Waymo refused to answer Wired’s questions about how many cameras are within its vehicles, exactly how much the shooting is maintained and if the company has ever delivered videos to the law enforcement officers or a branch of the military. Karp has noticed, however, that the company’s engineering team sometimes uses information from sensors, including video movies and other data, to perform simulations aimed at improving its technology. He says that Waymo also puts limits on both who can access data and for how long it is stored.
Waymo’s Robotaxi service It is currently available In the metropolitan area of Phoenix and parts of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin. In the relatively short time of the company by operating in the US cities, he showed the desire to meet the requests for filming of the police.
The agents who work for the Police Department of Mesa dell’Arizona and Chandler’s police departments have requested and used films from Waymos for criminal investigations since 2016 or approximately Until the vehicles were In their cities, According to the reports of the ABC 15 of Phoenix. The police told the point of sale in 2022 that it had used the movie for several cases, including an alleged anger accident. (The individual declared himself guilty after being accused of disordered conduct.)
In May 2022, two months after Waymo’s beginning Limited robotaxi operations in San Francisco, Deputy reported That a training document for the San Francisco police explicitly told the officers that “autonomous vehicles” have movies that sometimes could “help with investigative leads”.
Starting from 2023, Waymo had been issued at least nine research mandates in the county of Maricopa and Arizona, its main markets at the time, according to reporting from Bloomberg. One of the cases involved the murder of a Uber driver in 2021. While the San Francisco police declared that he could not identify a specific Waymo vehicle that was near the crime scene, an officer claimed that it was likely “that the Waymo vehicles were” guiding for the area “and had movies of the victim, possible suspicions, and the crime scene, according to a search Bloomberg. Waymo respected and provided videos, but in the end he did not lead to the arrest of the suspicion, which was sentenced for the murder in 2023.
Last year, Wired reported that Waymo had sued two people for presumably having vandalized his vehicles in San Francisco and had put films from the cars of the alleged accidents. (One of the cases is in progress; the other was fired last month.)
Waymo’s video recording and collection practices are not unique. All vehicles with autonomous skills are based on a combination of lidar, radar and video data to operate. Cruise, the now deceased autonomous driving car venture managed by General Motors, According to reports, he also gave movies to the police on request.
Private owners of vehicles equipped with cameras can also voluntarily turn the video movies to the police. For example, the police in Berkeley, California, received at least two series of videos from the owner of a Tesla Cybertruck who said that their car was vandalized twice this year, according to the documents obtained by Wired through a public registration request.
Additional reports by Paresh Dave.