Yet another Hacker News

Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had 'ghost gun"

22 points mmayberry 53 minutes ago 14 comments

MostlyStable 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

kelnos 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

MostlyStable 17 minutes ago | parent

I'm pretty wary of mass public surveillance. I'm much less concerned about companies monitoring the inside of their private property

bot403 9 minutes ago | parent

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.

_vertigo 5 minutes ago | parent

That's a good yardstick. Would a reasonable human driver call (or want to call) the cops? If yes, it's reasonable for Waymo to do the same

handwarmers 3 minutes ago | parent

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?

kelnos 22 minutes ago | parent

I'm really torn on this.

This particular situation, at face value at least, sounds like a good outcome. Kids had a gun, someone noticed, called police, situation handled without escalation or violence or something tragic happening.

But this doesn't generalize. Another incident described in the article was when some kids were drinking in the car and shooting toy guns. What if they hadn't been drinking? What if they were just holding toy guns, innocently going from one kid's house to another? What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids? These sorts of escalations aren't imaginary; they happen, and they end in tragedy.

The article is also a little cagey on how this "detection" happened. Was it a human spot checking cameras in vehicles? I doubt it. Most likely it was some sort of computer vision algorithm that flagged something. Perhaps a human was in the loop to verify and be the one to call the cops, but humans seem to be increasingly shutting off their brains and trusting the machine. (I recall a recent incident where someone was wrongfully arrested because one of the companies that run the license-plate reader machines flagged their car as stolen. The machine screwed up the image recognition, but the cops blindly trusted it and arrested the guy.)

What happens when cops are allowed real-time access to Waymo's in-car video footage? Maybe they even have it already. This is just more pervasive, always-on surveillance, and this will only get worse as autonomous vehicles become more popular in the taxi scene.

phoronixrly 15 minutes ago | parent

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...

anon84873628 4 minutes ago | parent

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.

epsteingpt 11 minutes ago | parent

Shocking this isn't bigger news. It will be strange what they get you for. Maybe car ownership isn't doomed after all.

At least a human usually has some judgment and discretion situationally.

I guess the alternative "Juvenile Driveby Shooting takes place from Waymo" isn't a better headline though.

handwarmers 6 minutes ago | parent

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)?

kobalsky 5 minutes ago | parent

> 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.