I'm not a fan of expanding surveillance but the alternative of unmonitored transit seems worse.

Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain. Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints. Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure. Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.

These are just a few situations any human driver would obviously react to. And a modicum of detection and human review could solve in an autonomous vehicle.

I'm pretty wary of mass public surveillance. I'm much less concerned about companies monitoring the inside of their private property

People are awful when they think they aren't being watched, especially with communal or other people's property. It's why things are covered in lame low-effort graffiti tags, why bathroom mirrors have things scratched into them with keys, and why bridges over highways all have metal grates to stop people from throwing rocks at oncoming cars.

When people know they're being watched and there will be immediate consequences if they do something bad, their behavior changes. If they don't, they're awful. We've seen this for decades (arguably millennia, as we know Pompeii had graffiti too)

I'm pretty sure a human started watching live video from the car as soon as the AI flagged a gun. I doubt that Waymo is willing to have their system automatically call cops.

A lot of taxis have models detecting weapons and aggressive behaviours. I work on some models like this. I think they are necessary. For driver's safety.

Would you be upset if someone at the WalMart central data center called the local police because they saw someone with a gun in a Walmart at a remote location?

That's what happened here. A private company saw a gun inside their property and called the police.