A January “burglary” of a San Francisco yoga studio in which the perpetrator used a Waymo self-driving taxi to convey himself to and from the scene of the crime remains unsolved five months later despite the number of cameras mounted inside and outside the vehicle that recorded every moment of the unknown male suspect’s theft of a stack of men’s yoga shorts from the small gym.
The problem, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, is that the Google subsidiary’s recording software automatically blurs the faces of every passenger inside and every pedestrian outside of the company’s fleet of Jaguar I-Pace crossover SUV models, rendering the footage useless. “I would think it would be easier to solve in a Waymo,” the case’s detective, SFPD Sergeant Tim Faye, told the Chronicle. Yet despite the company’s willingness to cooperate, he’s been unable to identify the suspect, who apparently used a stolen credit card and/or burner phone to book the ride and make the three minute stop to Hot 8 Yoga in the Marina District. The in-store surveillance footage was at the wrong angle needed to see the guy’s face and thus the crime remains unsolved.
It’s not clear why the Chronicle calls it a “burglary” when it sounds more like shoplifting that, for whatever reason, went unwitnessed by the studio’s staff. Manager Farah Issa laughed it off, saying the incident “was quite funny. He just stole a bunch of men’s shorts,” so it’s possible that the time elapsed and non-violent, low-loss nature of the crime are holding back investigative progress much more than any technical hurdles and/or lack of cooperation from Waymo on a subpoena.
Still, maybe the suspect’s likely permanent escape from justice should be oddly comforting to civil libertarians fearing that the proliferation of invasive cameras and facial recognition technology would have already, in a city full of autonomous taxis, annihilated the expectations for basic privacy. It almost certainly would be a different story if the suspect had shot and killed everyone in the studio but for a low-effort crime and low-effort investigation, Google overcorrecting to at least publicly protect people’s demands for anonimity, building trust by letting some men’s yoga shorts get stolen.