Police are beginning to turn to robotic taxis, specifically all images captured by cameras, for video evidence to help solve crimes. While it may not be a trend yet, the evidence suggests that the robotaxi is the new testing ground for privacy advocates and law enforcement, especially as companies like Cruise and Waymo scale into new cities.
Driverless cars can have more than a dozen cameras capturing 360-degree views and reams of data as they navigate city streets. And that turns out to be attractive to government agencies looking for evidence.
For example, Bloomberg reported Thursday that it found nine search warrants that had been issued for images of autonomous Vehicle company Waymo in San Francisco and Maricopa County in Arizona. Waymo is also testing in Los Angeles. Cruise, a Waymo rival that has operations in San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Houston, was also served with a court order, according to Bloomberg.
All the cases seem reasonable: The police wanted help learning more about crimes ranging from murder to robbery to an attempted kidnapping.
“Autonomous vehicles continuously record their surroundings and have the potential to help with investigative leads,” a San Francisco police department training read. documentwhich was obtained by Vice in 2022. “Investigations has already done this multiple times.”
Matthew Guariglia, principal policy analyst at the nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), says the problem with police being able to intercept otherwise straightforward vehicle data is that there isn’t always transparency about how the data is collected and stored, and how the police can access it.
“If an autonomous vehicle comes to a street corner and parks for a while, how would anyone know, or not know, if there are policemen standing at the desk of a cruise operator, saying, ‘Move a little closer to that corner because we want images of a drug deal,’” Guariglia said.
Cruise and Waymo told TechCrunch that relative to the number of miles they drive, police requests don’t happen often. When they do, the companies say they only provide data to the police when there is a court order or subpoena.
“We carefully review each request to ensure it complies with applicable laws and has valid legal process,” a Waymo spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Waymo will analyze the requested data or information to ensure that it is within the scope of the order. If a request is too broad (asks for too much information), we try to narrow it down, and in some cases, we are reluctant to produce any information at all.”
Both companies also say they tailor the data provided to the specific subject of the order. For example, if a warrant requests information to identify another vehicle, Cruise can only provide still images from a video. If a request requires video, then Cruise could provide a short clip from a single camera.
Waymo says it blurs license plates and people’s faces to protect the privacy of bystanders who may appear in the images requested in the order. A spokesperson told TechCrunch that there are exceptions to this rule. The company could, for example, blur the license plate of an offending vehicle in the case of a hit-and-run, but the warrant would have to provide a detailed description of the vehicle.
Cruise did not respond in time to confirm whether he has a similar policy.
“Privacy is extremely important to us, which is why we disclose relevant data only in response to legal process or exigent circumstances, where we may be able to help an individual who is in imminent danger,” Cruise spokesperson Navideh Forghani told TechCrunch.
Forghani went on to say that Cruise may share information without formal processes in genuine emergency circumstances, such as amber alerts, medical emergencies, or active crimes, such as sexual assault, assault with a deadly weapon, robberies, active shooter events, and acts of terrorism.
But Guariglia says it’s a slippery slope. In recent years, Amazon’s Ring, a doorbell and home security company, cozied up to law enforcement across the country, giving police easy access to data from your network of individual consumer products. Guariglia says that several companies feel compelled to create tools that allow the police to access their data, even if the police are not their client.
“We constantly have to ask ourselves, what are companies getting out of this?” Guariglia told TechCrunch. “The same may not happen with Cruise (and Waymo), but the concern is that cities will offer permits for these companies to operate. What happens if cities start to look more favorably at companies that have intimate relationships with police departments?
I’m not doing anything wrong, who cares if the police have data?
To those who say it doesn’t matter if the police have access to the footage because they’re not doing anything wrong, Guariglia says, “You have no idea what you’re doing wrong.”
“People in many states where it was legal to have an abortion a few months ago suddenly have to live in fear that at any time, these states could retroactively prosecute people,” she said. “And then you start to wonder about all those months traveling to your doctor or mental health specialist, how much data was collected, and what law enforcement can learn about me when I thought I had nothing to hide.”
Autonomous cars don’t just work in cities. Autonomous trucks are also being tested on the roads with the hope of eventually starting commercial operations with a safety driver behind the wheel. In the United States, where there are now 14 States That Have Completely Banned Abortionand Idaho has restricted travel out of state in the case of abortions, there is a real fear that local law enforcement will try to use audiovisual images to prosecute people seeking reproductive freedom.
Abuse of power is a major concern and has precedent.
In 2020, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the SFPD for conducting mass surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters using the downtown business district’s camera network. Records obtained by the EFF showed that the SFPD received live, real-time access to hundreds of cameras and “downloading” of camera footage amid demonstrations against police violence.
Going further back, privacy advocates point to revelations released in 2013 by Edward Snowden, a Homeland Security contractor who leaked information about the PRISM program and the bulk collection of phone metadata, which collected data on millions of people without specific suspicion of wrongdoing. .
And of course, any time you increase police access to surveillance and put communities under the microscope, the people who will get hurt are already marginalized communities, Guariglia says.
Tech has tested the limits of surveillance before
In addition to Ring, US police departments also use automatic license plate readers to track vehicle movements and can use court-issued geofence warrants to search databases to find all active mobile devices inside. of a particular geo-fenced area. And of course, police can request footage from millions of security cameras at businesses and residences across the country.
Privacy advocates say adding continuous networks of cameras and data from autonomous vehicles to that surveillance cocktail is cause for concern. At the very least, there is the potential for violation of basic privacy rights. But the use of video footage for surveillance also opens the door for abuse of power, such as increasing reach or surveillance of people unrelated to the crime under investigation. It can also have a chilling effect, where people may alter their behavior or expressions of free speech if they fear they are being constantly monitored.
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