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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, situat

• phoronixrly 4d ago
  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...
  • AngryData 4d ago
    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.
• anon84873628 4d ago
  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.
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  • graemep 4d ago
    A human driver would be more able to tell a toy gun from a real one.
    • jfaat 4d ago
      Probably
    • anon84873628 4d ago
      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.
    • mlyle 4d ago
      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.
    • smt88 4d ago
      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.
• krisbolton 4d ago
  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.
• ryandrake 4d ago
  > 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?
  • CSMastermind 4d ago
    [flagged]
    • gruez 4d ago
      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.
• analog31 4d ago
  >>> 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.
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  • leopoldj 4d ago
    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.
    • analog31 4d ago
      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.
      • stickfigure 4d ago
        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.
      • LorenPechtel 4d ago
        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.
• stackghost 4d ago
  > 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.
  • cucumber3732842 4d ago
    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"
    • stackghost 4d ago
      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.
      • cucumber3732842 4d ago
        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.
        • stackghost 4d ago
          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.
• sajithdilshan 4d ago
  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
• casey2 4d ago
  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.
• jareklupinski 4d ago
  > 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 :(
  • lostlogin 4d ago
    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.
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• xyst 4d ago
  These types of stories will be used to justify the blanket surveillance of citizens. It’s worked quite well.
• 8note 4d ago
  > 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
• willsmith72 4d ago
  > 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
  • AngryData 4d ago
    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.
    • LorenPechtel 4d ago
      The mere presence, no. The gun in the holster, fine. The gun in your hand, not so fine.
    • willsmith72 4d ago
      > The mere presense of a gun shouldn't involve calling the cops Unless it's against the terms of service of the private corporation
      • valleyer 4d ago
        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.
      • AngryData 4d ago
        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.
• amelius 4d ago
  I mean if you're using toy guns you're in for trouble. Do you take toy guns on a flight?
• deet 4d ago
  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.
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• superfrank 4d ago
  > 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.
• xnx 4d ago
  > 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.
• tqi 4d ago
  > 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?
• PeterStuer 3d ago
  The remote driver/observer has full access to the cabin footage no?