When Your Ride Becomes a Witness: What Waymo's Surveillance Powers Mean for Privacy

Two 15-year-olds in San Mateo got in a Waymo robotaxi, allegedly drank alcohol, shot toy guns from the windows, and triggered the company's safety systems. Waymo disabled the vehicle, contacted police, and the teens were detained. The San Mateo County Police Department even posted about it on social media with a tone that felt almost celebratory: "Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!"

On the surface, it sounds fine. A company protecting public safety, law enforcement doing its job. But dig one layer deeper, and you hit something much harder: What does it mean when a private corporation becomes a roaming surveillance system for police?

Waymo's vehicles are packed with sensors. The NPR article reports the company deploys as many as 29 cameras per vehicle, plus microphones and thermal imaging, all designed to see in daylight and low-light conditions. That's not just for safety inside the cab. Those cameras also capture everything outside: pedestrians, protesters, bystanders, the street itself.

This matters because the precedent is already being set. Police in Los Angeles used Waymo footage to investigate a hit-and-run. During 2025 immigration protests in Los Angeles, demonstrators vandalized Waymo vehicles because they believed (without evidence that it happened) the footage could be weaponized against them. Google's own transparency report shows the company received nearly 290,000 government requests for user information in the first half of 2025 alone, and complied with more than 80% of them.

The privacy scholar Alessandro Acquisti, from MIT, nails the real issue: "The privacy problems arise when and if driverless carrier companies used such laws or ethical obligations as a pretext for blanket, indiscriminate accumulation of identifiable data for unspecified future purposes." In other words, today's teenagers in a taxi. Tomorrow's protesters. Next year's ethnic communities that police decide to surveil. The infrastructure is already there.

Why This Matters for the Common Good

This isn't about protecting people who break the law. It's about what happens when we let private companies and government agencies build surveillance infrastructure without real guardrails. The Common Good Party believes in both public safety and actual privacy, the kind that exists in law and practice, not just on paper.

Right now, the rules are thin. There's no federal standard for when autonomous vehicle companies must hand over data, to whom, and under what circumstances. There's no transparency about how often police request this footage. There's no clear process for citizens to know they're being recorded or to challenge surveillance later. And because Waymo is owned by Alphabet, a company with extraordinary reach across search, email, mapping, and advertising, the data doesn't disappear into a silo, it flows into systems built to track and sort people at scale.

We also need to name what happened in San Mateo clearly: two teenagers made a dumb choice, and a private company decided to be the cop. That's not necessarily a company doing what it should do. It's a company deciding it has the right to make that choice, and we've let it.