The $50 billion tech company is using cities as its laboratories and residents as its guinea pigs

Clockwise from top left: A Waymo parked in a red zone, a Waymo with its cameras rolling outside the writer’s front window, and a Waymo taking up three parking spaces in Santa Monica. Photos by Christopher LeGras

I start this post with an admission: Generally speaking, I am not a big fan of new technology. I never got into video games, with the exception of a brief obsession with an early online first person shooter game called Doom in my senior year of college and the occasional dalliance with flight simulators. As a Gen X teenager, when my friends were spending hours on what was then the cutting edge Nintendo Playstation, I was up in the hills hiking and exploring with my dogs. In the early aughts, I began texting extremely grudgingly, only as family, friends, and colleagues essentially forced me to. I generally loathe my iPhone, with its constant distracting alerts and my knowledge that it is in some way shape or form tracking my every move and utterance. You couldn’t pay me to wear an iWatch (is that even what it’s called?) or a smart ring, and I’ll eat glass before ever wearing anything VR related. I use social media almost exclusively for research.

All that said, I’m no Luddite. I realize that the doodads that I avoid enhance other people’s lives, and good on them. I just choose to live a largely analogue existence. To each our own.

One technology for which I’ve developed an active animosity is self-driving vehicles, and particularly Waymo. Again, I acknowledge that there are good, even compelling arguments in their favor, especially safety. Waymo vehicles have driven 33 million miles, primarily in Phoenix, San Francisco, and parts of Los Angeles. As far as anyone knows they have not been involved in any fatal accidents. The company’s figures show that their vehicles have been involved in 62 percent fewer police-reported accidents, 78 percent fewer injury accidents, and 81 percent fewer crashes severe enough to deploy air bags. Moreover, many of the crashes in which Waymos have been involved were found to be a human driver’s, pedestrian’s, or bicycle rider’s fault.

These are laudable numbers, albeit with a couple of significant caveats. Any large corporation’s self-reported statistics should be taken with a grain of salt. For years Facebook swore they weren’t hoovering users’ personal information by the terabyte, until they were forced to admit that, oh, yeah, actually we are. Also, Waymo (literally) has a ways to go before we can make an apples to apples comparison. Human-driven cars are involved in 1.33 fatal accidents per 100 million miles driven. Waymo needs to drive another 67 million miles before the comparison can be made. Lastly, despite its exceedingly limited operations, the company already has faced two federal investigations and a number of lawsuits related to unsafe driving and erratic “behavior.”

Waymo’s poor (robo) corporate citizenship

Which is where I have a beef with the $50 billion company (really? $50 billion for a company that operates fewer than 1,000 cars in limited neighborhoods in just three cities?) Waymos are proving to be poor robo citizens. Over the last six months they’ve taken to parking on residential streets while they’re awaiting riders. The company’s cars have developed a particular affinity for my block in Santa Monica. Up to 20 or 30 times a day a Waymo parks outside my living room window. When the electric cars reverse they emit a distinctive warbling sound as a backup warning. The engineers have created a sound that is pitch perfect to drive human beings insane. Sometimes they park ever five or ten minutes for an hour or more. It’s aural Chinese water torture. It drives my neighbors and I out of our minds.

Also, Waymos have less than stellar parallel parking skills. As a result they often take up two or even three spaces at a time. Sometimes there are two or even three parked on the block at the same time, taking up as many as nine spaces reserved for residents who don’t have off-street parking. In effect, residents who street park are subsidizing the $50 billion privately held company twice, once with their taxes that pay to maintain the streets, curbs, and parking spaces, and a second time with their residential permit fees. As the pictures above demonstrate, Waymos also park in red zones reserved for emergency vehicles. The manager of a local convenience store told me Waymos park in the red zone in front of the shop “all the time.” I’ve also seen them help themselves to spots at expired parking meters.

Two months ago I saw one with a parking ticket for violating street sweeping hours.

Who pays this ticket?

There have been other examples of Waymo’s disruptive behavior. Last summer residents in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood documented dozens of them parked in a parking lot at night honking at each other for hours in the early morning, keeping people awake. The situation prompted tech author and journalist James Vincent to write on X, “current tech trends are resistant to satire precisely because they satirize themselves. a car park of empty cars, honking at one another, nudging back and forth to drop off nobody, is a perfect image of tech serving its own prerogatives rather than humanity’s.”

More serious safety concerns

Some of the problems with the company’s expanding operations are more than annoyances. As the company’s operations have expanded their vehicles seem to have developed more aggressive driving behavior. Social media and YouTube are replete with videos like this one, titled “I thought my Waymo was gonna kill me.” Videos include a Waymo in Phoenix driving in continuous circles around a roundabout, and Waymos in San Francisco driving down the wrong side of the street, getting into a standoff with each other and clogging up a street, and interrupting a Veterans’ Day parade. Wrong way driving and ignoring traffic laws appear to be particular concerns. Last July a police officer in Phoenix pulled a Waymo over for driving on the wrong side of the road.

Last month, a Waymo came within a foot or two of hitting me and my dog in a crosswalk on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica. It also cut off a human driver in the process. I had just entered the crosswalk on the west side of Ocean when the Waymo began a left turn off of Washington southbound onto Ocean. It didn’t wait for me to safely cross or even for me to make it to the northbound lane. It wasn’t going particularly fast, but it didn’t yield. It was a truly frightening experience. The human driver and I exchanged incredulous looks

That same week, a woman in the San Fernando Valley posted pictures to Facebook of another Waymo that had glitched and started driving in endless circles. She wrote, “My Waymo just went sideways and I had to evacuate!!!” Also that day, a friend texted me a video of a Waymo making an aggressive right turn without slowing down (it did use its turn signal). On yet another occasion, I had to swerve out of the way when an oncoming Waymo veered into my lane to pass a double parked delivery truck. These experiences are not unique.

On my walk home after my near-miss, I happened to spot a Santa Monica Police officer parked in her cruiser. I asked her if the department had had any issues with Waymo. She rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, yeah. Sometimes when we’re on the way to a scene Code 3 [meaning lights and sirens] they fail to yield or pull right.”

It seems, then, that Waymo robocars are as just as prone as human beings to behaving like jerks and scofflaws. These experiences suggest that Waymo may be getting out over its skis as it grows. The company did not respond to an email I wrote about my near-miss experience and other safety issues. Which raises yet another problem: I contacted my neighborhood’s Santa Monica Police Department’s Neighborhood Resources Officer (NRO’s are responsible for responding to resident non-emergency concerns). He was great, and followed up multiple times. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to get anywhere with the company, which ignored his email just like they ignored mine. It’s one thing for a corporation to ignore a private citizen’s email. To ignore an official inquiry from law enforcement suggests the company just doesn’t care.

Surveillance cameras on wheels

Which is where the story of Waymo goes from amusing to unsettling, to downright disconcerting. The vehicles are equipped with 29 ultra high resolution cameras that the company reports have a range of 500 meters. Those cameras record everything within that — including residents in their homes. That means that when they’re parked outside your front windows they’re recording you inside your own home. They’re recording you playing with your kids or your dog in you front yard, and recording you walking down the street. Yesterday morning I woke up around 6:30 a.m. and opened my front curtains to see a Waymo outside.

This raises serious privacy concerns. The company is cagey about how it uses all those millions of hours of footage, how long it keeps the footage, and other questions. The company operates around 700 cars that operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Collectively that’s more than half a million hours of recording per month. No one outside the company seems to know how long the company retains it, but reports suggest it’s for a long time. Nearly three years ago, VICE News reported that the San Francisco Police Department had obtained video from Waymo and Cruise (General Motors’s now-defunct robotaxi competitor) during investigations. VICE reported that a SFPD document obtained via a public records request said, “Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads. Investigations has already done this several times.”

Of course, surveillance cameras, dash cams, and home security cameras have been facts of life for nearly two decades. Law enforcement routinely uses footage from these systems in investigations. That’s well and good: I for one think that privacy advocates overstate the threat of this mass surveillance. I can choose to not install a Nest camera in my home or a dash cam on my car. To the extent I’m recorded incidentally by neighbors who do have those cameras, by police cameras on the street, or security cameras in stores, so be it. We aren’t ever going to unring that bell, and I personally don’t believe I’m interesting enough for anyone to spend time watching me.

Waymo, though, is something different. If a human being parked outside your home a dozen times a day and trained a high definition zoom camera through your front window you’d be on the phone to 911 lickety split, and that person very likely would be arrested. Why should a robotaxi be any different? The company would argue that it has no criminal intent, but that’s beside the point. Americans have a strong expectation of privacy in our homes. Recording us in our homes, particularly with a direct line of sight, is a strict liability crime. Waymo is a serial offender.

It also ranks a ten on the creepy-o-meter. On the way home from the grocery store a couple of weeks ago I followed a Waymo for a few minutes. It didn’t have a rider. It just drove around Santa Monica, with no discernible pattern, recording away. Presumably it was learning. And recording every thing within 500 meters. For what?

As best as I’ve been able to learn Waymo vehicles’ footage all goes into a single repository, a sort of hive mind. Again, why? Why hasn’t the company invested in a feature whereby the cameras go dark when vehicles are parked, so they don’t unnecessarily record us in our homes?

For now, it seems like there’s nothing any of us can do. That’s extraordinarily frustrating. These privacy, safety, and corporate citizenship concerns are real, and as the company continues to grow they’ll grow along with it. It’s just another example of corporate America, and the tech industry in particular, giving average citizens a big middle finger.

Come to think of it, the cone-shaped cameras on the roofs of of their cars looks like a big middle fingers. Or maybe more appropriately, giant dicks.