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> I never have to be concerned a Waymo hasn't seen me. Funnily enough that's exactly why I don't like them. Every time one rolls by me I know that tens of phot

by Lammy 1y ago

> I never have to be concerned a Waymo hasn't seen me. Funnily enough that's exactly why I don't like them. Every time one rolls by me I know that tens of photos of me and even my 3D LIDAR scan get piled in to some fucking Google dataset where it will live forever :/ Their site is even proud of it: https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/ https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/ section titled “Keeping an eye on everything, all at once” “The Waymo Driver's perception system takes complex data gathered from its advanced suite of car sensors, and deciphers what's around it using AI - from pedestrians to cyclists, vehicles to construction, and more. The Waymo Driver also responds to signs and signals, like traffic light colors and temporary stop signs.”

Manuel_D 1y ago
Human drivers have dash cams, too. Maybe without as sophisticated a data ingestion system as google, but they could theoretically put their dashcam footage on youtube if they wanted to.
- Lammy 1y ago
  I will be sure to think of that the next time I see a human driver whose car has 29 dash cams, 5 lidars, 4 radars, and is using four H100s to process all of its realtime images of me: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6-billion-round-and-details-of-the-ai-used/ https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6...
  - XorNot 1y ago
    What is someone doing with all that which they can't do with front and back dashcams?
    - sokoloff 1y ago
      Correlation of data across time and other cars in the fleet.
  - Manuel_D 1y ago
    A ring camera can do image recognition and store durations of video where a person is in frame. I'm not sure what the privacy difference is between these two. Is lidar and radar recording that much more of a privacy concern than video recording. I'm pretty sure between traffic cameras and security cameras lots of commuters on th street are being filmed. With or without Waymos
    - BobaFloutist 1y ago
      Frankly I'm not ok with Ring cameras with a field of view extending past the property line either
  - rpastuszak 1y ago
    Yeah, I mean it’s apples and a two trillion dollar adtech business. I don’t understand why so many comments here are missing the context
- SequoiaHope 1y ago
  What bothers me regarding surveillance and self driving cars is that an executive sympathetic to the surveillance state could build a system that allows arbitrary surveillance of vehicles or housing by license plate or location. Eric Schmidt was a regular visitor of The Pentagon and Billionaires simply live in a different world than we do. So while some driver could happen to capture me and upload it to YouTube, Waymo could, if someone wanted, have a secret operations center which allows surveillance of all sorts of people, locations, and vehicles. The same way that AT&T had a secret NSA closet that split off major fiber pipes, some data pipeline could have an invisible filter that duplicates data matching certain variables and delivers it to a surveillance partner.
  - tigroferoce 1y ago
    Wouldn't that would imply that Silicon Valley companies collude with governments? That's simply impossib ... oh, wait ...
leothetechguy 1y ago
Traffic isn't the right place to be if you demand not to be seen. If you do not want your data to be stored that's a different matter, but I'm still gonna look at you while driving to not crash, I have to.
dylan604 1y ago
man, the Googs already has a library of images of you. If there's anything about you that the Googs doesn't already know, I'd be shocked. the Googs probably knows you better than your therapist, because you've only shared with your therapist what you wanted. the Googs gets data about you from places you know nothing about. being concerned that a Waymo car took your picture isn't invalid, but man is it a tear drop in the rain of everything else the Googs is doing.
- mitthrowaway2 1y ago
  If "the Googs" knows so much about me, why do they keep showing me ads for products I not only have zero interest in, I'm also not even the target demographic for?
  - dekhn 1y ago
    Because all the smart people at Google who worked on Quality (Ads Quality, Search Quality, etc) got promoted and moved away from those, and the revenue is good enough that google can maintain its monopoly without improving the product.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      This is laughable. This isn't incompetence. The system was never designed to show you relevant ads that you want to see and would like to buy a product from. The system has always been designed to show you profitable ads. Those have always been and will always be a completely distinct set, with only coincidental overlap if at all.
      - dylan604 1y ago
        It's almost like people think that the phrase "relevant ads" means interesting to the person viewing the ads. Instead, it means you are relevant to the person buying the ad, so Googs shows you their ad. It means you are in the age range and income range, and possibly the geographic area that the person buying the ad placement finds relevant. The person viewing the ad is never relevant to Googs.
kajecounterhack 1y ago
Totally fair to be concerned about pervasive surveillance for the _potential_ of privacy violation. Not sure what to do about that. That being said, just speaking with some knowledge of current state: the scans don't live forever. At this point, all the data they collect is way too big to store even for a short period. They'll only keep data in scenarios that are helpful for improving driving performance, which is a tiny subset. Personally identifiable information is also redacted. You should probably be more worried about what gmail knows about you than Waymo.
- Lammy 1y ago
  True; I should have said metadata and not just data since you're right that the volume of raw images would be too big to store indefinitely. It's way more feasible to process the raw images and store the inferences, like number of persons visible in last 5 seconds, or dates and times a person who looks like me has been seen by a Waymo while my particular Android phone is nearby, or dates and times they have seen [my OCRed car number plate]. Flock is the same way. For example here's the Flock privacy policy from one of SF's fine local shopping centers: https://www.stonestowngalleria.com/en/visit/lpr-privacy-policy/ https://www.stonestowngalleria.com/en/visit/lpr-privacy-poli... > Video Clips captured by the LPR system will automatically be deleted after 30 days; although Images are deleted when no longer needed, the data obtained from the Images may be retained indefinitely. Should any information from the LPR Dashboard be needed to assist with a security or law enforcement matter, it may be retained indefinitely, in paper and electronic form, as part of the security file until it is determined it is no longer needed; in addition, it may be shared with local law enforcement who may retain it in accordance with their own retention policy. If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it. The one on their website is conspicuously labeled Waymo Web Privacy Policy lol
  - vitus 1y ago
    > If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it. For riders, there's the Waymo One privacy policy: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840?sjid=5254444386753770380-NA https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840?sjid=5254444... Beyond that, https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819?hl=en https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819?hl=en seems to be more relevant to your interests.
6510 1y ago
It's probably measuring the temperature of your bodily fluids.
hackncheese 1y ago
Definitely a big privacy concern, especially for people like you who aren't using the technology, and haven't consented to giving your data. But car crashes are the third highest cause of death in the US (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm). As a society, I think the benefit outweighs the cost in this case, and we can (theoretically) continue to make progress on privacy as a society. Seems like much more of a step forward than a step back to me
- Lammy 1y ago
  > But car crashes are the third highest cause of death in the US (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm). No, that says “Accidents (unintentional injuries)” as a category are collectively the third leading cause of death, and that category contains a lot of things. CDC “Underlying Cause of Death” dataset sez… https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10-expanded.html https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10-expanded.html https://i.imgur.com/4PB0xyC.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/4PB0xyC.jpeg - “Person injured in unspecified motor-vehicle accident, traffic” is the 50th leading cause of death at 0.4% of deaths. - “Person injured in collision between other specified motor vehicles (traffic)” is the 108th leading cause of death at 0.2% of deaths.
  - thelastgallon 1y ago
    Approximately 1.19 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes. Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5–29 years. More than half of all road traffic deaths are among vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
> Funnily enough that's exactly why I don't like them. Every time one rolls by me I know that tens of photos of me and even my 3D LIDAR scan get piled in to some fucking Google dataset where it will live forever :/ It's not going to be stored forever. That would be incredibly expensive. Those cars are taking in TB of information each daily. Scale that to 10s of millions of cars. It's just not going to happen. Maybe an ultra compressed representation of you that shares maybe 1 bit in 1 weight somewhere in a NN will live forever. Maybe.
- Lammy 1y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863276
- echoangle 1y ago
  > Scale that to 10s of millions of cars. Don’t they currently have less than 1000 cars? I don’t think they will keep every recording forever but technically, they still could at the current scale.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
    That's still close to an Exabyte of data per year... They have plans to grow 1000s of times this size.
vladgur 1y ago
See non-Waymo, human driven car? Fear not, your images and recordings will get piled on somebody's dashcam to do as their heart desires. I got a dashcam in my Camry recording front and back everytime i drive. I have no interest in preserving those images outside of an accident, but who knows what sommebody else will. We have no expectations of privacy in public spaces and ultimately I would trust Googles IT security more than some dude with a dashcam
bamboozled 1y ago
Good point
_bin_ 1y ago
Second this gripe. At this rate they're going to turn American cities into copies of beijing or london with cameras every other place you look. "Oh but the police will then be able to subpoena footage to catch criminals more easily" yes I don't want a world in which the government can instantly do that. It sucks.
netdevphoenix 1y ago
Do you dislike it enough to be happy with the increased car incidents that a human dominated driving world implies? Why are you so worried of something snapping tens of thousands of pics of your body (mostly identical) that don't tell much about you while the world's biggest ad companies know you better than any single human ever will. I feel popular western sci fi has made people fear companies taking some visual data of their bodies covering minutes at max while fully overlooking the dangers of having your behavioural data covering years at a very granular level. Yes, I know it's not a choice, both are bad. But I find people everywhere, including here in HN, are overly conscious of getting a few minute worth pictures of their bodies uploaded to some private servers while they are nowhere near as conscious when it comes to non-visual data about them (which I would argue mostly covers behavioural data imo).
mavhc 1y ago
Buy your scramble suit now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aS4xhTaIPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aS4xhTaIPc
xnx 1y ago
There are a lot more Tesla cameras than Waymo cameras. Tesla also has a history of sharing private/intimate video from inside the cars.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  And not just with law enforcement but internally for memes.
Zigurd 1y ago
There are somewhere between several hundred and a couple thousand Waymo vehicles per city being served. Even if that expands tenfold, it will be a small fraction of the number of cameras you pass by every day.

by Lammy 1y ago

Manuel_D 1y ago

Human drivers have dash cams, too. Maybe without as sophisticated a data ingestion system as google, but they could theoretically put their dashcam footage on youtube if they wanted to.

Lammy 1y ago
I will be sure to think of that the next time I see a human driver whose car has 29 dash cams, 5 lidars, 4 radars, and is using four H100s to process all of its realtime images of me: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6-billion-round-and-details-of-the-ai-used/ https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6...
- XorNot 1y ago
  What is someone doing with all that which they can't do with front and back dashcams?
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    Correlation of data across time and other cars in the fleet.
- Manuel_D 1y ago
  A ring camera can do image recognition and store durations of video where a person is in frame. I'm not sure what the privacy difference is between these two. Is lidar and radar recording that much more of a privacy concern than video recording. I'm pretty sure between traffic cameras and security cameras lots of commuters on th street are being filmed. With or without Waymos
  - BobaFloutist 1y ago
    Frankly I'm not ok with Ring cameras with a field of view extending past the property line either
- rpastuszak 1y ago
  Yeah, I mean it’s apples and a two trillion dollar adtech business. I don’t understand why so many comments here are missing the context
SequoiaHope 1y ago
What bothers me regarding surveillance and self driving cars is that an executive sympathetic to the surveillance state could build a system that allows arbitrary surveillance of vehicles or housing by license plate or location. Eric Schmidt was a regular visitor of The Pentagon and Billionaires simply live in a different world than we do. So while some driver could happen to capture me and upload it to YouTube, Waymo could, if someone wanted, have a secret operations center which allows surveillance of all sorts of people, locations, and vehicles. The same way that AT&T had a secret NSA closet that split off major fiber pipes, some data pipeline could have an invisible filter that duplicates data matching certain variables and delivers it to a surveillance partner.
- tigroferoce 1y ago
  Wouldn't that would imply that Silicon Valley companies collude with governments? That's simply impossib ... oh, wait ...

leothetechguy 1y ago

Traffic isn't the right place to be if you demand not to be seen. If you do not want your data to be stored that's a different matter, but I'm still gonna look at you while driving to not crash, I have to.

dylan604 1y ago

man, the Googs already has a library of images of you. If there's anything about you that the Googs doesn't already know, I'd be shocked. the Googs probably knows you better than your therapist, because you've only shared with your therapist what you wanted. the Googs gets data about you from places you know nothing about. being concerned that a Waymo car took your picture isn't invalid, but man is it a tear drop in the rain of everything else the Googs is doing.

mitthrowaway2 1y ago
If "the Googs" knows so much about me, why do they keep showing me ads for products I not only have zero interest in, I'm also not even the target demographic for?
- dekhn 1y ago
  Because all the smart people at Google who worked on Quality (Ads Quality, Search Quality, etc) got promoted and moved away from those, and the revenue is good enough that google can maintain its monopoly without improving the product.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    This is laughable. This isn't incompetence. The system was never designed to show you relevant ads that you want to see and would like to buy a product from. The system has always been designed to show you profitable ads. Those have always been and will always be a completely distinct set, with only coincidental overlap if at all.
    - dylan604 1y ago
      It's almost like people think that the phrase "relevant ads" means interesting to the person viewing the ads. Instead, it means you are relevant to the person buying the ad, so Googs shows you their ad. It means you are in the age range and income range, and possibly the geographic area that the person buying the ad placement finds relevant. The person viewing the ad is never relevant to Googs.

kajecounterhack 1y ago

Totally fair to be concerned about pervasive surveillance for the _potential_ of privacy violation. Not sure what to do about that. That being said, just speaking with some knowledge of current state: the scans don't live forever. At this point, all the data they collect is way too big to store even for a short period. They'll only keep data in scenarios that are helpful for improving driving performance, which is a tiny subset. Personally identifiable information is also redacted. You should probably be more worried about what gmail knows about you than Waymo.

Lammy 1y ago
True; I should have said metadata and not just data since you're right that the volume of raw images would be too big to store indefinitely. It's way more feasible to process the raw images and store the inferences, like number of persons visible in last 5 seconds, or dates and times a person who looks like me has been seen by a Waymo while my particular Android phone is nearby, or dates and times they have seen [my OCRed car number plate]. Flock is the same way. For example here's the Flock privacy policy from one of SF's fine local shopping centers: https://www.stonestowngalleria.com/en/visit/lpr-privacy-policy/ https://www.stonestowngalleria.com/en/visit/lpr-privacy-poli... > Video Clips captured by the LPR system will automatically be deleted after 30 days; although Images are deleted when no longer needed, the data obtained from the Images may be retained indefinitely. Should any information from the LPR Dashboard be needed to assist with a security or law enforcement matter, it may be retained indefinitely, in paper and electronic form, as part of the security file until it is determined it is no longer needed; in addition, it may be shared with local law enforcement who may retain it in accordance with their own retention policy. If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it. The one on their website is conspicuously labeled Waymo Web Privacy Policy lol
- vitus 1y ago
  > If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it. For riders, there's the Waymo One privacy policy: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840?sjid=5254444386753770380-NA https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840?sjid=5254444... Beyond that, https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819?hl=en https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819?hl=en seems to be more relevant to your interests.

6510 1y ago

It's probably measuring the temperature of your bodily fluids.

hackncheese 1y ago

Definitely a big privacy concern, especially for people like you who aren't using the technology, and haven't consented to giving your data. But car crashes are the third highest cause of death in the US (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm). As a society, I think the benefit outweighs the cost in this case, and we can (theoretically) continue to make progress on privacy as a society. Seems like much more of a step forward than a step back to me

Lammy 1y ago
> But car crashes are the third highest cause of death in the US (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm). No, that says “Accidents (unintentional injuries)” as a category are collectively the third leading cause of death, and that category contains a lot of things. CDC “Underlying Cause of Death” dataset sez… https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10-expanded.html https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10-expanded.html https://i.imgur.com/4PB0xyC.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/4PB0xyC.jpeg - “Person injured in unspecified motor-vehicle accident, traffic” is the 50th leading cause of death at 0.4% of deaths. - “Person injured in collision between other specified motor vehicles (traffic)” is the 108th leading cause of death at 0.2% of deaths.
- thelastgallon 1y ago
  Approximately 1.19 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes. Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5–29 years. More than half of all road traffic deaths are among vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

> Funnily enough that's exactly why I don't like them. Every time one rolls by me I know that tens of photos of me and even my 3D LIDAR scan get piled in to some fucking Google dataset where it will live forever :/ It's not going to be stored forever. That would be incredibly expensive. Those cars are taking in TB of information each daily. Scale that to 10s of millions of cars. It's just not going to happen. Maybe an ultra compressed representation of you that shares maybe 1 bit in 1 weight somewhere in a NN will live forever. Maybe.

Lammy 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863276
echoangle 1y ago
> Scale that to 10s of millions of cars. Don’t they currently have less than 1000 cars? I don’t think they will keep every recording forever but technically, they still could at the current scale.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  That's still close to an Exabyte of data per year... They have plans to grow 1000s of times this size.

vladgur 1y ago

See non-Waymo, human driven car? Fear not, your images and recordings will get piled on somebody's dashcam to do as their heart desires. I got a dashcam in my Camry recording front and back everytime i drive. I have no interest in preserving those images outside of an accident, but who knows what sommebody else will. We have no expectations of privacy in public spaces and ultimately I would trust Googles IT security more than some dude with a dashcam

bamboozled 1y ago

Good point

_bin_ 1y ago

Second this gripe. At this rate they're going to turn American cities into copies of beijing or london with cameras every other place you look. "Oh but the police will then be able to subpoena footage to catch criminals more easily" yes I don't want a world in which the government can instantly do that. It sucks.

netdevphoenix 1y ago

Do you dislike it enough to be happy with the increased car incidents that a human dominated driving world implies? Why are you so worried of something snapping tens of thousands of pics of your body (mostly identical) that don't tell much about you while the world's biggest ad companies know you better than any single human ever will. I feel popular western sci fi has made people fear companies taking some visual data of their bodies covering minutes at max while fully overlooking the dangers of having your behavioural data covering years at a very granular level. Yes, I know it's not a choice, both are bad. But I find people everywhere, including here in HN, are overly conscious of getting a few minute worth pictures of their bodies uploaded to some private servers while they are nowhere near as conscious when it comes to non-visual data about them (which I would argue mostly covers behavioural data imo).

mavhc 1y ago

Buy your scramble suit now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aS4xhTaIPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aS4xhTaIPc

xnx 1y ago

There are a lot more Tesla cameras than Waymo cameras. Tesla also has a history of sharing private/intimate video from inside the cars.

kjkjadksj 1y ago
And not just with law enforcement but internally for memes.

Zigurd 1y ago

There are somewhere between several hundred and a couple thousand Waymo vehicles per city being served. Even if that expands tenfold, it will be a small fraction of the number of cameras you pass by every day.