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Waymo called the cops on teen riders, raising privacy concerns
A Waymo robotaxi drives in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood this week.
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Heather Diehl/Getty Images
Police in San Mateo, Calif., posted Monday on social media that they had apprehended a pair of teenagers from a Waymo driverless robotaxi after the company alerted authorities to suspected criminal activity. It’s the latest incident involving video surveillance of passengers and others by autonomous vehicles — raising questions about the limits of privacy in such vehicles.
The Facebook post by the San Mateo County Police said: “Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!”
The 15-year-olds were allegedly drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns from the car, according to the police. They said Waymo’s systems detected behavior that then triggered a safety response, after which the company disabled the vehicle and contacted police.
Waymo’s cars, equipped with an array of cameras, microphones and other sensors to monitor passengers and other nearby vehicles, are becoming more common in cities across the United States. Experts say the detention of the two teens in San Mateo highlights a potential — but not inevitable — trade-off between privacy and convenience. It also questions the extent to which companies similar to Waymo are required to hand over private data, including audio and video of passengers, in situations where a crime is suspected.
NPR reached out to Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, for comment on the details of the San Mateo incident and how the company responded, but did not hear back. But on its website, the company says that as many as 29 cameras in its autonomous cars provide an all-around view and “are designed with high dynamic range and thermal stability, to see in both daylight and low-light conditions, and tackle more complex environments.”
“There already exist laws that govern duty to report or even duty to protect” for carriers such as Waymo, according to Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “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.”
That includes not just monitoring people inside the cars, but outside too. Take, for example, a hit-and-run investigation last year in Los Angeles. Media reported that the police inquiry was aided by video captured by a Waymo taxi that had a clear view of the crime. Critics suggested at the time that authorities were using the company’s vehicles as a mobile surveillance platform. And during 2025 protests in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns, demonstrators vandalized Waymos, apparently angry that video recorded by the vehicles could be used by police, although there is no evidence that happened.
In a transparency report, Google says it received nearly 290,000 requests from governments worldwide in the first six months of 2025 for disclosure of user information across all its platforms, including Waymo. The company says that in more than 80% of the requests in those six months, some information was disclosed. “Google carefully reviews each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases we object to producing any information at all,” the company says.
In an email to NPR, San Mateo Police Department spokesperson Jeanine Luna said that detaining the teens in the Waymo on Monday was “wholly appropriate” under the circumstances. “We received the call of a ‘firearm’ being shot from a moving vehicle,” she said. “Furthermore, the occupants were described as being possibly ‘intoxicated.’” she said.
“Being that the vehicle was disabled (the occupants had every right to exit the vehicle before police arrival, but they did not), a high-risk traffic stop was conducted to ensure the safety of all involved,” Luna added. “They were not arrested and were released to their parents, however, potential charges are still pending dependent on what the video from inside the vehicle shows.”
Autonomous taxis represent an ethical gray area
Robotaxis began to roll out across the U.S. in December 2018, when Waymo launched in Phoenix. These services have been used for less than a decade — so the norms surrounding them aren’t settled, experts agree.
The Facebook post may make Waymo passengers wonder what triggers a police intervention, says Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University. She has used Waymo’s driverless taxis and says ethically, the privacy issues surrounding them sit in a gray area. “There’s something about being in a car without another person that makes you think it’s private.”
“With all these recording devices, we don’t see them, [and] they’re not these obvious things being stuck in our faces,” Raicu adds.
That brings up a key issue: informed consent, Acquisti says.
“It is not clear the extent to which passengers … are reminded that when they step into the car, that they are being monitored, and most likely they are not told in its entirety how the data will be used,” he says.
Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity and privacy expert and professor at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, believes that Waymo does have a compelling interest in protecting its vehicles. He compares monitoring a robotaxi via cameras to a human taxi driver keeping an eye on passengers in the rearview mirror.
“Maybe the driverless car comes back … and it has all of its cushions slashed, and it’s like, ‘Who the hell did that? Let’s go and look at the tape,’” Schneier suggests. “You can’t have sex in the back of a taxi, right? Someone would say, ‘Stop it.’”
He concludes that some supervision makes sense. In an Uber rideshare, he notes, “most of the time there’s a camera recording the back seat.” (Uber says on its website that it allows drivers to install such cameras for the purpose of “fulfilling transportation services.”)
Waymo robotaxis, while a fairly common sight in the San Francisco Bay Area, are still a novelty in much of the country. And many people are hesitant to ride in one, according to a Pew Research Center poll published this month. The survey found that only 5% of Americans had ever ridden in a driverless car. Meanwhile, 71% of those polled said they would feel uncomfortable in one, with only 7% saying they would be “extremely or very comfortable” riding in one.
For that reason, experts who spoke with NPR said they were optimistic that it’s not too late to shift gears on privacy norms and policies surrounding these vehicles.
Acquisti doesn’t see why privacy measures can’t be built into driverless vehicles.
“I would immediately challenge the notion that people have to be monitored,” he says, noting that privacy-preserving technologies exist and can be installed.
“Driverless cars are coming, but they don’t have to come in this particular incarnation,” Raicu says. “They’re still being designed and redesigned. It’s early days.”
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This year brings a new challenge for Armaghan Khan and many other teachers in the nation’s second-largest school district: Ban screen time for younger students, and significantly limit it for older kids.
“This is going to be a big impact for me,” says Khan, who’s spent his career in the Los Angeles Unified School District. “I would say about 75% of our work was on some kind of screen-based activity.”
As a science teacher Khan, has embraced technology. Not only because his students at Johnnie L. Cochran Middle School can perform large-scale experiments on their laptops — like a car crash simulator to understand things like Newtonian forces — but also because it’s his best option.
“My hands are kind of tied in terms of just what I can offer,” he says. “We have a lab space, but we do not have a lab budget.”
Many districts and a growing number of states have passed similar limits this year, but the rapid roll out in Los Angeles for teachers and the district’s more than 400,000 students is unique. The school board passed the resolution this spring: Starting this week, 1st grade and under will have no screen time at all, in November, the rest of elementary school classes will have limits, with middle and high school students following later in the year.
The new rules are a departure for LAUSD, which only a few years ago was a national leader in bringing technology into the classroom. Khan said he was surprised by the new policy and subsequent lack of guidance: “I don’t feel like I’m being set up for success.”
A rapid rollout
Pia Sadaqatmal, the district’s new chief academic officer who is overseeing the new screen time rules, says she knows it’s not flawless.
“There is no perfect solution on how to roll out to a school district the size of ours.”
She encourages teachers to see this year as a transition year and not expect overnight improvements.
“We have one of the first school districts in the nation to adopt a policy at this scale,” she says. “We know that we are going to be learning along the way at each phase.”
Students will have software on their personal tablets or computers that will keep track of the amount of screen time used per week. The software will not shut the device off once the limit is reached, instead it collects data for the district to comb through at the end of the year.
The hope is that the data gathered will help the district make tweaks to the rule and better understand what worked this year and what didn’t.
Certain things are exempt, like virtual textbooks, but teachers are still trying to figure out where everything else fits.
Filling the gaps
“I have more questions than I do sort of immediate … concerns around it,” says Kirti Baranwal, a teacher librarian at William Jefferson Clinton Middle School. This is her 28th year with the school district.
“I think generally screen time limits are good,” she says.
Last year the district banned cell phones, a growing standard for many states around the country. So Baranwal did a lesson on screen addiction, and asked her students to report their own screen time. Many came back with 8 or 10 hours a day – even with the ban in place.
“And I was like, when are you sleeping?”
Research shows that for kids who don’t have the resources to play on sports teams or attend arts programs, their time outside of school is occupied, often, by their phone. Baranwal, like Khan in his science classroom, thinks just unplugging or turning screens off ends up leaving holes.
We know that we don’t want students on phones, Baranwal says. But then, “what is it that we want kids doing?”
With the school year just beginning, the Los Angeles school district is trying to figure that out.
Former Olympian David Hearn stands with his attorney Norman Eisen as he speaks to reporters and protestors gathered after his arraignment at Moultrie Courthouse on July 09, 2026 in Washington, DC.
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Finn Gomez/Getty Images
President Trump’s Department of Justice walked away from the case against David “Davey” Hearn.
Prosecutors charged Hearn with vandalism in relation to peeling paint in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The charges have since been dismissed.
But President Trump can’t let the case go .
Trump continues to insist it was so-called vandalism that led to peeling paint and blooming algae on the National Mall reflecting pool – not a botched repair project as prosecutors ultimately concluded.
What’s it like to have the President beat the drum for your arrest?
This episode was produced by Jason Fuller and Linah Mohammad, with audio engineering by Ted Mebane. Our director is Kai McNamee.
Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning who also edited today’s episode along with Patrick Jarenwattanon.
For tickets to a live taping of Sources & Methods, NPR’s national security podcast, visit this link on or after Tuesday, August 11: npr.org/sourcesliveshow
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Dispatchers in Alaska Airlines’ Network Operations Center near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Joe Nicholson/Alaska Airlines
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Joe Nicholson/Alaska Airlines
On a typical day, Alaska Airlines operates roughly 1,500 flights, most of them guided by a team of dispatchers on the sixth floor of an office building near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport known as “The Hub.”
The dispatchers sit in a big open room, surrounded by as many as five flat-screen monitors that display real-time information on air traffic, weather, upper-level wind patterns and more.
It’s a lot to process. But these dispatchers are getting some help from a software tool called Flyways AI.
“It ingests all that information,” said Alek Mead, a manager in Alaska’s Network Operations Center, “and it really kind of puts us all together in a nice little package for the dispatcher to look at, take some options, maybe play around with some different ideas, and then pick the most efficient and the safest route.”
When Alaska wanted to optimize its operations, it turned to a small startup called Air Space Intelligence. Now the Federal Aviation Administration has tapped the same company to carry out a major reboot of the entire U.S. airspace.
The FAA wants to use technology — including artificial intelligence — to make the nation’s airspace more efficient. And Flyways offers a glimpse of how that might look in practice.
Alaska was the first airline to start using the Flyways system back in 2021 to do things that would be challenging, if not impossible, for a human dispatcher working alone.
“It doesn’t decide the route or waypoints that a dispatcher uses to get an airplane from A to B, but it does help provide suggestions that might be more efficient,” explained Capt. Bret Peyton, the managing director of Alaska’s network operations control. “That’s where Flyways is really excelling for us.”
Alaska says it’s saving tens of thousands of hours in the air and roughly a million gallons of fuel per year because of Flyways.
The system works by basically crunching data on air traffic, wind, weather and other factors to anticipate what is going to happen during flight before it does.
Phillip Buckendorf, the CEO and co-founder of Air Space Intelligence, speaking at a conference in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.
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Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
“It’s actually a really fundamental change, a massive behavior change,” said Phillip Buckendorf, the co-founder and CEO of Air Space Intelligence, the company that built Flyways, in an interview on the podcast Crossing the Valley last year.
Buckendorf says his company worked closely with Alaska to build Flyways from the ground up. The company has since expanded to work with Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, as well as the U.S. Army and Air Force.
“One of the hardest things is we’re dealing with users that have basically made decisions against static displays for like 10, 20 years of their career. And so now they basically make a decision against a predictive picture,” Buckendorf said.
Federal regulators are betting that predictive analytics can make the entire U.S. airspace work better, too.
“I think we’ve got a real opportunity to do something transformational with AI,” said Bryan Bedford, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, at an industry conference in May.
Bedford says the U.S. airspace is safe today because air traffic controllers make sure planes are separated from each other at every stage of their journey. But he says the current system is not as efficient as it could be.
“What we’re seeing is a system that is woefully unorganized,” Bedford said. “We don’t have in any of our facilities the ability to see the entire national airspace picture in a unified way.”
Bedford says predictive analytics can help prevent bottlenecks and congestion before they happen, with relatively small adjustments to schedules and routes.
The FAA is so convinced that it recently announced an $875 million contract with Air Space Intelligence to modernize the nation’s airspace. The company is tasked with building what the agency is calling the SMART system, short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories.
It’s part of the Trump administration’s ambitious push to deliver a Brand New Air Traffic Control System. FAA officials say the goal is to help air traffic controllers, not replace them.
But skeptics wonder if the technology can scale up from helping airline dispatchers to optimizing the entire U.S. airspace, which is the busiest and most complex in the world.
Bret Peyton at Alaska Airlines says dispatchers there were skeptical, too.
“It took a while for us to convince the dispatch group that it is what we say it is, which is a decision-making aid, and not a tool that’s going to run rogue and make weird decisions for the dispatcher,” Peyton said. “And it happened relatively quickly once dispatchers saw their true results that were pretty immediate.”
KNKX’s Izzy Ross contributed reporting from Seattle.
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