Waymo self-driving cars face harassment, road rage in Phoenix area | Hacker News Reader

Waymo self-driving cars face harassment, road rage in Phoenix area

usatoday.com

20 pointsfmihaila5 comments

Their methods are absolutely wrong. But with that said, I don't necessarily disagree with all the sentiments expressed by these people. I don't want a company pervading every minute of my daily life. I can at least put down and turn off a phone, these things will be omnipresent. I've gone out of my way to avoid or disable every "always listening" or "always watching" thing I can, but this one can't be controlled.

Tech companies used to be about, "this is the future; buy it from us." Now, it's "this is the future; we will ram it down your throat until you accept it." This includes scooters dumped on the sidewalks, pushing into healthcare, facial recognition, amazon echos, and more.

This has got to stop. I hope nobody buys any more of this garbage. I understand existing doctrine of "expectations of privacy", but nobody expected constant monitoring by a private entity. Past that, nobody expected constant monitoring by a public entity, which is what is coming next and is most worrisome of all. If y'all thought the patriot act was bad, just wait: it's going to get a whole lot worse. Wait 100 years (maybe less), and we'll end up like Xinjiang or 1984.

There's a joke I've seen on the internet. It talks about how people in the sixties used to say things like, "I'd better not say that or the government will wiretap my house." Today, people say things like, "Hey wiretap, do you have a recipe for pancakes?"

> The incident is one of at least 21 interactions documented by local police during the past two years where people have harassed the autonomous vehicles and their human test drivers.

How many drivers do they have? That doesn't sound like a particularly high rate for a few dozen drivers over two years. Taxi drivers tend to encounter a lot of crap.

From another perspective, they created valuable data points for training the model. Great stress testing.

The self-driving vans use radar, lidar and cameras to navigate, so they capture footage of all interactions that usually is clear enough to identify people and read license plates.

Oops! They also have GPS, so they have a timestamped location as well as pictures.

next up: crashing speed cameras

Reply on news.ycombinator.com