Despite their ubiquity on San Francisco’s streets, Waymo’s pearly white autonomous vehicles have an air of mystery about them. Like The City’s growing population of coyotes, these purring electric Jaguars may appear in any neighborhood, at any time of day or night and sometimes in packs.
Now, the Google subsidiary is hoping to preserve a certain amount of mystery around its operations in San Francisco by claiming confidentiality on some of the data it is required to publicly report. Specifically, Waymo is seeking to withhold trip-level data on its limited ride-hail service in San Francisco, including pickup and dropoff locations, time of day and miles traveled. It also wants to make information about its charging stations confidential.
The California Public Utilities Commission, the regulatory agency that oversees autonomous vehicle passenger services, is currently reviewing Waymo’s claims.
Waymo cites trade secrets and passenger privacy concerns as the main reasons behind its confidentiality claims.
“If Waymo’s competitors obtained access to Waymo’s trip-level data, they could analyze the data to gain valuable insights into Waymo’s customer base, fleet utilization rate and optimization capabilities, marketing strategies, and other critical aspects of its business that Waymo does not publicly disclose, causing Waymo irreparable harm,” the company wrote in its July 14 confidentiality request to CPUC.
“Trip-level data of such granularity could be used to identify specific individuals and track their movements even though the individuals name, phone number and address are not otherwise reported,” the company further claimed.
A Waymo spokesperson said that the information the CPUC is requesting would represent the most detailed public reports any autonomous vehicle company has published to date. Waymo willingly provides unredacted data reports to CPUC staff as required by regulations, the spokesperson said, but the company does not want the general public to see this information.
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The data reports pertain to Waymo’s “drivered deployment” — its autonomous vehicle ride-hail service with backup drivers in San Francisco — from March through May. Waymo is the only company participating in the drivered deployment program. In June, Cruise began a driverless ride-hail service in San Francisco, but it has not been in operation long enough to require a quarterly data report. Several other companies are permitted to test their autonomous vehicles, with a backup driver, in California, though these programs are subject to less stringent data reporting requirements.
“In general, trip-level data is very sensitive for all transportation applications because it could compromise the privacy of the private individuals who are making the trips, so it needs to be subject to very strict security controls and protected from public disclosure,” said Steven Shladover, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology department and an autonomous vehicle policy expert. Shladover noted he’s not familiar with the specifics of Waymo’s case.
Uber, Lyft and other traditional ride-hail companies are not required to report detailed trip-level data to the CPUC, which also serves as the regulating authority for that industry.
The data Waymo is seeking to withhold pertains to nearly 10,000 ride-hail trips in San Francisco from the beginning of March through the end of May. Most of those trips were provided for free, though Waymo charged a fare for approximately 400 of them. Riders are selected through the company’s “trusted tester” program.
Waymo reported 17 collisions during the quarter, including two with pedestrians. No San Francisco census tract saw more than one collision, except for the tract surrounding Islais Creek, encompassing parts of Bayview and Dogpatch, which saw three collisions. (A safety driver was present for all of these collisions, unlike several recent hit and run collisions with driverless Cruise vehicles.)
Waymo’s confidentiality claims follow a February legal victory in California Superior Court, in which the company successfully blocked a public records request for information about its technology.
As the global epicenter of autonomous vehicle testing, San Francisco consistently lobbies the CPUC for increased data reporting from autonomous vehicle companies to better understand how they affect traffic and safety. However, San Francisco can only plead its case: Regulatory authority over autonomous vehicles lies solely with the state.
