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.
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.
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)