You should have no expectation of privacy on a public train.
I agree we should also add live facial recognition to train stations.
No expectation of privacy in public does not mean we should eliminate privacy from public areas or allow our government to engage in mass surveillance.
I think the risks are different on a train, which is far more public than the inside of a taxi. There are more likely to be other people and/or an operator to intervene.
Those are bad examples of things where a computer should make a judgement call.
> Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain.
I take my kid to go skeet shooting. You’d call the police on us for having legal guns? What about my pocket knife?
> Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints.
My wife is scared by someone on the sidewalk. We’re riding to where we parked our car for the evening. There’s a scared woman with me as we commute to our vehicle. BART wouldn’t call the cops on me.
> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.
What’s “obvious” here? I have drinks with friends and bump my head on a cabinet, and now I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m not remotely about to die. Dammit, Waymo, I just want to go home and shower and let me wife laugh at me while she tapes me up.
> Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.
Person’s exhausted after work and wants to nap on the way home. They look identical to the dead guy. BART lets you nap.
If we had ubiquitous taxi and subway police, maybe they’d spent 5 seconds assessing each situation and move on. In no other real-life situation do we expect empty subways or taxi drivers to call the cops and investigate every possible bad scenario, nor should we.
But it's a reduction of privacy compared to private vehicles. If the goal is to convert all transportation infrastructure into surveilled transportation then that is a loss in privacy for the general public.
No, the argument should be raised before that happens. You want to prevent undesirable things from happening, not try to claw them back after they happened.
It looks quite foolish to me to never plan ahead and predict undesirable future events and then trying to prevent them ahead of time.
"Sorry, we can't fulfill your request for transportation to the protest for private ownership, but we can offer a free ride to the Colosseum" ;)
I don't think their primary intent is to create a surveillance state (though google might like having yet another data source...), I think companies are trying to make it happen to capture transportation market share, regulators will want to make it happen to drive down traffic fatalities and insurers will incentivize it because human drivers are more costly.
And once the difference in how they can be regulated is clear there'll be additional incentives to discourage private transportation.
> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.
When I was a teenager working in a taxi office some guy came in slurring and covered in blood. I phoned him an ambulance and after 15 minutes of waiting he got up and walked out despite my protests. How should I have reacted?
Those are made up problems because 90% of the time people drive their own vehicle or are with a willing participant. We don't have cameras watching us in normal cars.
People are awful when they think they aren't being watched, especially with communal or other people's property. It's why things are covered in lame low-effort graffiti tags, why bathroom mirrors have things scratched into them with keys, and why bridges over highways all have metal grates to stop people from throwing rocks at oncoming cars.
When people know they're being watched and there will be immediate consequences if they do something bad, their behavior changes. If they don't, they're awful. We've seen this for decades (arguably millennia, as we know Pompeii had graffiti too)
A lot of taxis have models detecting weapons and aggressive behaviours. I work on some models like this. I think they are necessary. For driver's safety.
I'm pretty sure a human started watching live video from the car as soon as the AI flagged a gun. I doubt that Waymo is willing to have their system automatically call cops.
Would you be upset if someone at the WalMart central data center called the local police because they saw someone with a gun in a Walmart at a remote location?
That's what happened here. A private company saw a gun inside their property and called the police.
I dunno. This doesn’t bother me in the same way that flock cameras do. A Waymo car is a private space that you don’t have to use if you don’t want to. Seems pretty reasonable to me that Waymo doesn’t want their cars used for drive by shootings. If a drive by were to happen in a Waymo, this would be compelled by law anyway.
It starts to become a problem once you’ve replaced public infrastructure to a sufficient degree by private infrastructure like waymos that avoiding to use them starts to seriously inconvenience people.
What public infrastructure is replaced by Waymo? All the roads, traffic lights, signs, etc are all still there. Seems equivalent to any other vehicle that is not replacing public infrastructure.
Taxis are a part of transportation infrastructure. Like a system that allows public and private healthcare, a private option pulls the rich people off the public system causing them to neglect and vote against the public system.
So waymos means less busses/trains, which means a bunch of people stuck in the middle - they would prefer to take a bus or a train but the service is poorly maintained so they are forced to take a waymo.
Yes. And the use of cameras has traditionally been: if something happens, there is a record that can be consulted.
That has changed. Networked cameras and AI means that cameras can be constantly monitored: license plates logged and mapped in realtime, faces scanned and profiled, symbols and objects detected.
I have no problem with calling the cops on someone with a gun. But that same kind of tech can (and has already been) seamlessly be turned on protestors, journalists, political opponents, union organizers, and ex girlfriends.
a taxi driver will call the police if you do anything stupid inside them, usually after dropping you in the middle of the street, your argument doesn't hold any water.
Yes. Totally. Will a taxi driver call the police to let them know where I was if I am a journalist on my way to meet a source?
Networked cameras with ai monitoring is begging for totalitarian oppression. A cabby calling the cops because I did something shitty in their cab is not.
Yeah I don’t get it. You’re getting into a privately owned vehicle. You agree to the terms of service when you sign up and ask for a ride. You should assume you have zero privacy in those cars.
Sure, but the Waymo is taking intrusive video of much more than the inside of the car. And unlike a mast-mounted camera, it can be sent almost anywhere at almost any time.
You seem to have missed the point. A recording is one thing. A networked camera being ai-monitored in realtime is another.
Your uber driver is using the video to protect their in-app reputation (also dystopian, but unrelated), and in case a crime is committed against them or they are accused of one.
A networked ai monitored camera system is a panopticon. It will be (or already has been) turned against journalists, protesters, political opponents, ex girlfriends, union organizers, etc.
In California, it's surprisingly hard to be a legal, responsible gun owner if you don't own your own car. Rideshare bans weapons via TOS, public transit (even unloaded in a locked container) is illegal.
That's the point (like for all this stuff, going back a hundred years, not just in CA). Don't extend the right to anyone who doesn't have a bunch of wealth to lose that the state can threaten to get compliance.
Even if their rules say that I don't get why they are allowed to call the police. In this case it might have been an unregistered gun but if someone was carrying legally they can refuse service but they shouldn't be calling the police.
Flock is bad, but fleets of cars strapped to the teeth with cameras and sensors are suddenly ok even when they call the police on you? Why? Because of the makers of the technology that powers the cars say they are safer (via datasets that we have no way to validate)?
What do you mean? Google is legally required to share information, and does share information, when such information is requested through a whole variety of different means available to local governments. https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests
That's the same as the police getting security footage from any random building.
The problem with Flock is that they let police hop on and look at whatever they want whenever they want. Completely different operating modes and intentions.
Also, Google and Waymo are different companies under the same parent. Google's policies are irrelevant.
Yeah good point on the policies. It makes Waymo's case worse though, because they have nothing defined publicly. They are also for-profit, and trying to deploy to more cities. The concerns are real - https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2025/jul/1/driverless...
"While companies like Waymo insist they require search warrants for footage, based on probable cause and judicial approval, the legal framework for accessing autonomous vehicle data remains unsettled. A 2022 analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) noted that few states have specific laws governing law enforcement access to such data, leaving gaps in oversight. In Arizona, where Waymo operates extensively, police must typically obtain a search warrant to access footage, as required by state law for electronic records and consistent with Fourth Amendment protections. "
Depends on how you feel about guns. I think people who are opposed to them would agree with this, people who are in favor of guns would be alarmed by this.
> I think people who are opposed to them would agree with this, people who are in favor of guns would be alarmed by this.
Bizarrely, I think it comes out backwards. In this article, the comments are surprised that Waymo's gun detection led to someone contacting authorities - it's not over guns, but that it was "young people" with guns, which means they can't use generalizations, there have to be bespoke solutions unique to every individual, calling the police to assess on potential threats is too broad.
The gun crowd would neither use taxis broadly to carry weapons, nor do so in the manner of the "juveniles" found in the article. Generalizing, they're well-versed in the minutiae of gun transport laws and more or less anticipate law enforcement contact, whether inadvertent or from Karens.
I think if anything waymo, robot taxi is doomed. Self driving ever matures to private car ownership will to car share to subsidize costs will with 1-10% utilization will basically generate more demand than non car owners will ever need - there simply isn't business model for share only fleet outside of specific low vehicle density zones. And even for private car owners, the only ones who will generate some revenue are those that work offpeak hours, i.e. they can rent their cars during surge, which will make congestion worse for all existing drivers by increasing traffic (kek). Proliferation of self driving = eventually millions of beater supply cars doing rotations for basically marginal costs killing fleet economics.
Google would probably be held 100% liable if it happened from their car.
.
What I don’t get is why Waymo allows unaccompanied juvenile riders at all? That seems like a huge risk for them.
As of this writing, Waymo only permits unaccompanied minors in the Metro Phoenix area. The incident occurred in San Francisco, so it seems that they should not have riding without an adult.
Teen accounts are supposed to be governed by the parent account.
I understand the appeal. Parents I've spoken to feel safer putting their kid in a Waymo than and Uber. And I guess the time savings of not driving them around yourself are too compelling.
In the US, the term is used to mean firearms that are legal to manufacture but not to sell, because they do not have serial numbers for tracing. The misdetection would be if the Waymo cameras did not have sufficient resolution to see the serial number on the firearm, or if the firearm serial number were concealed, for example by being locked inside of a carrying case, as is the standard practice for responsible firearm owners.
However, kobalsky is alluding to frequent past reports of Google misdetecting things that are not ghost guns, followed by banning people's accounts. For example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil... #news from 02022 of Google flagging Mark [anonymous]’s Google account for child porn when he sent a photo of his toddler son’s infected penis to the doctor and reported him to the police. The police decided no abuse had happened but he never got his account back. #privacy #human-rights #USA #politics
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36443747 Very disturbing accounts of people getting banned from Google for searching for the board game "Ethnos", from credit cards for not using them, from Amazon for having a racist doorbell recording, etc.
Aminreza Khoshbahar: “I’m seeking assistance regarding a sudden restriction on my Google AI Ultra account that has persisted for three days. I received no prior warnings or notifications regarding a potential violation.
“The only recent change in my workflow was connecting Gemini models via OpenClaw OAuth. If third-party integrations are the issue, I would expect the platform to block the integration rather than restrict a paid account ($249/mo) without communication.”
Possibly to go to the shooting range, or to your job as a security guard? Or, in the cases of less conspicuous ghost guns than the AK-47 purportedly involved in this case, to carry on you for self-defense? All of these are common and legal in the US in general, whatever I may think about their ethical implications.
Interesting that it is ok in the US. I also work in weapon detection for driver safety systems. Obviously it is impossible for a human or a machine to detect intent with accuracy. A security guard can enter the car and then shoot the driver. You never know. That is why our systems always send alerts no matter the situation.
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In CA it's legal for regular citizens to detain someone if you think there's a reasonable public safety threat (but if you're wrong, you can obviously be in a lot of trouble)
I don't trust any of these driverless cars. The last vestige of American car culture was that it would provide freedom and an open road. Now, it seems, that era is over, and cars in the future will be more like jail cells with constant surveillance.
Maybe we need very clear, standardized signals for entering a surveillance zone (where someone not obviously present, possibly a corporate stooge or AI or simpler-than-AI automated detection system, is judging behavior) so that people realize that private behavior (like casually showing off guns to each other, safely, which I've seen done myself and was not cause for alarm—guns were legal) is no longer private.
The steelman -against- what waymo did is:
Guns are generally legal, even in California. This is America, not the EU. Nobody was harmed, nobody was threatened. This is like calling the cops on someone open carrying because you don't like open carry.
That is what a lot of pro-2A libertarians would argue.
The steelman -pro- what waymo did is:
Private conveyance. Even though the occupants thought they were "alone", there was someone/something else present, which felt threatened (or thought the passengers represented a potential threat to others) and called police, as most cabbies or uber drivers probably would.
I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. This is a grey area, and I think it'll likely resolve in favor of waymo, and it won't really bother anyone except the staunch libertarians. If the gun hadn't been illegally possessed, likely nothing would've happened after the cops were called.
"Maybe we need very clear, standardized signals for entering a surveillance zone." [proceeds to give a libertarian pro-2A perspective and then the "what would a cab driver do perspective]
I have a suggestion. Perhaps if you enter an autonomous vehicle, it has a display with your name and will not drive until you buckle your seatbelt and click the button acknowledging?
When no strangers seem to be around, but we might be under surveillance, are we all supposed to tailor our legal behavior so that no random person or AI surveillance could reasonably view it as possibly illegal or problematic?
How can someone have an expectation of privacy if they take pictures of a gun in a waymo, and upload them to google drive... but no expectation of privacy against waymo calling the cops when they see the same thing with their own cameras?
I was at LOWES the other day with a used can of paint that I brought for color matching. obviously used. beat up and stained. at the checkout the computer halted the checkout process said "did you forget something in your cart?"
yeah fuck that. also fucks self-checkout. are we so poverty stricken as a society now that we can't afford to pay cashiers?
In general I'd rather interact with a machine than with the kind of person who can get hired as a cashier where I live - likely someone cognitively disadvantaged or who is an immigrant from a poor part of the world with limited English skills.
Precisely because our society is rich, and reasonably meritocratic (and has a lot of immigrants from poor, non-English-speaking parts of the world), people who are reasonably smart and conscientious don't last long in low-pay, low-status jobs like cashiering - they get promoted or quit to do something more lucrative. This is Patrick McKenzie's concept of The Sort (https://x.com/patio11/status/1818781344702644311). And it means that my experience of interacting with a cashier is likely to involve interacting with a menial laborer who is difficult to communicate with; meaning I'd rather avoid that interaction altogether and just press buttons on a machine.
It's also increasingly appearing to be the case that checking out yourself is adverse selection.
People with money have others shop for them, or ship to their house. The checkouts are for those who labor in that system who must now submit to the panopticon.
If you stumble into a big retailer like Walmart or Home Depot now yourself, it's like you crossed a zero-trust boundary. Security guards, motion-activated cameras that play sounds and nag you to remind you you're surveilled, manned turnstiles to stop door crashes with loaded carts -- all these adversarial controls suggest you're now in the wrong customer channel.
>also fucks self-checkout. are we so poverty stricken as a society now that we can't afford to pay cashiers?
Yeah, I'm appalled how poor as a society we've become, now that we can't afford door men (outside of luxury condos in Manhattan), elevator operators, and bank tellers.
As someone who cashiered in college, I vastly preferred monitoring self checkouts over being monetarily forced to interact with an endless line of the kind of people who don't use self checkouts.
As a shopper, I don't want to be one of those people either. Ideally, I want lower friction and to be able to pay on my phone instead of dealing with the kiosk.
Whatever LG has been doing in the consumer electronic sector has been perfected in Waymo’s vehicles. It starts with capturing everything that happens inside vehicle, claim it’s catching users violating ToS. Then it graduates to full blown Flock—like mobile surveillance tech.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the cars are already capturing and storing license plates, tracking pedestrian activity.
It’s all being prepared for the sale to governments and intelligence communities. Or maybe to serve the privatized shit hole known as 'network states' coined by the pathetic parasite, Peter Thiel.
Orwellian dystopia is here folks. It just took a detour/roundabout way (9/11, patriot act, greedy capitalists, social media …) to get us there.
Why stop at autonomous cars? New cars monitor drivers for “drowsiness” and have internal/external cameras. Why not monitor for guns too? Maybe they should even refuse to drive if you’re holding a gun!
And why stop at cars? Maybe home cameras should call the cops if they see a weapon. Maybe your Apple Watch should detect if you’ve fired a gun. Brave new world!
Guns don't cause violence. Just look at New Hampshire–lots of guns, low crime or violence.
Freedom is more important when we already have safety. People are trying to scare us into thinking we are unsafe so they can take away our freedom. We are very safe.
Why not just immediately seize all guns then? I’m sure you’ll save a lot of lives that way! Better start now, no time to hesitate or consider the consequences!
So would you also install a camera in your own car to monitor for illegal activity and call the cops on you? How would you feel if your car came standard with the feature and no way to turn it off?
I'm really torn on this.
This particular situation, at face value at least, sounds like a good outcome. Kids had a gun, someone noticed, called police, situation handled without escalation or violence or something tragic happening.
But this doesn't generalize. Another incident described in the article was when some kids were drinking in the car and shooting toy guns. What if they hadn't been drinking? What if they were just holding toy guns, innocently going from one kid's house to another? What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids? These sorts of escalations aren't imaginary; they happen, and they end in tragedy.
The article is also a little cagey on how this "detection" happened. Was it a human spot checking cameras in vehicles? I doubt it. Most likely it was some sort of computer vision algorithm that flagged something. Perhaps a human was in the loop to verify and be the one to call the cops, but humans seem to be increasingly shutting off their brains and trusting the machine. (I recall a recent incident where someone was wrongfully arrested because one of the companies that run the license-plate reader machines flagged their car as stolen. The machine screwed up the image recognition, but the cops blindly trusted it and arrested the guy.)
What happens when cops are allowed real-time access to Waymo's in-car video footage? Maybe they even have it already. This is just more pervasive, always-on surveillance, and this will only get worse as autonomous vehicles become more popular in the taxi scene.
Would you do any of those things in a regular taxi or subway car?
Imagine the alternative headline saying the murderers used Waymo for their drive-by assassination. There is only one option for Waymo here, and the idiocy of the US police is not within their power to solve.
That could be a funny-or-die kind of script. They find a Waymo car that is feeling outcast and looking for friendship so it joins a gang. The Waymo car is constantly looking out for rival gang members while on the job, then swings by to pick up its fellow gang members for the hit, but then must obey all of the traffic laws during the get away.
You've almost perfectly described Delamain and his side missions from Cyberpunk 2077
YA example of there is no original idea left. However, I'm not a gamer and had no idea what Cyberpunk 2077 is/was without having to look it up. So at least I'm not guilty of absorbing all content on the planet and regurgitating it as if it were an original idea while charging you $20/month.
Or worse the waymo gets put in to 'gang mode' by someone bribed on the inside, the car rolls the window down for the drive by, delivers the duffle bags of drugs, auto darkens the windows for a drive by kidnapping, think of the UX possibilities!
Even in the analog world, every situation can be exploited for criminal purposes. The Waymo initiative initially reduces the potential for harm. Is everything else just speculation?
Well you can go in the direction of Cory Doctorow's Attack Surface where self driving cars are hacked to attack people, or openBSD is the OS of self driving cars and crime only receives placid self driven transport from the nice self driving cars and the proceeds and weapons of crime are carried in a way to avoid the scrutiny of the car's internal cameras. Or... there's so many cameras that crime evolves into micro-crime: the gamBean-o family resorts to fraudulent video surveillance attestation so they can build and use unauthorized micro drones to slip laxatives into the meals of their sworn enemies and rivals. It's fun to speculate :D
just needs to implement a shoot-first, verify later algorithm and everything is good to go!
https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-illuminati-ganga-automa...
Self-driving cars don't "feel"
Charlie Brown says "oh good grief!"
What part of funny-or-die suggested anything following should be taken seriously? You might be interested in reading about creative licensing, make believe, parody, or any other style.
We used to do this and more with nerf guns, laser tag, and then paintball guns. You're not going to believe this but we even used to be able to ride our bikes 30 miles away from home without our parents being arrested. We played with fire in the park too. One time we even found porn there dude
The 90s were lit
Nah you're right tho let's imagine the worst case scenario. What if that person in the waymo had a nuclear bomb in their suitcase? There's only one option
Don't talk to me about the 90s if you weren't soaking a tennis ball in lighter fluid and firing the flaming missile out of a "potato gun" made out of beer cans... in the 70s. Also something about all the kids trying to imitate Evil Knievel and jumping their bikes off ramps made out of planks and milk crates... Without protective gear of any kind.
Everyone who got out of that decade alive and with at most minimal brain damage thinks that we're too obsessed with safety today.
;-)
Don't worry we know you were alive in the 70s just from you including a hyphen in that emoticon (and everyone knows I was alive in the 90s because I said emoticon and not emoji) ;)
> Everyone who got out of that decade alive and with at most minimal brain damage thinks that we're too obsessed with safety today.
There must be a word for this, but the issue today is the normalization of zero-risk.
Did some kids likely die because of the shenanigans free range kids were allowed in the 70s - 90s?
Sure!
Were those kids as cohorts on the whole better off because of the freedom they were allowed at formative years?
I'd be hard pressed to argue against that...
Sometimes it takes a few broken eggs (or children) to make an omelette (a responsible and creative adult).
Maximize the good to each individual, but only up until it begins impacting the good of the many.
The most I will say about the bullshit we got up to, as "the last chopper out" before literally everyone had CCTV, is that we made it our personal goal to get everything we did listed in the local newspaper's crime blotter
11 yr old me bought canned hairspray in the drug store, walked straight to the payphone 12 feet outside the drug store, ignited the hairspray and torched the phone until it didn't work anymore.
Considering how to deal with people brandishing weapons in a Waymo is not just imagining a scenario, since it has already actually happened.
I also grew up in the 90s and did things like throw eggs out of cars. We wouldn't have done it from a taxi or Uber. Your comment really makes no sense.
I grew up in the 90s too, and I’m fairly certain that shooting paintball guns out of a taxi would have been generally frowned upon even during that halcyon era.
The kids I grew up with played paintball tag in their own cars, not taxis.
We used to raid the "dumpster" of nearly expired hostess products at the local hostess factory, and no bullshit fill the back of a jeep with twinkies and ho-hos and king dongs, then go drive on two lane roads and throw them out in front of oncoming traffic to try and get them to chase us.
I made the mistake of using my car as a paintball tank at an unofficial range. That stuff never came out of weather stripping on the windows and left streaks every time the windows rolled for years.
I lived next to the ghetto as kid in the 90s and my mom was driving me by a car of ghetto dudes and I absolutely blasted them with a super soaker as an 8yo. They also had super soakers we got hosed back. Greatest decade ever!
So murderers put their guns in a bag and get away with it, normal people who have "nothing to hide" leave their guns out in the open and get the police called on them.
Just like would happen with open carrying anywhere?
The london riots were sparked by the police shooting Mark Duggan for (allegedly, no good evidence) carrying a gun around in a taxi.
People do definitely use regular taxis to transport both drugs and weapons sometimes
I am going to say the question is the wrong way to look at this. People behave differently in different situations. While I am very conflicted like the GP about this specific case. I don’t think it’s as simple as - don’t do anything you won’t do in a human driven cab, and if you do those things, then calling cops should be acceptable.
On the contrary, we have a long history of evidence that when people think they aren't being watched, enough of them will do awful things.
This is why public restrooms in the US are vandalized, why there are low effort graffiti tags all over, litter in parks, and more.
People believing that something is watching - a human or machine with the autonomy to enact consequences - preserves the commons for the rest of us.
Panopticon to the rescue - seriously ???
People just dont vadalize stuff - there are reasons for that that need to be fixed, not adding even more spying.
Among the reasons are that kids (and some adults) are idiots. That's it, it's not income inequality or rage at the system, some people just break things because they think it's funny. That's not something you can fix, so you have to guard against it in other ways.
Is't that just bad education or parenting in the end ? I don t think many people with good parents & education would be essentially insane to break thinks just for fun.
In general, I think you kinda need to fix people rather than make the environment basically so hostile to everyone, to prevent a small group of people from breaking it. Not saying its easy, but in my the only correct way.
I don't agree with your claim, but assuming you're right: Do you think that trying to solve "bad parenting" is less intrusive than cameras in robotaxis?
I hope so, but at the same time - I'm not sure how to best do it without ending up with some different authoritative issues.
Like, in general, you kinda want people to be good parent so their children end up as decent humans (that for example don't vandalize public restrooms for fun). But any direct attempts to control that process, even if well meant, would be rightfully considered a horrendous form of government/societal meddling. So it is definitely hard.
In any case, I think removing as many sources or uncertainty and stress as possible (stable income, affordable housing, no naked corruption visible day by day, etc.) could hopefully have positive outcomes on parenting without direct interference with the process. And I guess a better founded & more prestigious for the teach school system could also help.
As much as I disagree with it, graffiti is an interesting topic. A lot of graffiti proponents fully believe that they are beautifying the environment by making it human, and even continue doing it as the level of effort to bypass the consequences go up. They don't believe it to be an awful thing (though I'm sure some do, plus some have other motivations, plus some are lying to themselves about their motivations, etc, I just mean what they say and do).
I enjoy murals and graffiti art. Taggers who just put their names on walls, however, are a cancer
Yes. Well, not exactly wave guns around, but say and do stupid stuff? Not in a taxi around a human driver, no. And not in a subway car with people other than me and my friends, no. But your question had an “or” in it. If we had nerf guns and no one else was there to witness? It’s not unimaginable that someone might get a nerf dart to the ear when they didn’t expect it.
My wife and I like watching real-life police detective shows. Sometimes we discuss mistakes the killer made, and how we’d avoid them. “I wouldn’t kill anyone, but if I did, I wouldn’t cheap out and keep the clothes I wore to do it instead of tossing them into a river.” Of course we’re not going to do that, but it’s a puzzle to solve, so we try to solve it. We would not have those conversations around a taxi driver or a crowded subway, lest someone overhear and get the wrong idea. On an empty subway or Waymo? Yeah, sure. And if BART or my cab reported us for planning a murder, I’d be livid enough to plan how to murder the computer that made the decision to rat me out.
Good thing Waymo yells you you're being monitored then.
And the sign along the highway says my speed might be monitored by airplane, but I don’t want to live where that means a surveillance drone is flying along side me at all times. Consenting to let a taxi record me in case it comes up later that I did something bad and they want to have footage of it is one thing. But now we know Waymo is a little Flock tattletale, and people generally aren’t ok with their robocab proactively narcing on them.
I’m anti surveillance but I don’t get this take.
Every uber driver I’ve been ive been in has an inside dashcam to protect themselves and their property. I would do the same thing if I were them.
Waymo has every right to monitor their property and if someone does something illegal in their car why would they not report? An Uber driver would do the same, as would I. Otherwise you are an accomplice.
This comparison to Flock is bunk. Flock cameras are in public places and paid for with public dollars. I don’t want that.
But in a surveillance state, every private citizen should be keeping their own footage. Nobody is going to share theirs with you.
It depends on if you think private surveillance should exist to help the property owner in court, after something happens to them, e.g. the taxi driver getting robbed or the Waymo getting vandalized, or if you think private surveillance should exist solely to pipe any and all actual or imagined crimes to law enforcement in real time.
Private surveillance that immediately sends any and all crimes to law enforcement is indistinguishable from government surveillance and should treated the same way.
> Private surveillance that immediately sends any and all crimes to law enforcement is indistinguishable from government surveillance and should treated the same way.
Don’t use Snapchat then…
https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-...
> I’m anti surveillance but I don’t get this take.
Some people foresee a future where self-driving cars are the norm. The big prize being fewer deaths on the road (about 40k people per year in the USA) which is a pretty big prize.
If today's self-driving cars are heavy on the AI surveillance of passengers, and you foresee self-driving cars doing 90% of journeys within your lifetime, that's a pretty ominous situation.
Especially if you interpret it in light of EU driver-facing-camera mandates.
I would love it if self driving cars became the norm, and I could just hop into my car, doze off, and arrive at my destination. Key word being my car, and not Waymo's car. A future where every car is self driving is a utopia, but a future where every car is hired and actually owned by a company (spying on you) is a dystopia.
We should try to separate "self driving" from "owned and operated by someone else." One is good and one is very bad.
But what if I've done nothing illegal and they only think I have?
Again, I believe every private citizen should keep their own footage for exactly this reason.
Other people’s footage will only be used against you.
It is a real big shame that Meta is the only one pushing personal video capture right now. It has tainted the idea of personal surveillance as a counter to all this madness.
So don't use it? You seem to want the benefits of the service but without having to comport your behavior accordingly.
Other countries already have highway cameras track speed and automatically issue citations. I am happy for Americans to petition their government against implementing that, but I won't pretend it's anything other than a desire to break the law for personal gratification.
A human driver would be more able to tell a toy gun from a real one.
I own airsoft (pellet) guns people have confused for real ones when I left them on a shelf in my house. If you don't know what to look for they look quite convincing these days. Take a look around https://www.evike.com/airsoft-guns/ - everyone deletes or spray paints the orange tips because they make you really visible on the airsoft field.
It's not like you can allow kids to shoot pellet guns out of a car indefinitely in a metro without substantial risk of something going wrong.
We need to (be able to) trust the police to not escalate irresponsibly and to deal with situations with nuance. Declining to escalate to authorities because we're scared of what they may do is not great.
Absolutely not. A human driver has to watch the road and can’t scrutinize a gun.
And it’s also not easy to tell toys from real guns. Many cities illegalized toy guns on public transit because people were putting orange tips on real guns to make them look like toys. 3D-printed guns rarely look like they can actually fire, even though they can.
A human driver has a vested interest in determining if the person sitting behind them is holding a real gun or not.
A human driver can't tell. I've had gun guys mistake my airsoft guns for real ones. Average person who isn't familiar with both real guns and airsoft has no chance.
You literally can't tell. You can tell by touching or by extreme close inspection if you have had held examples of both by subtle process/cultural differences, or by racking if you have done so in the past in either or both, due to major internal differences. But if you think toy guns are like nerf guns painted in black, then you just can't. It's not an easy tell like wrong corner rounding on Apple lookalike aluminium chassis.
Maybe I would change my mind if I were an actual Uber driver, but I'm thinking that I don't care if my passenger has a gun, as long as they're being safe and not pointing it at me. I've been around guns. They don't scare me. My job is to drive them from point A to point B. Why should I care if they are packing, or if they're underage drinking a beer, or if they're texting a mob boss about money laundering?
Really only airsofters know telltale signs of toy guns. Guys into real guns can't instantly tell them apart.
It's that way because real guns weren't available in Japan but real-ism wasn't defined, so Japanese toy gun brands just turned that volume up to 1100 without allowing toy guns take pressure bearing gun parts. And then those toy guns got exported and copied, leading to the present status.
Probably
You'd never had a discussion about firearms with the average person then. Good luck.
So? In the real scenario, the underage passengers were drinking alcohol. Also, the 14-17 teen accounts are supposed to be monitored by parents, otherwise all riders need to be adults or their guests. That means they need to exercise judgment not brandishing what might look like weapons. The same way you need to exercise that judgment in a public park.
And I'm not even convinced that human drivers would be more discerning or rational about it. They could easily overstate the issue to police and create a more biased situation.
I’m not sure the line is that clear.
Any gun shooting projectiles out of a moving vehicle is dangerous. Pellet guns and paintball guns are less dangerous than “regular” guns, but they’re not really toys.
> and the idiocy of the US police is not within their power to solve.
Given how much money Google gives to electoral campaigns, I'd argue that it is in their power but that's the least of their problems when they interfere with the democratic process. They are too busy voting for less taxes and regulations on their business.
>>> What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids? These sorts of escalations aren't imaginary; they happen, and they end in tragedy.
I take this seriously, but I think this a problem with the cops. Even regular people hesitate to report problems if they think the police might overreact.
Please do not encourage your children to carry and brandish replica guns. This is never a good idea. Unfortunately I see this more frequently than I like. Kids don't just carry, they aim and pretend to shoot. Even in an open carry state like Florida brandishing a gun is illegal.
I know, it's a different world. I'm 62. As a kid, my friends and I chased one another around the neighborhood with toy guns for hours, raising a racket. My kids are 24 and 26 now, but it would have been unthinkable to let them have toy guns.
I'm in my 50s and did the same. But even then the toy guns were often bright orange.
Nerf guns are the modern equivalent of our dart guns and kids run around with them today all the time. They are pretty unmistakeable, I'm sure by design.
Clearly toy guns. Gun-like, but nobody with the slightest understanding of guns would think they were real. I have no problem with kids having toy guns. I do have a problem with kids in public having realistic replica guns. Bright orange isn't enough.
I think the answer is that other than in organized events realistic replicas should be subject to the same restrictions on actions that real guns are.
Toy guns back then: https://i.imgur.com/2DQnhNC.jpeg
Never saw those, but from the picture that looks too small to be a real gun.
How about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbYlrSRhsZk
> Even regular people hesitate to report problems if they think the police might overreact.
I can’t think of any instance I would call the police except to satisfy the requirements of an insurance claim. I was in a car accident in an Uber last year and left before the cops came.
ok
> What happens when cops are allowed real-time access to Waymo's in-car video footage? Maybe they even have it already. This is just more pervasive, always-on surveillance, and this will only get worse as autonomous vehicles become more popular in the taxi scene.
Yea, what's disturbing about this article isn't what happened in the article--it's what will happen in the future.
Today, a corporation transmits to the police "user in possession of what appears to be a gun." Tomorrow, what will that message contain?
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1. there's still personal cars.
2. this is hardly a waymo/autonomous car/big tech thing. covid came with "vaccine passports" in some jurisdictions. there's no reason why it couldn't be enforced by human taxi drivers.
> The article is also a little cagey on how this "detection" happened. Was it a human spot checking cameras in vehicles? I doubt it. Most likely it was some sort of computer vision algorithm that flagged something. Perhaps a human was in the loop to verify and be the one to call the cops, but humans seem to be increasingly shutting off their brains and trusting the machine
I think there's a middle ground between those that's possible that you might not be considering.
A while back I was in a Waymo and someone I was with dropped one of their Airpods and it went under the seat. They took off their seatbelt to dig under the seat and the car started beeping since we were driving. After about a minute of that someone came over the speaker and asked what was going on and told him he needed to get up and put the seatbelt back on or Waymo would end the ride right there.
I'm sure these cars are full of other sensor based triggers like seat belts being taken off, doors being opened, people messing with the steering wheel, etc that alert a human to come take a look. I know that the cars have cameras and microphones and it wouldn't surprise me if they are or are planning to use that for monitoring the cars, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the people in the car just triggered some other unrelated sensor and then the human stepped in to review and noticed the gun.
The article says they violated the TOS relating to the firearm, but that doesn't mean that Waymo initially started looking at the car because of that. It's possible that they were looking at the vehicle for something much more inane initially, discovered the firearm by chance, and are now using that to ban them since it's the most obvious TOS violation.
> What happens when cops are allowed real-time access to Waymo's in-car video footage?
Same thing that happens whenever cops get new surveillance powers. They’ll use it to stalk and harass women.
The size and scale of that problem absolutely pales in comparison to the number of people who will be screwed by a better ability to enforce unpopular or rarely enforced laws.
And the sick part is how many useful idiots will go to bat for all of it because "well they broke the law after all"
No, I know this is a minority opinion on HN but I think violence towards women is a larger problem than seldomly enforced laws being enforced more often.
You can repeal a law. The courts can strike it down. The same cannot be said about cops abusing women, which is statistically well established.
Whatever appeal to emotion crime you want to cook up, violence toward women, unfair targeting of minorities, etc, etc. That's all already not allowed either by law or rule.
Fixing that stuff by enforcing the existing rules against it wouldn't make these systems fine. The fundamental point of these systems is to let the government screw the people.
Sure, but the quote I was responding to was not "what will the government do", it was "what will cops do". Well, Flock and countless other examples have shown us exactly what cops will do.
That would taught those kids a lesson. There is a certain way to behave in a car regardless if it belongs to them or not. Getting drunk and trashing the inside of the car is not acceptable just because someone is a minor
> thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids?
you dont need a Waymo for that :(
The scenario has 3 problems. The surveillance by Wayno, the US police propensity for shooting people and kids having guns.
Wayno picked a difficult market.
> What if they were just holding toy guns, innocently going from one kid's house to another? What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids?
I'm always confused by how lines are drawn in scenarios like this. if calling cops makes waymo culpable, why not also blame parents buying kids guns? Toy stores selling the guns? Where does the chain of events start?
It would be good to know more about the detection mechanism, if it wasn't computer vision it may well have been audio monitoring - a kid is perhaps more likely to brag / talk about what they're doing, which gets flagged to a live monitor who can intervene in real time.
> What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids?
Waymo is not the one to solve your policing problem. The root issue is that your police shoot to kill first, and investigate or make stuff up to get themselves off later.
the police's job is to analyze reports and actually figure out if theyre correct or not. If theyre failing at that, the rest really doesnt matter. Theyre gonna take some other stranger's report or false report and go shoot those kids for the love of the game anyways, regardless of if waymo is involved
> Most likely it was some sort of computer vision algorithm that flagged something.
Possible, but probably more likely they weren't wearing their seatbelts and then a Waymo remote support person saw the gun and immediately called police.
If we are going to privilege privately operated transportation providers like Waymo with special access to streets relative to individually operated vehicles, we need to rethink whether a private company's terms of service should govern the rights and privileges of users of such services or if users should have more substantial protections.
Waymo has chosen to monitor travelers in a way that drivers of their own cars would not be monitored, while the government has chosen to ban privately owned vehicles from some spaces (like Market Street in San Francisco). This coerces individuals into sacrificing privacy and other rights.
Imagine if your phone company listened to all your calls and reported you to the police if it didn't like something you say.
And what happens when a private company like Waymo partners with a municipality to integrate into its transportation network? Is that now privately operated vehicle or part of a public space system like a sidewalk or the road itself?
Waymo is not like mass transit or even a taxi: only one group of passengers are in the vehicle at a time. Subway and bus rules don't cleanly apply. It's closer to a rental car that drives itself.
We as a society are turning to rely on or even require private companies for much of our essential infrastructure and interpersonal fabric: communications, payments (decline of cash) transportation, surveillance (Flock), places of congregation (virtual town squares), etc. Meanwhile because they are private they are not bound to privacy and other protections like the state itself.
We should rethink this direction.
The remote driver/observer has full access to the cabin footage no?
Cops are allowed to shoot kids in the US, that's just how society works. No point rat-holing into every possible hypothetical about it.
> What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids?
See this is only an issue because that is a plausible situation. The actual problem is on the police/cultural side, not the waymo side. No one should even have to think about this when calling the cops. And I can't think of 1 other western society where they do
This is America though. The mere presense of a gun shouldn't involve calling the cops unless there is a bigger reason to expect something nefarious. US cops being thugs and aggressive is a known fact so I find it hard to say Waymo isn't part of the problem, they have the best view of the situation after all and are initiating the call/report of armed criminals.
> The mere presense of a gun shouldn't involve calling the cops
Unless it's against the terms of service of the private corporation
At least in the US, police don't enforce terms of service of private corporations. That's a civil matter, enforced by filing a lawsuit.
If that was truly the only issue then it is a civil matter and the cops have no jurisdiction without a ruling from a judge. If I walk into a store with no shoes despite them requiring shoes, the first action isn't call the police and have the person arrested without saying anything.
Exactly. If Waymo wants to be weird and disallow people from legally or even illegally open carrying, then that should be between the customer and Waymo. They should not get to call the police.
The mere presence, no. The gun in the holster, fine. The gun in your hand, not so fine.
I was going to say that this is the only surveillance that I would be OK with, considering the users are not on public property. However, I hadn't considered that calling the police on anyone in the US (especially for carrying a firearm) does not carry the same consequences as elsewhere...
Yeah, most (but perhaps not a super majority of) people in the US know calling the cops has a large chance of excalating a situation and making it deadly, especially if a gun is mentioned in any context.
These types of stories will be used to justify the blanket surveillance of citizens. It’s worked quite well.
I mean if you're using toy guns you're in for trouble. Do you take toy guns on a flight?
There's no reference to a "ghost gun" in the LA Times text. It's only in the headline. In the text, the weapon is referred to as an AR-15. SFGATE, though, quotes cops as saying "AR-styled assault rifle also known as a ghost gun.”
The "ghost gun" thing refers to guns without serial numbers. For an AR-15, that usually means something assembled from an "80% lower receiver", a part which exists purely to evade US gun laws. [1] It's not quite complete; it takes some final machining. This can be done by hand with modest machine shop tools, or there's a special-purpose 3-axis CNC mill to do it for $4000, available from Ghost Gunner.[2] (They used to sell a simpler device for $1200 which was only useful for the single task of finishing "80% lower receivers", but the current $4000 unit is halfway respectable as a desktop CNC mill. It understands a subset of G-Code. Nobody seems to use it for general CNC work, though. A good desktop CNC mill for $4000 would be useful, but they'd need to get serious about cooling and chip removal.)
[1] https://gundigest.com/more/how-to/gunsmithing/building-a-gho...
[2] https://ghostgunner.net/
An 80% lower exists purely to comply with US gun laws. That's exactly why they're legal.
Unless it was edited after your comment, it's mentioned in the first paragraph:
> Two young people riding in an autonomous vehicle were arrested in San Francisco after authorities allegedly found them in possession of an illegal “ghost gun.”
As far as I can tell here the ghost portion is basically a non-sequiter. The waymo vehicle called the cops because it detected e passengers had a gun. The vehicle did not know or care about its status as a ghost gun or not. I'm sure that the Waymo terms of service prohibit carrying weapons into the vehicle. I'm pretty sure that if you were brandishing a realistic looking enough gun, an Uber driver would kick you out and call the cops as well.
There's a big difference between a human present who can make a decision based on a situation literally in front of their eyes, and a computer flagging a video feed for someone in what amounts to a call center to look at and decide on.
Not to mention the mass surveillance this sort of stuff continues to help enable.
I'm not a fan of expanding surveillance but the alternative of unmonitored transit seems worse.
Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain. Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints. Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure. Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.
These are just a few situations any human driver would obviously react to. And a modicum of detection and human review could solve in an autonomous vehicle.
This is a problem that autonomous vehicles created. Why should we not complain that its solution is worse than non-autonomous travel, given it carries risk that doesn't exist today? Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
And what surveillance or other risks does this introduce outside of the cabin, and why should society allow that? What is the definition of modicum of detection, and who is drawing that line?
> Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
It absolutely does 1000x. You can also just not use it.
They snap me crossing the street almost daily, nothing I can do about since sometimes they take me by surprise.
What?
I meant catch me crossing and take photos, scans, etc.
>its solution is worse than non-autonomous travel
Citation needed. Assaults and abuse against public transit and taxi drivers is a common workplace hazard. Why are we subjecting humans to that? Why are we ok expecting them to decide if a gun is fake or not and call the police?
>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
Absolutely.
>>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
>Absolutely.
Citation needed.
Why stop at Waymo? The entirety of your digital activity happens on private property. You should have no expectation of privacy, and your attempts at privacy should mark you as a higher risk subject. We should algorithmically police your digital life in case you start showing signs of anti-social behavior. I don't want to wait until you get your gun into a Waymo to have the cops handle you. I want you to be caught much earlier. This will make the world much safer.
There are other ways to solve safety issues, but they are harder and more expensive - civic education and a government invested in incentivizing a productive life, better law enforcement training, freely available mental health services etc.
Fortunately the Fourth Amendment has mostly established the answer for us already.
No? The Fourth Amendment only grants you protections that apply to government action. The police are allowed to accept evidence gathered voluntarily by private citizens or corporations.
Maybe we shouldn't put the whole burden of world justice on Waymo, this allowing it a complete invasion of the privacy of both the people who use it and those who don't? Guy takes a drugged up girl on the train, should we hold the train responsible for the outcome also?
Are you aware of BART Police or MTA Police? All trains have conductors who monitor passenger behavior and enforce rules/laws.
That's the key question: whose laws are Waymo enforcing? ICE and Flock's extra-constitutional policies? City ordinances? A future eco-radical government's laws?
How about things taking place outside the car?
Can Waymo mount a robotic machine gun next to the LIDAR and snipe suspected terrorists? Release tear gas? Self destruct, killing several nuns to protect s CEO?
Btw ghost guns are not all instantly illegal.
Yes? I am pretty sure they don't do algorithmic policing. Fwiw, they probably don't do any policing, but that is a different subject.
I am not against monitoring for safety - I am against deploying a sophisticated network of automated monitoring that covers all digital and soon physical aspects of my life for my "safety" by for profit companies.
I don’t think a train conductor would normally intervene if they saw someone escorting an intoxicated person.
Unfortunately taking someone somewhere to rob or assault them doesn’t look that different from taking a drunk friend to a safe place.
Public trains are covered in camera surveillance and that footage is very often used in conjunction with tracking down and prosecuting criminals. You should have no expectation of privacy on a public train.
I agree we should also add live facial recognition to train stations.
No expectation of privacy in public does not mean we should eliminate privacy from public areas or allow our government to engage in mass surveillance.
I think the risks are different on a train, which is far more public than the inside of a taxi. There are more likely to be other people and/or an operator to intervene.
Those are bad examples of things where a computer should make a judgement call.
> Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain.
I take my kid to go skeet shooting. You’d call the police on us for having legal guns? What about my pocket knife?
> Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints.
My wife is scared by someone on the sidewalk. We’re riding to where we parked our car for the evening. There’s a scared woman with me as we commute to our vehicle. BART wouldn’t call the cops on me.
> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.
What’s “obvious” here? I have drinks with friends and bump my head on a cabinet, and now I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m not remotely about to die. Dammit, Waymo, I just want to go home and shower and let me wife laugh at me while she tapes me up.
> Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.
Person’s exhausted after work and wants to nap on the way home. They look identical to the dead guy. BART lets you nap.
If we had ubiquitous taxi and subway police, maybe they’d spent 5 seconds assessing each situation and move on. In no other real-life situation do we expect empty subways or taxi drivers to call the cops and investigate every possible bad scenario, nor should we.
But it's a reduction of privacy compared to private vehicles. If the goal is to convert all transportation infrastructure into surveilled transportation then that is a loss in privacy for the general public.
That is acceptable (and even desirable) for these people.
Only the few who can afford luxury deserve privacy.
You can raise that argument when they actually prevent you from owning your own vehicle.
No, the argument should be raised before that happens. You want to prevent undesirable things from happening, not try to claw them back after they happened.
It looks quite foolish to me to never plan ahead and predict undesirable future events and then trying to prevent them ahead of time.
"Sorry, we can't fulfill your request for transportation to the protest for private ownership, but we can offer a free ride to the Colosseum" ;)
I meant to imply that it's ridiculous because no one is trying to make that happen...
I don't think their primary intent is to create a surveillance state (though google might like having yet another data source...), I think companies are trying to make it happen to capture transportation market share, regulators will want to make it happen to drive down traffic fatalities and insurers will incentivize it because human drivers are more costly. And once the difference in how they can be regulated is clear there'll be additional incentives to discourage private transportation.
> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.
When I was a teenager working in a taxi office some guy came in slurring and covered in blood. I phoned him an ambulance and after 15 minutes of waiting he got up and walked out despite my protests. How should I have reacted?
Those are made up problems because 90% of the time people drive their own vehicle or are with a willing participant. We don't have cameras watching us in normal cars.
That's a good yardstick. Would a reasonable human driver call (or want to call) the cops? If yes, it's reasonable for Waymo to do the same
> alternative of unmonitored transit seems worse
Almost all private cars are unmonitored (in this respect).
"Unmonitored transit" like the way almost every human being in the history of the world has moved from one place to another? Please.
I'm pretty wary of mass public surveillance. I'm much less concerned about companies monitoring the inside of their private property
When they are one in the same, how do you plead?
People are awful when they think they aren't being watched, especially with communal or other people's property. It's why things are covered in lame low-effort graffiti tags, why bathroom mirrors have things scratched into them with keys, and why bridges over highways all have metal grates to stop people from throwing rocks at oncoming cars.
When people know they're being watched and there will be immediate consequences if they do something bad, their behavior changes. If they don't, they're awful. We've seen this for decades (arguably millennia, as we know Pompeii had graffiti too)
A lot of taxis have models detecting weapons and aggressive behaviours. I work on some models like this. I think they are necessary. For driver's safety.
The number of people expecting drivers to calmly & accurately distinguish between real threats and not is wild.
I'm pretty sure a human started watching live video from the car as soon as the AI flagged a gun. I doubt that Waymo is willing to have their system automatically call cops.
Would you be upset if someone at the WalMart central data center called the local police because they saw someone with a gun in a Walmart at a remote location?
That's what happened here. A private company saw a gun inside their property and called the police.
I would be unless there was a posted no guns sign. Remote areas are were it is most appropriate to have a gun for personal protection.
It is generally not legal to open carry in California.
> The waymo vehicle called the cops
Waymo called the cops. It’s not clear if it was the vehicle, or a human in the company. I suspect the latter.
I dunno. This doesn’t bother me in the same way that flock cameras do. A Waymo car is a private space that you don’t have to use if you don’t want to. Seems pretty reasonable to me that Waymo doesn’t want their cars used for drive by shootings. If a drive by were to happen in a Waymo, this would be compelled by law anyway.
It starts to become a problem once you’ve replaced public infrastructure to a sufficient degree by private infrastructure like waymos that avoiding to use them starts to seriously inconvenience people.
What public infrastructure is replaced by Waymo? All the roads, traffic lights, signs, etc are all still there. Seems equivalent to any other vehicle that is not replacing public infrastructure.
Taxis are a part of transportation infrastructure. Like a system that allows public and private healthcare, a private option pulls the rich people off the public system causing them to neglect and vote against the public system.
So waymos means less busses/trains, which means a bunch of people stuck in the middle - they would prefer to take a bus or a train but the service is poorly maintained so they are forced to take a waymo.
Taxis, busses, and trains are all private spaces with cameras in them.
Public infrastructure has been run by private companies for a long time.
Yes. And the use of cameras has traditionally been: if something happens, there is a record that can be consulted.
That has changed. Networked cameras and AI means that cameras can be constantly monitored: license plates logged and mapped in realtime, faces scanned and profiled, symbols and objects detected.
I have no problem with calling the cops on someone with a gun. But that same kind of tech can (and has already been) seamlessly be turned on protestors, journalists, political opponents, union organizers, and ex girlfriends.
a taxi driver will call the police if you do anything stupid inside them, usually after dropping you in the middle of the street, your argument doesn't hold any water.
Yes. Totally. Will a taxi driver call the police to let them know where I was if I am a journalist on my way to meet a source?
Networked cameras with ai monitoring is begging for totalitarian oppression. A cabby calling the cops because I did something shitty in their cab is not.
Yeah I don’t get it. You’re getting into a privately owned vehicle. You agree to the terms of service when you sign up and ask for a ride. You should assume you have zero privacy in those cars.
Do you defend LG telescreens too? After all, by using the TV, you agreed to LG watching your every move.
Sure, but the Waymo is taking intrusive video of much more than the inside of the car. And unlike a mast-mounted camera, it can be sent almost anywhere at almost any time.
>Sure, but the Waymo is taking intrusive video of much more than the inside of the car.
The alternative is having a driver in the car, which is equally intrusive.
> The alternative is having a driver in the car, which is equally intrusive.
Would you rather have one random stranger see you naked, or have a video of you naked passed around to every cop in your city?
Unless you feel the same about those two scenarios, it seems like a driver and a camera are not equally intrusive.
>Would you rather have one random stranger see you naked, or have a video of you naked passed around to every cop in your city?
Half the ubers I've been now has a "you're being recorded" notice. Public transit is far worse.
You seem to have missed the point. A recording is one thing. A networked camera being ai-monitored in realtime is another.
Your uber driver is using the video to protect their in-app reputation (also dystopian, but unrelated), and in case a crime is committed against them or they are accused of one.
A networked ai monitored camera system is a panopticon. It will be (or already has been) turned against journalists, protesters, political opponents, ex girlfriends, union organizers, etc.
Wait, can I not carry in a Waymo?
Found their rules page: "Do not carry weapons of any kind in the car"
That seems... naive? Plenty of people carry pepper spray or a knife with them. Not even ever intending to use them as a weapon.
When I go to the range, I travel with a locked case that contains my pistol, which inside has a cable lock. I couldn't take that through a waymo?
What about some kid buying a goofy mall katana they are going to put on their wall?
Like, obviously brandishing a weapon should be disallowed, but merely having anything that's a weapon? Seems fraught.
In California, it's surprisingly hard to be a legal, responsible gun owner if you don't own your own car. Rideshare bans weapons via TOS, public transit (even unloaded in a locked container) is illegal.
That's the point (like for all this stuff, going back a hundred years, not just in CA). Don't extend the right to anyone who doesn't have a bunch of wealth to lose that the state can threaten to get compliance.
Which is why "just build your own infrastructure" is never a good faith argument.
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Don’t brandish your weapon and no one will know you have it. Obviously the case here.
And make sure you don't brandish a mars bar too!
I understand Waymo having this position for now. I also think it is reasonable to push them to refine the rules for the situations you mention.
>Found their rules page: "Do not carry weapons of any kind in the car"
Corporate speak for "concealed means concealed"
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> What about some kid buying a goofy mall katana they are going to put on their wall?
Or a kitty keychain...
Even if their rules say that I don't get why they are allowed to call the police. In this case it might have been an unregistered gun but if someone was carrying legally they can refuse service but they shouldn't be calling the police.
Flock is bad, but fleets of cars strapped to the teeth with cameras and sensors are suddenly ok even when they call the police on you? Why? Because of the makers of the technology that powers the cars say they are safer (via datasets that we have no way to validate)?
I think there's a legitimate distinction between monitoring what's inside the car vs what's outside. Outside seems bad. Inside is probably necessary.
This is a good distinction. My main concern with Waymo is that we have no way of knowing if they stick/will stick to only monitoring the inside.
How are they supposed to drive themselves without monitoring whats going on outside the vehicle?
That’s possible to do without also sending all the captured data to police.
Well for one, so far they've only called the police on people who chose to use the service.
When we have evidence that Waymo is contracting its external cameras out to local governments and allowing abuse, then we can criticize them for it.
What do you mean? Google is legally required to share information, and does share information, when such information is requested through a whole variety of different means available to local governments. https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests
That's the same as the police getting security footage from any random building.
The problem with Flock is that they let police hop on and look at whatever they want whenever they want. Completely different operating modes and intentions.
Also, Google and Waymo are different companies under the same parent. Google's policies are irrelevant.
Yeah good point on the policies. It makes Waymo's case worse though, because they have nothing defined publicly. They are also for-profit, and trying to deploy to more cities. The concerns are real - https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2025/jul/1/driverless...
"While companies like Waymo insist they require search warrants for footage, based on probable cause and judicial approval, the legal framework for accessing autonomous vehicle data remains unsettled. A 2022 analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) noted that few states have specific laws governing law enforcement access to such data, leaving gaps in oversight. In Arizona, where Waymo operates extensively, police must typically obtain a search warrant to access footage, as required by state law for electronic records and consistent with Fourth Amendment protections. "
Only if they retain it, and I would bet they are purging it quickly as a matter of policy to avoid these kinds of situations.
Because you sign up for the service, agree to the terms, and voluntarily get into the car.
Depends on how you feel about guns. I think people who are opposed to them would agree with this, people who are in favor of guns would be alarmed by this.
> I think people who are opposed to them would agree with this, people who are in favor of guns would be alarmed by this.
Bizarrely, I think it comes out backwards. In this article, the comments are surprised that Waymo's gun detection led to someone contacting authorities - it's not over guns, but that it was "young people" with guns, which means they can't use generalizations, there have to be bespoke solutions unique to every individual, calling the police to assess on potential threats is too broad.
The gun crowd would neither use taxis broadly to carry weapons, nor do so in the manner of the "juveniles" found in the article. Generalizing, they're well-versed in the minutiae of gun transport laws and more or less anticipate law enforcement contact, whether inadvertent or from Karens.
I have an option not to use Waymo. I don't have an option not to get screwed by Flock.
Shocking this isn't bigger news. It will be strange what they get you for. Maybe car ownership isn't doomed after all.
At least a human usually has some judgment and discretion situationally.
I guess the alternative "Juvenile Driveby Shooting takes place from Waymo" isn't a better headline though.
>Maybe car ownership isn't doomed after all
I think if anything waymo, robot taxi is doomed. Self driving ever matures to private car ownership will to car share to subsidize costs will with 1-10% utilization will basically generate more demand than non car owners will ever need - there simply isn't business model for share only fleet outside of specific low vehicle density zones. And even for private car owners, the only ones who will generate some revenue are those that work offpeak hours, i.e. they can rent their cars during surge, which will make congestion worse for all existing drivers by increasing traffic (kek). Proliferation of self driving = eventually millions of beater supply cars doing rotations for basically marginal costs killing fleet economics.
Google would probably be held 100% liable if it happened from their car. . What I don’t get is why Waymo allows unaccompanied juvenile riders at all? That seems like a huge risk for them.
As of this writing, Waymo only permits unaccompanied minors in the Metro Phoenix area. The incident occurred in San Francisco, so it seems that they should not have riding without an adult.
https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/16389431?sjid=166657...
> What I don’t get is why Waymo allows unaccompanied juvenile riders at all?
Why not? They can already take an uber. It's questionable which is safer
I wasn’t talking about the kids’ safety, I was referring to Waymo’s liability.
Teen accounts are supposed to be governed by the parent account.
I understand the appeal. Parents I've spoken to feel safer putting their kid in a Waymo than and Uber. And I guess the time savings of not driving them around yourself are too compelling.
“Maybe car ownership isn't doomed after all.”
You think “owning” the vehicle will matter in the near future? That’s cute
If i were a driver i would call the cops too. What do you mean? A ghost gun in a taxi is ok?
> The company pulled the car over after detecting a “violation of our terms of service involving a firearm,"
Well now my biggest fear of riding a Waymo is not how it drives but getting my Google account banned because it misdetected something.
Do you know what a ghost gun is? Where is the misdetection?
In the US, the term is used to mean firearms that are legal to manufacture but not to sell, because they do not have serial numbers for tracing. The misdetection would be if the Waymo cameras did not have sufficient resolution to see the serial number on the firearm, or if the firearm serial number were concealed, for example by being locked inside of a carrying case, as is the standard practice for responsible firearm owners.
However, kobalsky is alluding to frequent past reports of Google misdetecting things that are not ghost guns, followed by banning people's accounts. For example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil... #news from 02022 of Google flagging Mark [anonymous]’s Google account for child porn when he sent a photo of his toddler son’s infected penis to the doctor and reported him to the police. The police decided no abuse had happened but he never got his account back. #privacy #human-rights #USA #politics
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36443747 Very disturbing accounts of people getting banned from Google for searching for the board game "Ethnos", from credit cards for not using them, from Amazon for having a racist doorbell recording, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115805 seems like people are getting banned from their #Google accounts for using #OpenClaw for #AI with #Gemini
https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/account-restricted-without-w... more on people getting banned from their #Google accounts for using #OpenClaw for #AI with #Gemini:
Aminreza Khoshbahar: “I’m seeking assistance regarding a sudden restriction on my Google AI Ultra account that has persisted for three days. I received no prior warnings or notifications regarding a potential violation.
“The only recent change in my workflow was connecting Gemini models via OpenClaw OAuth. If third-party integrations are the issue, I would expect the platform to block the integration rather than restrict a paid account ($249/mo) without communication.”
But regarding this specific case, where is the misdetection? Why would you enter a taxi with a ghost gun?
Possibly to go to the shooting range, or to your job as a security guard? Or, in the cases of less conspicuous ghost guns than the AK-47 purportedly involved in this case, to carry on you for self-defense? All of these are common and legal in the US in general, whatever I may think about their ethical implications.
Interesting that it is ok in the US. I also work in weapon detection for driver safety systems. Obviously it is impossible for a human or a machine to detect intent with accuracy. A security guard can enter the car and then shoot the driver. You never know. That is why our systems always send alerts no matter the situation.
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If a human driver did the same we wouldn't have this conversation.
So, the real operator of the car in whatever country it's cheaper to employ people will have been the one that called the policem
Similar a few months back:
Waymo reports teen riders for bad behavior and delivers them to the police
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48824010
Delivering sounds an awful lot like kidnapping..
In CA it's legal for regular citizens to detain someone if you think there's a reasonable public safety threat (but if you're wrong, you can obviously be in a lot of trouble)
I don't trust any of these driverless cars. The last vestige of American car culture was that it would provide freedom and an open road. Now, it seems, that era is over, and cars in the future will be more like jail cells with constant surveillance.
Maybe we need very clear, standardized signals for entering a surveillance zone (where someone not obviously present, possibly a corporate stooge or AI or simpler-than-AI automated detection system, is judging behavior) so that people realize that private behavior (like casually showing off guns to each other, safely, which I've seen done myself and was not cause for alarm—guns were legal) is no longer private.
The steelman -against- what waymo did is:
Guns are generally legal, even in California. This is America, not the EU. Nobody was harmed, nobody was threatened. This is like calling the cops on someone open carrying because you don't like open carry.
That is what a lot of pro-2A libertarians would argue.
The steelman -pro- what waymo did is:
Private conveyance. Even though the occupants thought they were "alone", there was someone/something else present, which felt threatened (or thought the passengers represented a potential threat to others) and called police, as most cabbies or uber drivers probably would.
I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. This is a grey area, and I think it'll likely resolve in favor of waymo, and it won't really bother anyone except the staunch libertarians. If the gun hadn't been illegally possessed, likely nothing would've happened after the cops were called.
>Guns are generally legal, even in California. This is America, not the EU.
Guns are generally legal in the EU, too.
"Maybe we need very clear, standardized signals for entering a surveillance zone." [proceeds to give a libertarian pro-2A perspective and then the "what would a cab driver do perspective]
I have a suggestion. Perhaps if you enter an autonomous vehicle, it has a display with your name and will not drive until you buckle your seatbelt and click the button acknowledging?
When no strangers seem to be around, but we might be under surveillance, are we all supposed to tailor our legal behavior so that no random person or AI surveillance could reasonably view it as possibly illegal or problematic?
How can someone have an expectation of privacy if they take pictures of a gun in a waymo, and upload them to google drive... but no expectation of privacy against waymo calling the cops when they see the same thing with their own cameras?
I was at LOWES the other day with a used can of paint that I brought for color matching. obviously used. beat up and stained. at the checkout the computer halted the checkout process said "did you forget something in your cart?"
yeah fuck that. also fucks self-checkout. are we so poverty stricken as a society now that we can't afford to pay cashiers?
In general I'd rather interact with a machine than with the kind of person who can get hired as a cashier where I live - likely someone cognitively disadvantaged or who is an immigrant from a poor part of the world with limited English skills.
Precisely because our society is rich, and reasonably meritocratic (and has a lot of immigrants from poor, non-English-speaking parts of the world), people who are reasonably smart and conscientious don't last long in low-pay, low-status jobs like cashiering - they get promoted or quit to do something more lucrative. This is Patrick McKenzie's concept of The Sort (https://x.com/patio11/status/1818781344702644311). And it means that my experience of interacting with a cashier is likely to involve interacting with a menial laborer who is difficult to communicate with; meaning I'd rather avoid that interaction altogether and just press buttons on a machine.
It's also increasingly appearing to be the case that checking out yourself is adverse selection.
People with money have others shop for them, or ship to their house. The checkouts are for those who labor in that system who must now submit to the panopticon.
If you stumble into a big retailer like Walmart or Home Depot now yourself, it's like you crossed a zero-trust boundary. Security guards, motion-activated cameras that play sounds and nag you to remind you you're surveilled, manned turnstiles to stop door crashes with loaded carts -- all these adversarial controls suggest you're now in the wrong customer channel.
have you talked to cashiers? many prefer the new ones. who are you protecting?
>also fucks self-checkout. are we so poverty stricken as a society now that we can't afford to pay cashiers?
Yeah, I'm appalled how poor as a society we've become, now that we can't afford door men (outside of luxury condos in Manhattan), elevator operators, and bank tellers.
As someone who cashiered in college, I vastly preferred monitoring self checkouts over being monetarily forced to interact with an endless line of the kind of people who don't use self checkouts.
As a shopper, I don't want to be one of those people either. Ideally, I want lower friction and to be able to pay on my phone instead of dealing with the kiosk.
Teens will just learn not to use the tattle taxi. Or hide their toy guns before they do.
Whatever LG has been doing in the consumer electronic sector has been perfected in Waymo’s vehicles. It starts with capturing everything that happens inside vehicle, claim it’s catching users violating ToS. Then it graduates to full blown Flock—like mobile surveillance tech.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the cars are already capturing and storing license plates, tracking pedestrian activity.
It’s all being prepared for the sale to governments and intelligence communities. Or maybe to serve the privatized shit hole known as 'network states' coined by the pathetic parasite, Peter Thiel.
Orwellian dystopia is here folks. It just took a detour/roundabout way (9/11, patriot act, greedy capitalists, social media …) to get us there.
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Why stop at autonomous cars? New cars monitor drivers for “drowsiness” and have internal/external cameras. Why not monitor for guns too? Maybe they should even refuse to drive if you’re holding a gun!
And why stop at cars? Maybe home cameras should call the cops if they see a weapon. Maybe your Apple Watch should detect if you’ve fired a gun. Brave new world!
I’m a gun owner, but I’d rather start saving lives now rather than doing nothing while theorizing about all the ridiculous things that could happen.
Guns don't cause violence. Just look at New Hampshire–lots of guns, low crime or violence.
Freedom is more important when we already have safety. People are trying to scare us into thinking we are unsafe so they can take away our freedom. We are very safe.
Why not just immediately seize all guns then? I’m sure you’ll save a lot of lives that way! Better start now, no time to hesitate or consider the consequences!
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So would you also install a camera in your own car to monitor for illegal activity and call the cops on you? How would you feel if your car came standard with the feature and no way to turn it off?
It's an absolutely beautiful story!
The only issue is a somewhat wasteful use of police time - Waymo should have taken them straight to juvenile hall.