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A San Francisco power outage left Waymo's self-driving cars stranded at intersections
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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Technology
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Easy. Give police the ability to remotely control driverless cars.
I mean, that is going to be a thing they will implement anyway, and probably not restricted to driverless cars.
If you give police a backdoor to control self-driving cars, somebody is going (to hack it and) use it to kill somebody.
You can already kill someone with a car without any hacking.
It happens every day.
The commenter before me described the solution, give cops an override, as easy. I wanted to highlight that it isn't that easy. Unintended side effects ought to be considered before coming up with seemingly easy solutions. And this problem is not dissimilar to the one about encrypted chats and law enforcement wanting a backdoor into that. If you build a backdoor, it's not guaranteed that only the good guys use it. And that raises questions about privacy on the encryption front or questions about abuse, safety, and liability on the self-driving car front.
I'm not arguing any of that. Giving police access to a car override would open up horrible abuse of power but that wasn't your argument. Your argument was that people would hack it to kill people.
I'm saying that it's much easier to kill someone by just driving over them with your car and claiming it's an accident. It happens every day and people walk away without any repercussions. No hacking necessary.