Extreme silly example to make my point:
DMV: "What does your car do to avoid running people over"
Waymo: "Its a trade secret, sorry".
* New law gets passed
DMV: "Ok now tell us"
Waymo: "Ok well...it honks the horn automatically and gives the person 5 seconds to get out the way. We believe that should be sufficient for the majority of cases and if you're too stupid to move, well...natural selection ftw."
DMV: "..............really? that's crazy...it should really be more like...10 seconds."
DMV: "What does your car do to avoid running people over? This is a confidential process so that you can be as specific as possible in the name of public safety."
Waymo: "[REDACTED]"
Anonymous third party: FOIA request
Waymo: "WTF?"
DMV: "You can sue us to stop us from responding to this FOIA request. Please do."
Waymo: "OK"
It would. And it would also require an extreme leap of logic to go from "companies developing car technology with direct effect on road safety should be as public as possible" to "do you want to expose where you drove your car"
One example that would seem more important is Pfizer et al and the vaccine trial data, but more generally applications to the FDA
Absolutely. Also the "we in EU have a secret deal with Pfizer to buy vaccines, this is not public info"
For this context though I agree, we as a society should have the right to inspect any algorithm that makes safety or life altering decisions (looking at you "AI" judges) about your person or in public spaces you might reasonably occupy.
I do think data used by an algorithm, or even potentially data that was used to train an algorithm should have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The trained weights do become part of the algorithm in my humble opinion, and that does potentially lead to leakage about the source data, but that doesn't justify not allowing inspection of the algorithm.