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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
> 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.
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.
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 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?
>>> 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.
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
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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)
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MostlyStable | 12 hours ago
kelnos | 12 hours ago
Not to mention the mass surveillance this sort of stuff continues to help enable.
MostlyStable | 12 hours ago
bot403 | 12 hours ago
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.
_vertigo | 12 hours ago
handwarmers | 12 hours ago
jplona | 12 hours ago
anon84873628 | 12 hours ago
handwarmers | 12 hours ago
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.
diydsp | 10 hours ago
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.
smelendez | 9 hours ago
Unfortunately taking someone somewhere to rob or assault them doesn’t look that different from taking a drunk friend to a safe place.
coderintherye | 12 hours ago
Cider9986 | an hour ago
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.
the8472 | 12 hours ago
anon84873628 | 12 hours ago
the8472 | 11 hours ago
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" ;)
anon84873628 | 11 hours ago
the8472 | 11 hours ago
iamnothere | 11 hours ago
Only the few who can afford luxury deserve privacy.
threecheese | 12 hours ago
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?
anon84873628 | 12 hours ago
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.
handwarmers | 11 hours ago
>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.
anon84873628 | 11 hours ago
handwarmers | 11 hours ago
UltraSane | 9 hours ago
It absolutely does 1000x. You can also just not use it.
mixmastamyk | an hour ago
kstrauser | 11 hours ago
> 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.
AngryData | 8 hours ago
dwedge | 7 hours ago
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?
mmooss | 7 hours ago
Almost all private cars are unmonitored (in this respect).
pc86 | 6 hours ago
PunchTornado | 12 hours ago
anon84873628 | 12 hours ago
UltraSane | 9 hours ago
parineum | 8 hours ago
That's what happened here. A private company saw a gun inside their property and called the police.
AngryData | 8 hours ago
parineum | 5 hours ago
Arainach | 8 hours ago
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)
mr_toad | 9 hours ago
Waymo called the cops. It’s not clear if it was the vehicle, or a human in the company. I suspect the latter.
kelnos | 12 hours ago
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.
phoronixrly | 12 hours ago
AngryData | 8 hours ago
anon84873628 | 12 hours ago
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.
graemep | 12 hours ago
jfaat | 12 hours ago
anon84873628 | 12 hours ago
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.
mlyle | 12 hours ago
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.
smt88 | 12 hours ago
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.
mehjustmeh | 8 hours ago
t2r3121 | 8 hours ago
ryandrake | 3 hours ago
numpad0 | an hour ago
t2r3121 | 9 hours ago
numpad0 | 9 hours ago
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.
smelendez | 9 hours ago
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.
pc86 | 6 hours ago
dylan604 | 12 hours ago
sellmesoap | 9 hours ago
bryanrasmussen | 8 hours ago
https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-illuminati-ganga-automa...
gwbas1c | 8 hours ago
dylan604 | 7 hours ago
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.
kstrauser | 12 hours ago
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.
anon84873628 | 12 hours ago
kstrauser | 11 hours ago
anon84873628 | 11 hours ago
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.
mingus88 | 9 hours ago
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.
ethanwillis | 7 hours ago
michaelt | 7 hours ago
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.
ryandrake | 3 hours ago
We should try to separate "self driving" from "owned and operated by someone else." One is good and one is very bad.
pc86 | 6 hours ago
Private surveillance that immediately sends any and all crimes to law enforcement is indistinguishable from government surveillance and should treated the same way.
sroussey | 6 hours ago
Don’t use Snapchat then…
https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-...
monster_truck | 9 hours ago
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
mplanchard | 9 hours ago
nradov | 9 hours ago
MrDrMcCoy | 8 hours ago
monster_truck | an hour ago
anon84873628 | 9 hours ago
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.
a4isms | 7 hours ago
Everyone who got out of that decade alive and with at most minimal brain damage thinks that we're too obsessed with safety today.
;-)
gosub100 | 6 hours ago
pc86 | 6 hours ago
monster_truck | an hour ago
a34729t | 6 hours ago
stymaar | 9 hours ago
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.
ifwinterco | 7 hours ago
People do definitely use regular taxis to transport both drugs and weapons sometimes
tecoholic | 4 hours ago
Arainach | 4 hours ago
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.
m4rtink | an hour ago
People just dont vadalize stuff - there are reasons for that that need to be fixed, not adding even more spying.
krisbolton | 12 hours ago
ryandrake | 12 hours ago
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?
analog31 | 12 hours ago
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.
leopoldj | 11 hours ago
analog31 | 11 hours ago
stickfigure | 8 hours ago
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.
LorenPechtel | 7 hours ago
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.
juiceland | 7 hours ago
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.
pc86 | 6 hours ago
sajithdilshan | 12 hours ago
casey2 | 12 hours ago
stackghost | 12 hours ago
Same thing that happens whenever cops get new surveillance powers. They’ll use it to stalk and harass women.
cucumber3732842 | 8 hours ago
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"
stackghost | 8 hours ago
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.
cucumber3732842 | 5 hours ago
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.
stackghost | 5 hours ago
jareklupinski | 11 hours ago
you dont need a Waymo for that :(
lostlogin | 9 hours ago
Wayno picked a difficult market.
xyst | 9 hours ago
8note | 8 hours ago
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
willsmith72 | 8 hours ago
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
AngryData | 8 hours ago
willsmith72 | 7 hours ago
Unless it's against the terms of service of the private corporation
valleyer | 5 hours ago
AngryData | 4 hours ago
ryandrake | 2 hours ago
LorenPechtel | 7 hours ago
amelius | 8 hours ago
deet | 8 hours ago
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.
superfrank | 6 hours ago
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.
xnx | an hour ago
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.
tqi | an hour ago
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?
epsteingpt | 12 hours ago
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.
seanmcdirmid | 12 hours ago
anon84873628 | 11 hours ago
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.
ButlerianJihad | 11 hours ago
https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/16389431?sjid=166657...
willsmith72 | 8 hours ago
Why not? They can already take an uber. It's questionable which is safer
seanmcdirmid | 7 hours ago
PunchTornado | 11 hours ago
Aboutplants | 9 hours ago
You think “owning” the vehicle will matter in the near future? That’s cute
handwarmers | 12 hours ago
jplona | 12 hours ago
handwarmers | 12 hours ago
alt227 | 9 hours ago
mckn1ght | 8 hours ago
anon84873628 | 12 hours ago
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.
handwarmers | 12 hours ago
seanmcdirmid | 12 hours ago
anon84873628 | 11 hours ago
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.
handwarmers | 11 hours ago
"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. "
Simulacra | 12 hours ago
9x39 | 5 hours ago
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.
nbaugh1 | 9 hours ago
newhotelowner | 6 hours ago
kobalsky | 12 hours ago
Well now my biggest fear of riding a Waymo is not how it drives but getting my Google account banned because it misdetected something.
PunchTornado | 11 hours ago
kragen | 9 hours ago
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.”
Gimpei | 12 hours ago
adrianN | 12 hours ago
lotsofpulp | 12 hours ago
kennywinker | 9 hours ago
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.
alt227 | 9 hours ago
Public infrastructure has been run by private companies for a long time.
kennywinker | 9 hours ago
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.
luckydata | 7 hours ago
kennywinker | 7 hours ago
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.
singleshot_ | 12 hours ago
gruez | 9 hours ago
The alternative is having a driver in the car, which is equally intrusive.
kennywinker | 9 hours ago
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.
gruez | 9 hours ago
Half the ubers I've been now has a "you're being recorded" notice. Public transit is far worse.
kennywinker | 7 hours ago
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.
nbaugh1 | 9 hours ago
lemmetellya | 12 hours ago
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.
anon84873628 | 11 hours ago
hosel | 11 hours ago
kennywinker | 9 hours ago
Rebelgecko | 9 hours ago
cucumber3732842 | 8 hours ago
qball | 8 hours ago
cucumber3732842 | 8 hours ago
Corporate speak for "concealed means concealed"
globular-toast | 7 hours ago
benatkin | 6 hours ago
Or a kitty keychain...
analog8374 | 11 hours ago
yeah fuck that. also fucks self-checkout. are we so poverty stricken as a society now that we can't afford to pay cashiers?
gruez | 9 hours ago
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.
redwall_hp | 9 hours ago
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.
willsmith72 | 8 hours ago
JuniperMesos | 7 hours ago
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.
9x39 | 4 hours ago
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.
xyst | 9 hours ago
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.
harshreality | 8 hours ago
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.
bravura | 8 hours ago
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?
harshreality | 7 hours ago
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?
Ylpertnodi | 3 hours ago
Guns are generally legal in the EU, too.
classified | 8 hours ago
trolleski | 7 hours ago
Animats | 7 hours ago
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/
pc86 | 6 hours ago
Jtsummers | 6 hours ago
> 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.”
kittikitti | 6 hours ago
ChrisArchitect | 6 hours ago
Waymo reports teen riders for bad behavior and delivers them to the police
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48824010
morkalork | 5 hours ago
Rebelgecko | 3 hours ago
stuaxo | 5 hours ago
chronomex | an hour ago
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