Waymo reports teen riders for bad behavior and delivers them to the police

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-07-07/waymo-reports-teen-riders-for-bad-behavior-delivers-them-to-police

by pilingual • 15 days ago

60 31 15 days ago

sameers• 15 days ago

The car sent the San Mateo PD a report that the riders had toy projectile emitters (aka "guns," I suppose) they were using to shoot pellets at passers-by. It pulled into a parking lot until cops arrived. It doesn't report if it locked the riders in.

I was just thinking I want to try at least one joyride but no, now I'm not even interested in giving them those $20.

rolph2• 15 days ago

hmmm kidknapped due to a false positive would be a bit of an oops to try and rewind. its bad enough that the cops do it [just try and get them to give you a ride back to where thay took you from, even when they are told to cut you loose]

it causes real damages when you basically abduct and strand someone.

these "kids" were shooting orbees out the windows, so mischief on them, but get it wrong once and it could get expensive.

JumpCrisscross2• 15 days ago

these "kids" were shooting orbees out the windows, so mischief on them, but get it wrong once and it could get expensive

It would be a tiny settlement, particularly now that we have documented cases like this one where the policy is preventing real harm.

Like, if you're a kid drinking and shooting bystanders from the back of an Uber, what do you think is going to happen?

wmf• 14 days ago

You're not stranded... just call a Waymo.

dlcarrier• 15 days ago

Even if there was a way to remotely engage child lock, the front doors are still always unlocked from the inside.

fragmede• 11 days ago

The newer vehicles with the suicide doors don't have an emergency exit lever that I could find.

kylecazar• 15 days ago

I suspect they weren't locked in and stayed because they didn't know the police were coming to their location.

Locking people in a car, remotely, as a private company, for "bad behavior", would be a mess.

Schiendelman5• 15 days ago

I'm 99% sure that a human made these decisions after viewing the cameras in the vehicle, not that the Waymo vehicle itself decided to contact the police and park in a parking lot with these kids.

This honestly seems pretty ideal. In a dangerous situation, the only risk is property damage - there's no driver to threaten!

baranul2• 15 days ago

Agree. AI is not there yet, but it seems it is coming, and that would be scary. People will one day be in the scenario, where AI judges human behavior, and then decides what type of punishments to dish out based on it.

nisegami• 15 days ago

I personally think that frontier LLMs are already at the point where I trust them to be a better judge of human behavior than humans overall.

4d4m• 14 days ago

Your view is dangerous because you don't see how this can be used to harm you.

JohnFen2• 14 days ago

This honestly seems pretty ideal.

I disagree. A decent response would have been for the car to simply refuse to continue the ride rather than kidnapping the ne'er-do-wells.

That Waymo did this means that the hesitations I had about using the service are amplified by a few orders of magnitude. I'm not willing to risk someone at Waymo (or, worse, a machine at Waymo) making the wrong call and kidnapping me by mistake.

sidibe• 14 days ago

A decent response would have been for the car to simply refuse to continue the ride rather than kidnapping the ne'er-do-wells.

It seems that's what exactly what they did? Except also called the police which seems the responsible thing to do when dropping drunk kids off somewhere

ButlerianJihad4• 15 days ago

One time I was settling into a long Waymo ride (about 15 miles through traffic) and it was rolling down a wide urban street where a white English-speaking guy like me is distinctly a minority.

And I was playing Pat Benatar's "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" with the windows wide open, and waving at other cars, and singing along at the top of my lungs, and eventually, Waymo Support rings in, and the guy goes, "just checking in! Is everything alright there?" and I go "er... yeah" and he goes "OK! thank you bye!"

So I decided maybe there had been an external complaint, and I should perhaps keep the windows up, and the music down a few notches from now on. Especially as a minority in such a neighborhood like that one.

Schiendelman5• 15 days ago

Ha! I don't think there was an external complaint. I suspect that was the mic/cameras IN the car alerting support because you were loud and they wanted to make sure you were okay. :)

nojvek• 15 days ago

If you’re screaming for help vs singing on top of your lungs, it’s a minor difference. Worth a check.

thatmf• 15 days ago

As Benn Jordan pointed out, imagine what a hacker group or ICE could do with this. Fun times!

worik• 14 days ago

In my country (New Zealand) this would be very illegal

You cannot detain someone because you do not like their behavior, in almost all situations. In civilised countries

It is called kidnapping

tejusarora• 14 days ago

My main concern is the deceit, "[s]topping for mechanical issues". Nah bruh

Fedot• 14 days ago

AI is just a tool. The real responsibility belongs to the developers, companies, and users who decide how it's built and used—not the AI itself. Anyway, that's insane. But if they were trying to damage the car, I can understand why Waymo reported them to the police.

Waymo reports teen riders for bad behavior and delivers them to the police

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