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Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had 'ghost gun"
- MostlyStable 21d agoAs 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.
- kelnos 21d agoThere'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.
- MostlyStable 21d agoI'm pretty wary of mass public surveillance. I'm much less concerned about companies monitoring the inside of their private property
- deleted 20d ago[deleted]
- pocksuppet 20d agoWhen they are one in the same, how do you plead?
- bot403 21d agoI'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.
- _vertigo 21d agoThat's a good yardstick. Would a reasonable human driver call (or want to call) the cops? If yes, it's reasonable for Waymo to do the same
- handwarmers 21d agoMaybe 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?
- jplona 21d agoI 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.
- anon84873628 21d agoAre you aware of BART Police or MTA Police? All trains have conductors who monitor passenger behavior and enforce rules/laws.
- handwarmers 21d agoYes? 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.
- PunchTornado 21d agoA 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.
- anon84873628 21d agoThe number of people expecting drivers to calmly & accurately distinguish between real threats and not is wild.
- UltraSane 21d agoI'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.
- parineum 21d agoWould 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.
- Arainach 20d agoPeople 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)
- mr_toad 21d ago> The waymo vehicle called the cops Waymo called the cops. It’s not clear if it was the vehicle, or a human in the company. I suspect the latter.
- kelnos 21d agoI'm really torn on this. This particular situation, at face value at least, sounds like a good outcome. Kids had a gun, someone noticed, called police, situation handled without escalation or violence or something tragic happening. But this doesn't generalize. Another incident described in the article was when some kids were drinking in the car and shooting toy guns. What if they hadn't been drinking? What if they were just holding toy guns, innocently going from one kid's house to another? What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids? These sorts of escalations aren't imaginary; they happen, and they end in tragedy. The article is also a little cagey on how this "detection" happened. Was it a human spot checking cameras in vehicles? I doubt it. Most likely it was some sort of computer vision algorithm that flagged something. Perhaps a human was in the loop to verify and be the one to call the cops, but humans seem to be increasingly shutting off their brains and trusting the machine. (I recall a recent incident where someone was wrongfully arrested because one of the companies that run the license-plate reader machines flagged their car as stolen. The machine screwed up the image recognition, but the cops blindly trusted it and arrested the guy.) What happens when cops are allowed real-time access to Waymo's in-car video footage? Maybe they even have it already. This is just more pervasive, always-on surveillance, and this will only get worse as autonomous vehicles become more popular in the taxi scene.
- phoronixrly 21d agoI 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 20d agoYeah, 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 21d ago
- epsteingpt 21d agoShocking this isn't bigger news. It will be strange what they get you for. Maybe car ownership isn't doomed after all. At least a human usually has some judgment and discretion situationally. I guess the alternative "Juvenile Driveby Shooting takes place from Waymo" isn't a better headline though.
- seanmcdirmid 21d agoGoogle 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.
- anon84873628 21d agoTeen 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.
- ButlerianJihad 21d agoAs of this writing, Waymo only permits unaccompanied minors in the Metro Phoenix area. The incident occurred in San Francisco, so it seems that they should not have riding without an adult. https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/16389431?sjid=16665774682959300202-NC https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/16389431?sjid=166657...
- willsmith72 20d ago> What I don’t get is why Waymo allows unaccompanied juvenile riders at all? Why not? They can already take an uber. It's questionable which is safer
- seanmcdirmid 20d agoI wasn’t talking about the kids’ safety, I was referring to Waymo’s liability.
- handwarmers 21d agoFlock 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)?
- jplona 21d agoI think there's a legitimate distinction between monitoring what's inside the car vs what's outside. Outside seems bad. Inside is probably necessary.
- handwarmers 21d agoThis is a good distinction. My main concern with Waymo is that we have no way of knowing if they stick/will stick to only monitoring the inside.
- alt227 21d agoHow are they supposed to drive themselves without monitoring whats going on outside the vehicle?
- mckn1ght 20d agoThat’s possible to do without also sending all the captured data to police.
- anon84873628 21d agoWell for one, so far they've only called the police on people who chose to use the service. When we have evidence that Waymo is contracting its external cameras out to local governments and allowing abuse, then we can criticize them for it.
- handwarmers 21d agoWhat 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 https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests
- kobalsky 21d ago> The company pulled the car over after detecting a “violation of our terms of service involving a firearm," Well now my biggest fear of riding a Waymo is not how it drives but getting my Google account banned because it misdetected something.
- PunchTornado 21d agoDo you know what a ghost gun is? Where is the misdetection?
- kragen 21d agoIn 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-surveillance-toddler-photo.html 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 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 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-warning-google-ai-ultra-oauth-via-openclaw/122778/4 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.”
- antibull 21d ago[dead]
- throwaway613746 21d ago[dead]
- Gimpei 21d agoI 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.
- adrianN 21d agoIt 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.
- lotsofpulp 21d agoWhat 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.
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- kennywinker 21d agoTaxis 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.
- alt227 21d agoTaxis, busses, and trains are all private spaces with cameras in them. Public infrastructure has been run by private companies for a long time.
- lemmetellya 21d agoWait, can I not carry in a Waymo? Found their rules page: "Do not carry weapons of any kind in the car" That seems... naive? Plenty of people carry pepper spray or a knife with them. Not even ever intending to use them as a weapon. When I go to the range, I travel with a locked case that contains my pistol, which inside has a cable lock. I couldn't take that through a waymo? What about some kid buying a goofy mall katana they are going to put on their wall? Like, obviously brandishing a weapon should be disallowed, but merely having anything that's a weapon? Seems fraught.
- anon84873628 21d agoI understand Waymo having this position for now. I also think it is reasonable to push them to refine the rules for the situations you mention.
- hosel 21d agoDon’t brandish your weapon and no one will know you have it. Obviously the case here.
- kennywinker 21d agoAnd make sure you don't brandish a mars bar too!
- Rebelgecko 21d agoIn 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.
- cucumber3732842 20d agoThat'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.
- qwerpy 21d ago[flagged]
- iamnothere 21d agoWhy stop at autonomous cars? New cars monitor drivers for “drowsiness” and have internal/external cameras. Why not monitor for guns too? Maybe they should even refuse to drive if you’re holding a gun! And why stop at cars? Maybe home cameras should call the cops if they see a weapon. Maybe your Apple Watch should detect if you’ve fired a gun. Brave new world!
- qwerpy 21d agoI’m a gun owner, but I’d rather start saving lives now rather than doing nothing while theorizing about all the ridiculous things that could happen.
- iamnothere 21d agoWhy not just immediately seize all guns then? I’m sure you’ll save a lot of lives that way! Better start now, no time to hesitate or consider the consequences!
- handwarmers 21d ago[flagged]
- Cider9986 20d agoGuns don't cause violence. Just look at New Hampshire–lots of guns, low crime or violence. Freedom is more important when we already have safety. People are trying to scare us into thinking we are unsafe so they can take away our freedom. We are very safe.
- dude250711 21d agoIt's an absolutely beautiful story! The only issue is a somewhat wasteful use of police time - Waymo should have taken them straight to juvenile hall.
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- analog8374 21d agoI 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?
- gruez 21d ago>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.
- redwall_hp 21d agoAs 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.
- willsmith72 20d agohave you talked to cashiers? many prefer the new ones. who are you protecting?
- JuniperMesos 20d agoIn 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 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.
- xyst 21d agoWhatever 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.
- harshreality 20d agoMaybe 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.
- bravura 20d ago"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?
- harshreality 20d agoWhen 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?
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- classified 20d agoTeens will just learn not to use the tattle taxi. Or hide their toy guns before they do.
- trolleski 20d agoIf a human driver did the same we wouldn't have this conversation.
- Animats 20d agoThere's no reference to a "ghost gun" in the LA Times text. It's only in the headline. In the text, the weapon is referred to as an AR-15. SFGATE, though, quotes cops as saying "AR-styled assault rifle also known as a ghost gun.” The "ghost gun" thing refers to guns without serial numbers. For an AR-15, that usually means something assembled from an "80% lower receiver", a part which exists purely to evade US gun laws. [1] It's not quite complete; it takes some final machining. This can be done by hand with modest machine shop tools, or there's a special-purpose 3-axis CNC mill to do it for $4000, available from Ghost Gunner.[2] (They used to sell a simpler device for $1200 which was only useful for the single task of finishing "80% lower receivers", but the current $4000 unit is halfway respectable as a desktop CNC mill. It understands a subset of G-Code. Nobody seems to use it for general CNC work, though. A good desktop CNC mill for $4000 would be useful, but they'd need to get serious about cooling and chip removal.) [1] https://gundigest.com/more/how-to/gunsmithing/building-a-ghost-gun-an-80-percent-lower-buyers-guide https://gundigest.com/more/how-to/gunsmithing/building-a-gho... [2] https://ghostgunner.net/ https://ghostgunner.net/
- pc86 20d agoAn 80% lower exists purely to comply with US gun laws. That's exactly why they're legal.
- Jtsummers 20d agoUnless 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.”
- kittikitti 20d agoI 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.
- ChrisArchitect 20d agoSimilar a few months back: Waymo reports teen riders for bad behavior and delivers them to the police https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48824010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48824010
- morkalork 20d agoDelivering sounds an awful lot like kidnapping..
- Rebelgecko 20d agoIn 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)
- stuaxo 20d agoSo, the real operator of the car in whatever country it's cheaper to employ people will have been the one that called the policem
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