Hacker News Reader

Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

I like bashing Tesla as much as anyone else, but this isn’t a Tesla-ism.

This is a direct and predictable result of placing cameras where people are, and then giving employees access to that footage. The solution is to encrypt all footage such that it is only accessible to the camera owners. The flaw is that the company has access to that footage at all - as has been found time and time again no amount of “controls” stops people sharing videos with each other, the only solution is for it to be impossible for any person at the company to ever access any uploaded footage, for any reason, ever.

View on HN

It's a Tesla-ism because they're collecting this data to train their ML models on to try to get self-driving to work. If they couldn't use the data for their own purposes they probably wouldn't bother keeping it.

From the article:

> In its customer privacy notice, Tesla explains that if a customer agrees to share data, “your vehicle may collect the data and make it available to Tesla for analysis. This analysis helps Tesla improve its products, features, and diagnose problems quicker.” It also states that the data may include “short video clips or images”, but is not linked to a customer’s account or vehicle identification number, “and does not identify you personally”.

So it sounds like this was an opt-in data sharing option, but likely of the kind that everyone just clicks through without reading, consent but not informed consent. Unfortunately that isn't a Tesla-specific problem either, but it does seem that the reason they're not taking measures like encrypting camera data as you describe is that it was intentional that the company have access to this data - of course from there it's practically inevitable that bored employees would abuse it like this.

I bet it makes features of the car that you've paid for not work if the customer does actually opt-out.

Like every other tech company on the planet. Its a huge problem that society can't even begin to study because all of it is done in secret. It's also kept secret because the damage it would do to tech companies and the government would be huge

Why is camera footage from a purchased car sent to a car manufacturer at all is the bigger question. Can people opt-out?

I guess it's for the human supervised training of their AI

...or, ahem, for the supervised-human training of their AI

Because, in this case, it was opt-in. People chose to allow this as part of furthering Tesla's (poor) self-driving systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com