The radical scope of Tesla’s data hoard | Hacker News Reader

The radical scope of Tesla’s data hoard

spectrum.ieee.org

It's unbelievable the extent to which people want to spin anything related to this company. This is just a rehash of the (still weak, but better) article that came along a few days back. The overall implication of most of the text is that Tesla is keeping everything from the car, but this is the only money quote the author can muster about actual tracking:

> Meanwhile, every recent-model Tesla reportedly records a breadcrumb GPS trail of every trip it makes—and shares it with the company. While this data is supposedly anonymized, experts are skeptical.

No citation for that "reportedly". No "experts" are cited to substantiate this. In fact what this seems to be is a third-hand repetition of an answer from greentheonly in the previous article that seems to say that he thought there was an exploit that a malicious insider could use to de-anonymize the tracking. Which is... rather a different and less sensational claim.

I went looking, and AFAICT the purported vulnerability was never otherwise made public. It was just the clipped answer to a journalist. I think green has an HN account, maybe he'll provide some context?

But... sigh. No, the car isn't Tracking Everything You Do. Tesla has a privacy policy that looks very reasonable and typical, and as far as anyone can tell they're indeed making a good faith effort to honor it.

>As part of its defense, the company submitted a historical speed analysis showing that the car had been driven with a daily top speed averaging over 90 miles per hour (145 kilometers per hour) in the months before the crash. This information was quietly captured by the car and uploaded to Tesla’s servers. (A jury later found Tesla just 1 percent negligent in the case.)

If the data is anonymized then they had no data that could be tied to the car in question and this "historical speed analysis" is completely fabricated. Literally the only way it makes sense is if it is not anonymized. It doesn't take an expert to see they regularly produce data for specific cars when they want to.

That's power train telemetry, not location data. Yes, they keep that stuff. They know your battery voltage and tire pressure too, etc...

I suppose you can argue that's a privacy issue too (and I'm sure replies to this comment will), but it's not location tracking and it's unhelpful to try to suggest, as this article and you do, that it is.

Again, if people want to have a reasonable discussion about what data is appropriate for vehicle operators to retain, I think there's a space for it. But starting with "radical scope" in the headline of an article that doesn't really detail anything radical is a bad start to the debate.

With Steering wheel position, speed, and charging history, I am pretty sure I can figure out where you live and every where you have ever driven.

Sampled at 5-10s intervals? No you can't, that's just ridiculous. That's the same kind of wild supposition and hyperbole that motivated the article. You want this to be true, so you imagine ways in which it must be true that don't match any known system.

Is it really so unimaginably hard to believe that a company would... just honor its privacy policy in good faith? Really?

Who owns Tesla’s data? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32384827 - Aug 2022 (131 comments)

Is it ethical that this link redirects to spectrum.ieee.org.cdn.rebelmouse.com?

My NextDNS blocked it under a certain adblocking lists.

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