Over the past five years, many driverless cars have been actively striving to measure their vehicles on public roads. These communities are constantly wandering in the community. At the same time, various sensors (especially cameras) on the vehicle are constantly observing what is happening around, so that the auto drive system can assess the safety situation Unexpectedly, in addition to well-known start-ups such as waymo and cruise, the San Francisco police came up with a unique application scenario - acting as a mobile surveillance camera for the traffic control department
Motherboard obtained the training documents from the San Francisco police department through the public record request, and learned that the autonomous vehicle that can continuously record the surrounding environment is also helpful to help the police find relevant clues required for investigation, and such work has been carried out for many times.
In the three page guide (PDF Document), the police also introduced in detail how to correctly interact with autonomous vehicle, especially those vehicles that do not have human safety officers on their seats to take over the operation at any time.
The basic routine includes not opening the door in non emergency situations and not trying to force the autonomous vehicle to stop unless there is reasonable enforcement action.
In addition, for violations of self driving vehicles, although tickets cannot be issued without the presence of passengers, police officers can still write an incident report afterwards.
Finally, in the section entitled "investigation", the police also mentioned two key points and practical suggestions to pay attention to when collecting relevant information.
However, in the view of privacy advocates, the move of the San Francisco police is not only obviously cross-border, but also chilling. Adam Schwartz, senior professional lawyer of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said in an interview with motherboard:
I am very worried about this. Although private cars only produce basic data, autonomous vehicle will record huge data by capturing the extreme details of the world around them.
For this reason, we were shocked when we saw that any police department used autonomous vehicle as a new evidence collection data source.
Chris Gilliard, a visiting fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School, added:
As major autonomous vehicle enterprises continue to use public roads as test grounds, everyone should understand their essence, because they expand the already widespread mobile monitoring equipment based on spy technology.
Given that law enforcement agencies already have the ability to identify license plates, implement geographic fence restrictions, access smart doorbell images, and purchase location data, the San Francisco police move has greatly expanded the coverage of the already ubiquitous monitoring network.