I'm not sure if they really care about privacy as much as they do arse-coverage. The sentence before that one:
>The emergency drivers in the Waymo vans that were attacked in various cases told the Chandler police that the company preferred not to pursue prosecution of the assailants.
If I didn't know any better, this statement reads as if the emergency driver doesn't exist to Waymo. One could argue that they aren't the target, but nowhere else can I think of someone attacking a vehicle because of the vehicle, and not the one "not driving" it.
It doesn't matter why the emergency drivers attacked.
It's a hubris of Google Management that they think that they should be the ones who decide whether the victim (the driver) should pursue prosecution or not, and the company should help the driver in his decision, whatever it is.
It was very sad to see that the forced arbitration case was handled only for sexual offences, Google management has too much power over employees when they are assaulted.
Neither Google nor the driver gets to make that choice. The police decide whether to refer the incident for prosecution and the prosecutor decides whether to pursue it. Google saying they don’t want to pursue it carries only as much weight as the police and prosecutor give it.
If Google refuses to provide video and sensor data, it becomes difficult to impossible to prosecute.
If they do this in some but not all cases, that lends to suspicion that the denial cases could show egregious misconduct on the part of the Waymo software (I.e. avoiding self incrimination).
Unclear. Is the company actually forbidding or "strongly discouraging" drivers from pressing charges, or is it just declining from pressing charges itself?
I don't really care about the reason. If their fear of case-by-case liability/PR aligns with my fear of case-by-case government data sharing it's a win for both of us.
>The emergency drivers in the Waymo vans that were attacked in various cases told the Chandler police that the company preferred not to pursue prosecution of the assailants.
If I didn't know any better, this statement reads as if the emergency driver doesn't exist to Waymo. One could argue that they aren't the target, but nowhere else can I think of someone attacking a vehicle because of the vehicle, and not the one "not driving" it.