Since I was recently musing about police cameras, here is an article about San Francisco police using footage from cameras on autonomous vehicles.

While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may one day offer, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.

“Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads,” says a San Francisco Police department training document obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. “Investigations has already done this several times.”

Vice

My first reaction was why is a camera on an autonomous vehicle more sinister than one on any other vehicle. But I guess the point here is that all autonomous vehicles collect camera footage, so it is a large potential data source for the police to tap. I am not sure I have a big problem with this. A Go Pro camera is kind of expensive, and I don’t have one. When a driver threatened to kill me recently when I was riding my bike 100% legally on a one-lane city street, I tried to pull out my phone and get some footage but it wasn’t very good. I wouldn’t mind at all if someone else had recorded evidence of that crime. There is not much point in my bothering to report it to police when it would just be a claim not backed by any evidence. But especially if the guy continues to harass me (which has already happened once) it would be good to have a record. I don’t think the guy is actually dangerous though, he is just an ignorant asshole at least when he is behind the wheel.