Tesla Model 3 is equipped with a driver-facing camera | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Model 3 is equipped with a driver-facing camera

electrek.co

33 pointsprostoalex48 comments

> Some might be concerned about privacy. It’s something that the MIT research addressed. The collected data was kept on secure servers and people could never need to actually watch the footage.

Yeah, because a system like that has never before been compromised... ಠ_ಠ

That's the kind of argument they have to make to the general public. What else could they say to justify the technological need for that camera to be there? People in general don't respond to facts most of the time. It's a fear-based concern and they are saying "there there, it will be fine". And it works.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-...

So, nobody ever goes in to manually fine-tune the models? Or do they just review individual frames and call it "not watching the footage"?

And apparently they trust every sysadmin, every researcher, and every programmer that they currently and will hire... Someone always has the keys to the kingdom (or the capability of stealing said keys).

And, that camera will be the first thing covered after a purchase, just like cameras on a laptop.

https://smile.amazon.com/Webcam-Cover-Laptops-Pad-Devices/dp...

Until the car doesn't start or "auto pilot" features don't work because the car's ai does not detect an "alert human" at the wheel?

You are being paranoid. When you purchase the car it will be matched to your implanted chip and it can get your biometrics directly.

Presumably you'd know about this prior to buying the car. In which case you can wait a few more years for full self driving car.

Here, a good idea of a product to sell on Amazon.com : a device that, applied to the camera, makes it think it's looking at the driver, while instead it's looking at some fake footage.

That's some pretty bad design on the part of the car manufacturer for a car to drive into pedestrians when someone covers an internal camera.

What about when the camera doesn't work due to defects? The card driving into buildings isn't an acceptable result.

What's the point of this, when audio is likely to be far more sensitive? I haven't heard of anyone covering microphones, and 99% of us carry one around 24/7.

Some people do threat modelling kind of like this: What are the threats I can stop? OK, those are my threats. I will stop them. All safe now.

It's also a matter of what sort of information is exposed. Video is something most people care about. Audio, not so much. The latter tends to be far less embarrassing/incriminating.

> Audio, not so much.

" Haldeman: That the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, “Stay the hell out of this…this is ah, business here we don’t want you to go any further on it.” That’s not an unusual development,…

Nixon: Um huh. "

Audio is far less embarrassing/incriminating?

A camera pointed at my face will, at worst, catch me picking my nose or something. A microphone will pick up all sorts of stuff I really don't want other people hearing. Audio is way worse.

Or: What is the lowest hanging fruit, err security threat, that I can easily counter? Scotch tape over the camera - check. What's the next lowest hanging fruit?

<tinfoil_hat> Driving a car which has an unknown number of cameras, microphones, and is constantly connected (and can not be disconnected while still retaining the ability to drive the car)? Perhaps that's not a car I would ever be able to trust, and perhaps its not a car I should buy. </tinfoil_hat>

It's not paranoia if they install a camera in plain view that will record your image to a secret remote server.

I have tried covering my notebooks microphone, but short of disconnecting it I haven't found anything that produces notable results.

But covering the camera still helps. Some thread scenarios are solved by covering the camera. Not all of them, but nobody is going to get 100% security anyways. No reason to give up.

I get that you can't achieve 100%, but covering your laptop camera while you carry around a cell phone feels more like building a gate without building the fence it goes in. Is achieving 1% worth anything?

I do. After I got a facebook friend suggestion related to an in-person voice conversation that I had just been part of, I started trying to cover my microphone as a habit.

Mark Zuckerberg covers microphone: https://twitter.com/topherolson/status/745294977064828929/ph...

My Mercedes E550 has it too, and it is used for drowsiness detection. The car suggests you should take a break if you look tired or like you will fall asleep. I have had warning to stop and take a break come on only once and I was indeed incredibly tired.

Wow, I rented a MB once and it did that, which was absolutely the right call. The thing was that I initially ignored it and thought MB used a timer or something but 15 minutes later, I became aware of it and it was quite acute by the time I was aware of it.

I've always wondered how it knew that.

Do you have a source for this? My understanding is the Mercedes "Attention Assist" is based off driving behavior and not a camera pointed at the driver.

mb doesnt use a camera.. it's based on your steering wheel inputs.

There is at least one manufacturer doing it though: DS has "driver attention monitoring" which does use a driver facing camera.

wikipedia has a good list of what manufacturers are using: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_drowsiness_detection

This seems like a great solution to the problem of driver distraction, except that most face-detection algorithms are biased (they work best on "white" people, and poorly on just about any other race/skin type).

We definitely should fix that before restricting access to a feature based on where your face is looking.

At least Google photos seems to work done with Indian faces. No recognition problems and even classifies photos by people. It even recognised my photo in which I was 3 years old.

You make an interesting point, though I would guess that determining where the eyeballs are pointing would be the key to assessing attentiveness (sunglasses could be a problem.) I would hope they will use a broad enough training set (and my more cynical self notes that it is Caucasians who display the broadest range of eye color.)

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Frost_06.html

When I sleep I slump over almost into a fetal position. It's never comfortable for me to sleep in a car. My Mrs on the other hand appears to be awake and sitting up, the only subtle clue is a slight bobbing of the head if her sunglasses are on. I wonder how engagement detection would work in her case? There have been many times I have been having a grand old chat with her as I am driving and in my periphery and she is sound asleep. I predict that she could easily fool the system unto thinking she is awake.

Drowsiness detection with OpenCV

http://www.pyimagesearch.com/2017/05/08/drowsiness-detection...

You wont own a Model 3, Tesla only lets you drive it around.

Here you go:

https://www.amazon.com/EL7566-AW-Synthetic-Rubber-Electrical...

Plain old scotch tape works stupidly well too.

I see more value in being able to see who's riding in the car and if they're doing any damage while my car is in use as a taxi.

For that a normal non-Musk camera will do just as well, not a hidden camera that will come on on its own after an unspecified update Tesla does remotely and then steam video to their servers.

Theoretically it could be a good anti-theft device where certain facial profiles would only be allowed to access the vehicle.

Seems like this might be a good hedge against potential regulation. I could easily see some states or even a federal regulation or law requiring that level III autonomous cars have some sort of driver attention monitoring system.

Well, you have to have surveillance coverage when people aren't looking at their phone and are away from their Samsung TV and Microsoft XBox 360.

"If you see something, say something."

"If you see something, say nothing and drink to forget."

https://topatoco.com/collections/wtnv/products/cpb-wtnv-sees...

(No affiliation, just a fan of the podcast)

Is this really that surprising? The article mentions what I would expect: it's likely to be used for tracking how engaged the driver is in the future.

I'm a little surprised that's not in there today.

Alternate theory: do we know what it's actually looking at? Could it be used to put a few of the back seat on the touchscreen so the driver can check on the kids easily? A number of cars these days have small mirrors up by the sunglass holder to allow drivers to do this.

The backseat cam is a valid potential use case, but I'm surprised they wouldn't have put that on the larger S or X, if so. ;)

Perhaps it wasn't ready and will be going into future revisions.

I cancelled my model 3 reservation over this. I found it very sleazy this wasn't mentioned in the official reveal.

Could the model 3 be a very expensive video conferencing platform?

We are all being phished to purchase an extremely expensive camera.

The future of meetings: starting them in SF and ending them in Tahoe. Maybe it's a cheap video conferencing platform :)

Drats, another new platform. Now I need to worry about the adapter problem, again...

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