Incident 234: Waze Allegedly Frequently Routed Drivers through the Town of Los Gatos, Blocking Its Single Wildfire Escape Route

Description: Waze app was blamed by Los Gatos town residents for contributing to high wildfire hazard risk via allegedly routing weekend beach-going drivers through their neighborhoods, effectively choking off their single escape route in the event of a medical emergency or wildfire.

Tools

New ReportNew ReportNew ResponseNew ResponseDiscoverDiscoverView HistoryView History
Alleged: Waze developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Los Gatos residents.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
234
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2019-09-06
Editors
Khoa Lam
Google's Waze App Blocks Wildfire Escape Route for Residents Living in the Los Gatos Hills and Historic Neighborhoods
prnewswire.com · 2019

The Los Gatos Historical Society, which is an advocate for quality of life in Los Gatos historical neighborhoods, today announced a campaign to assist the town's staff in raising visibility with the federal and state government, with Google…

Los Gatos resident: Waze a 'death sentence' to neighbors in the event of a wildfire
bizjournals.com · 2019

A Los Gatos man is waging war with Waze, the Alphabet Inc.-owned routing app that he says endangers his neighborhood by diverting traffic heading to and from Santa Cruz on summertime weekends.

Jeffrey Siegel, a tech consultant who founded t…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.