Serve Robotics, which delivers food for Uber Eats, provided footage filmed by at least one of its robots to the LAPD as evidence in a criminal case. The emails show the robots, which are a constant sight in the city, can be used for surveillance.
The specific incident in question was a grand larceny case where two men tried (and failed) to steal a robot owned and operated by Serve Robotics, which ultimately wants to deploy “up to 2,000 robots” to deliver food for UberEats in Los Angeles. The suspects were arrested and convicted.
So it wasn’t like some incidental crime that happened to be filmed by the robot, they were literally trying to steal the robot. I mean… of course the victims provided the police with the evidence they had to help catch and convict the people who tried to rob them? This is like a hit-and-run victim giving the police their dash cam footage.
The videos of people breaking them, riding them, humping them, stealing food out of them, is so fucking on point about how some of our behavior. Why would any company trust that these things would not get fucked with?
With emergent tech you ALWAYS have to look at who’s interested.
I don’t have facts, but I’d like to think it’s more the low and middle class who use services like Doordash and UberEats.
I can imagine them soon introducing a way to “verify” the correct customer by doing a facial scan.
Suddenly cops are allowed to use the scanning and live feeds from these robots on the streets to keep an eye on persons of interest, and suddenly there are patrolling robots on the streets, that can grass people up without them even realising.
You absolutely won’t see the upper class communities with these patrolling robots around (saying it’s too oppressive!), so it becomes a tool to spy on lower socio-economic communities. And of course, any attempt to damage them is met with a fine, or arrest.
Amazon’s Ring cameras have already been used to provide recordings to cops. Those were private devices so the cops can’t just tap into them whenever they want. But a Doordash robot is fully exempt of that limitation.
So it wasn’t like some incidental crime that happened to be filmed by the robot, they were literally trying to steal the robot. I mean… of course the victims provided the police with the evidence they had to help catch and convict the people who tried to rob them? This is like a hit-and-run victim giving the police their dash cam footage.
Yup, we’re done here. Mods can turn the comments off now.
ya this is classic rage bait for those that dont actually read the article. got to that same paragraph and noped the fuck outta the article
The videos of people breaking them, riding them, humping them, stealing food out of them, is so fucking on point about how some of our behavior. Why would any company trust that these things would not get fucked with?
Oh they know they will, but they’ve chalked that up to being cheaper than paying humans.
How can one “fail” to steal one of these things? They’re the size of a small cooler. Just pick it up and go.
With emergent tech you ALWAYS have to look at who’s interested.
I don’t have facts, but I’d like to think it’s more the low and middle class who use services like Doordash and UberEats.
I can imagine them soon introducing a way to “verify” the correct customer by doing a facial scan.
Suddenly cops are allowed to use the scanning and live feeds from these robots on the streets to keep an eye on persons of interest, and suddenly there are patrolling robots on the streets, that can grass people up without them even realising.
You absolutely won’t see the upper class communities with these patrolling robots around (saying it’s too oppressive!), so it becomes a tool to spy on lower socio-economic communities. And of course, any attempt to damage them is met with a fine, or arrest.
Amazon’s Ring cameras have already been used to provide recordings to cops. Those were private devices so the cops can’t just tap into them whenever they want. But a Doordash robot is fully exempt of that limitation.
EDIT: confirmed, 2 days later. [https://www.404media.co/serve-food-delivery-robots-are-feeding-camera-footage-to-the-lapd-internal-emails-show/](http://www.the.com/ footage from delivery bots is going straight to the lapd)