Totally fair to be concerned about pervasive surveillance for the _potential_ of privacy violation. Not sure what to do about that.
That being said, just speaking with some knowledge of current state: the scans don't live forever. At this point, all the data they collect is way too big to store even for a short period. They'll only keep data in scenarios that are helpful for improving driving performance, which is a tiny subset.
Personally identifiable information is also redacted.
You should probably be more worried about what gmail knows about you than Waymo.
True; I should have said metadata and not just data since you're right that the volume of raw images would be too big to store indefinitely. It's way more feasible to process the raw images and store the inferences, like number of persons visible in last 5 seconds, or dates and times a person who looks like me has been seen by a Waymo while my particular Android phone is nearby, or dates and times they have seen [my OCRed car number plate].
> Video Clips captured by the LPR system will automatically be deleted after 30 days; although Images are deleted when no longer needed, the data obtained from the Images may be retained indefinitely. Should any information from the LPR Dashboard be needed to assist with a security or law enforcement matter, it may be retained indefinitely, in paper and electronic form, as part of the security file until it is determined it is no longer needed; in addition, it may be shared with local law enforcement who may retain it in accordance with their own retention policy.
If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it. The one on their website is conspicuously labeled Waymo Web Privacy Policy lol
That's still not really what I'm looking for. I am curious about a “what we keep, for how long” policy for the sensors on the outside of the cars like the Flock one I linked above.
Your second link does mention cameras and microphones outside the car but doesn't mention what they keep (full video? stills? LIDAR? RADAR?) or for how long:
“Waymo’s cameras also see the world in context, as a human would, but with a 360° field of view. Our high-resolution vision system can help us detect important things in the world around us like traffic lights and construction zones. Our systems are not designed to use this data to identify individual people.”
The “Our view on your privacy” section links to the same page as your first link, and that page's “What we keep” section is explicitly only about riders:
“We will retain information we associate with your Waymo account, such as name, email and trip history, while your account remains active.”
Right. I merely shared the closest thing that I could find, and as mentioned, the first link is specific to the ride-hailing service. Notably, in the second link, there is a reference to sharing information with law enforcement, but it's generally lacking in details.
It's Google we're talking about. In no way do I trust them to take pictures of me using their city-wide camera network and not use face/body recognition to keep track of where I go, for the purposes of targeting advertisement.
People are able to get their very boring suburban house that you can find pictures of the interior on zillow of blurred for years (indefinitely?) on google street view. If they were so cartoonishly evil they would not let you do that.
I agree in principle that a privately run company could use information in nefarious ways internally, and that barring any additional knowledge you should not trust them.
That being said, I have an anecdote as a former googler: the reality with Google though is very thoughtful and favorable for users if you ask Googlers who've worked on their software products. There are audit trails that can result in instant termination if it's determined that you accessed data without proper business justification. I've known an engineer who was fired for an insufficiently justified user lookup (and later re-hired when they did a deeper look -- hilariously they made this person go through orientation again).
And safeguards / approvals required to access data, so it's not just any joe shmoe who can access the data. Wanna use some data from another Google product for your Google product? You're SOL in most cases. Even accessing training data sourced from youtube videos was so difficult that people grumbled "if I were outside of Google at OpenAI or something I'd have an easier time getting hold of youtube videos -- I'd just scrape them."
This isn't to say any of this is a fair thing to make decisions on for most people, because companies change and welp how do you actually know they're doing the right thing? Imo stronger industry-wide regulations would actually help Google because they already built so much infra to support this stuff, and forcing everyone else to spend energy getting on their level would be a competitive advantage.
The impression I have, as an outsider, is that Google hoovers up all information available to them and uses it as input to various algorithms and ML models for targeted advertising. I'm sure individual Google employees are as thoughtful as you say, but I don't think the organization views itself as it users' "enemy" or as something which its uses should be protected from.
I'm not afraid of employees at Google or random Google divisions obtaining unauthorised access to information at me, it's not about that. I'm certain that there's very little data that the targeted advertising part of Google can't access.
Honest question - what's the harm in being targeted by ads? Is it just scrolling youtube more often than you should? Or is there a nefarious side that I'm failing to consider?
For me the thing I hate about location tracking and the ilk is primarily about its harmful externalities (e.g. put into use by gov't, abusive users, or by Google for anticompetitive reasons), not targeted advertising itself.
I find it disgusting that our society invests so much effort into manipulating everyone, companies spend billions on armies of psychologists, computer science experts and data centres whose only job is to manipulate people into buying things they don't need. Targeted advertising is even more disgusting than non-targeted advertising, because there you're trying to find an individual person's weaknesses for more effective manipulation. It's simply evil.
That, and the existence of targeted advertising incentivises collecting and correlating as much data about people all the time. If it wasn't for targeted ads, I'm sure that Google would've actually just used data from their city-wide surveillance networks for improving their cars (at least until a government would've asked for the data, which is also an issue). But with targeted ads in the mix, there's a huge incentive to collect it and correlate it with all the other data Google has, which is creepy.
I guess. But bringing new products to market requires distribution, and do you have a better way for people to crack that? Targeted advertising through say, Instagram, has enabled a lot of small businesses whom would otherwise struggle to aggregate demand.
So it's not like pure evil. In many cases there's a service being provided to match users to products they want / that don't suck.
> with targeted ads in the mix, there's a huge incentive to collect it and correlate it with all the other data Google has, which is creepy.
Strongly agree that in theory this shit can be used nefariously. That said, Google is far from the scariest of the bunch despite being the biggest. Telecom for example wants to deep inspect your network packets, and they can tell where you are physically today, anywhere in the country without even having cameras driving around 5 US cities.
Stronger regulations around data rights and privacy have been proven to work by the EU. I don't really see another solution apart from a legislative one.
That being said, just speaking with some knowledge of current state: the scans don't live forever. At this point, all the data they collect is way too big to store even for a short period. They'll only keep data in scenarios that are helpful for improving driving performance, which is a tiny subset.
Personally identifiable information is also redacted.
You should probably be more worried about what gmail knows about you than Waymo.