Two teenagers got into a Waymo in early September and ended up in the back of a police car. The robotaxi, according to The Verge, detected a violation and reported it. The passengers did not consent to being surveilled or to their ride becoming a police referral. They just needed to get somewhere. The same week, Apple announced it would soften its App Tracking Transparency prompts in the EU after competition regulators complained the scary pop-ups favored Apple's own data ecosystem over third parties. Two stories, one structure: consent interfaces exist to manage liability, not to produce consent.
The Surveillance Economy's Honest Moment
Waymo's disclosure is almost admirably direct. The company says it cooperates with law enforcement when it detects violations. There is no pretense of a privacy-first experience. You are in a vehicle owned by Alphabet, networked at all times, and the data goes where it goes. This is not a scandal. It is the product working as designed. The scandal is that we built an entire paradigm of urban mobility around this architecture and called it a convenience. A 2024 paper in Surveillance & Society by Kitchin and Fraser found that smart mobility infrastructure systematically produces surveillance data as a byproduct of service delivery, a byproduct that becomes the primary product in practice.
Apple's EU Retreat and the Consent Theater Cycle
Apple's tracking consent screens were always as much about brand positioning as user protection. The alarming pop-ups made Apple look like the good guy while making rivals look predatory. Regulators noticed the asymmetry. Softening the prompts in response to competition law, rather than privacy law, reveals the mechanism. This connects directly to what Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick's work on enshittification describes: the moment platforms optimize consent flows for competitive advantage rather than user comprehension, the consent becomes cosmetic. The robotaxi and the iPhone are on the same continuum, just at different speeds.