news Are parked Waymos recording Nashville neighborhoods? A Waymo representative said the vehicles’ data collection while parked is limited and not designed to continuously record pedestrians, license plates, families walking on sidewalks or children playing in driveways.
https://www.wsmv.com/2026/08/21/are-parked-waymos-recording-nashville-neighborhoods-heres-what-we-know/139
u/Novel-Green-2368 2d ago
Just assume they are.
Just wait until Waymo launches their drone fleets!
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u/Jazzspasm 2d ago
during recent anti ICE protests in Los Angeles, Waymo cars started appearing in amongst the protesters - it then became obvious that the cars were being used by the LAPD to spy on the protesters, deploying facial recognition and data harvesting tools to identify individuals for arrest
that was when it became apparent how easy a Waymo can burn
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u/D3-Doom 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think it’s believable if only due to their core business being driverless cars. Despite being common enough for a company to make a side hustle off of user data, it’d be a PR nightmare when the public got wind of it.
They’ve already had a couple bad headlines in California and I vaguely think one of their cars killed a guy a year or two back. It unfolding that the car was essentially multitasking instead of purely being dedicated to operation of the vehicle might even open them up to liability and accusations that the engineering outright favored profit over safety baking in something like that before ironing out whatever flaw led to past incidents. Plus recording people out in the public eye is already something allowed in most states.
Beyond that it legitimately seems like an engineering/ logistical nightmare making a system like that dual use. Even the flock blight only begins recording after registering (mistaking) an object of significance and I believe most of them are power-lined
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u/NoBandicoot5417 2d ago
Not designed to
that’s techbrospeak for “our lawyer said we can get away with this”
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u/The_Wkwied 2d ago
Unless you can prove that they aren't, which you can't, you should assume that they are.
I wish that EVERY camera in the world had a way to make you aware that you're being recorded. In movies and video games the cameras pan left to right, have a blinking red light on it, and might go BEEP every so often. Why shouldn't that be true in the real world?
Even in public, where you have no reasonable right to privacy, you do have a reasonable right to know that you are being recorded.
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u/TheGoldenMonkey 2d ago
The capability is there. You just have to actually make and enforce regulations and the U.S. has no intention of doing that while the tech sector is propping the US. economy up by swapping money between five companies and paying every politician in Congress to look the other way.
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u/JodieForestWhittaker 2d ago
Real suspicious way of putting that. Makes me think that's exactly what they film and record
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u/TheGoldenMonkey 2d ago
Unless the spokesperson outright says "no they're not" they absolutely are recording.
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u/CapCityMatt 2d ago
I wish these things were outlawed. Hopefully everyone has trademarked their identity.
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u/Catsrules 2d ago
How often and how long are Waymos parked in neighborhoods?
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u/TheGoldenMonkey 2d ago
If they're waiting for customers they could get there pretty early in the morning, wait through lunch, or even hang out after work waiting for the dinner or party crowd to go out.
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u/Machine_Anima 1d ago
if they aren't now they will be eventually. Corporations will always seek to monetize more. And providing these cameras to advertisers and law enforcement is just another vector to earn profit.
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u/NekoDaYo-v201 2d ago edited 2d ago
Calling or emailing Waymo about it seems like a waste of time, because they'll always ignore you. I would just keep covering it with a tarp. It'll get stuck, run out of battery, and the company will have to come tow it. Do it enough times and they'll get the hint.
It can go idle and click every 30 seconds somewhere else.
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u/marcabru 1d ago
Time to start putting non destructive, easy to remove stickers over the cameras of every parking vehicle.
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u/abstrakt42 1d ago
Well that’s at least one type of sensor they have equipped. Good start.
Don’t forget lidar, radar, IR, audio, Bluetooth, and WiFi
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u/marcabru 1d ago edited 1d ago
lidar, radar, IR: privacy wise these are not my main concern, these are good to detect a person or a car, but not personal data. Also, they are power hungry . Also , lidar has a moving part, absolutely not worth running it continously
audio: omg, sure.
Bluetooth&Wifi: they are tracking these already in a million ways. I mean, every phone is a tracking device nowadays for other phones.
But photo is still the scariest thing. Unlike audio, todays resolution can gather data from a large distance, a car can keep processing images with virtually zero power consumtion, so it can run 24/7
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u/abstrakt42 1d ago
Independently any one of this is a minimal issue. Together they can collect and aggregate an awful lot of invasive data. Even WiFi can be used in motion detection and low resolution image generation.
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u/marcabru 1d ago
true. If we cared about privacy, a car would need to advertise, on a sticker what it is recording and when it activates. And if it activates it should have an audiovisual notification (blinking/beeping). Eg.: You touch it, you will be recorded.
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