A security researcher found a hidden unreleased feature in the Waymo app that allowed her to display whatever characters she wanted on the robotaxi’s top display.
Jane Manchun Wong, a well-known security researcher, posted an image on X on Saturday showing the top display of a Waymo car — officially called “dome” — that included her X handle and other strings of characters.
“I hacked my Waymo into showing weird texts like empty string, ‘wongmjane,’ and emojis as the Car ID, pls don’t ban me or patch it @waymo lol,” she wrote.
Wong, who lives in San Francisco, told TechCrunch that she was able to customize the characters on the self-driving Jaguar I-Pace dome by fiddling with the Waymo mobile app on her Android phone as she waited for the robotaxi to show up.
“The good old magic of messing around with the Waymo mobile app. I guess their servers didn’t validate the input for the Car ID from non-employees,” said Wong. “So no ‘jailbreaking’ or ‘rooting’ the car itself. All I did was change the Car ID to something beyond what it’d normally accept. A pretty harmless thing I suppose.”
Despite her pleas, it appears Waymo updated the app to stop riders from customizing the dome like Wong did. On Tuesday, Wong posted an update saying she was not able to change the Car ID anymore.
Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp confirmed that Wong found a hidden feature, and the company shut it down for regular users like Wong.
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“Jane identified an unreleased feature given her advanced Android knowledge,” Karp told TechCrunch. “We have restricted access to the dome display features.”
In 2020, Waymo announced that it added moving LEDs to its dome “so that it can act as a mechanism for riders to identify the vehicle day and night and know which vehicle is theirs when there may be more than one Waymo car waiting.”
The dome is also used to communicate with pedestrians that the car is yielding to them, or to cyclists that the passenger is about to open the car’s door. And the company has also used the display for marketing purposes.
