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007
Field Note · 007
Confessions in the back of a car that drives itself.
On robotaxi ridership and the new privacy of being unwitnessed. Spring 2026.
Waymo passes one million paid rides per month, across three cities. The data on operational safety is well-covered. The data on what passengers do inside the car is not.
01 /
Operators report, and the cars record, that people behave differently when there is no driver. They cry. They have arguments. They call their mother. They put their feet on the seat. The car is not a private space. It is, however, an unwitnessed one, which turns out to be the same thing to most people.
02 /
Privacy used to mean: no one is watching. It now means: no person is watching. The system is, of course, watching constantly. Cameras inside the cabin, microphones, telematics, an audit log preserved for years. The passenger calibrates against the human, not the system, and so feels alone.
03 /
The robotaxi has accidentally become a confessional. Not because anyone designed it that way. Because it removed the only kind of witness most people have learned to fear.
The next decade will be full of small spaces like this: rooms where there is no human, only a system that does not appear to judge. We will say more in those rooms than we meant to. The systems will remember it. We will learn what that means slowly, the way we always do.