Lawsuit: Tesla must be punished for “tasteless” sharing of car-camera images | Hacker News Reader

Lawsuit: Tesla must be punished for “tasteless” sharing of car-camera images

arstechnica.com

57 pointsm_fayer16 comments

From the article: "Although Tesla represents to customers "that its camera recordings cannot be linked to individuals and their vehicles," the Tesla system "was, in fact, capable of—and did—show the location of recordings, meaning anyone viewing the videos and images could determine exactly where the Tesla owner lived, i.e., who the Tesla owner was," the lawsuit said."

And that is exactly what people should remember vividly about this. Whatever a company tells you regarding privacy, it is almost always a big fat LIE. Yet somehow when one accuses companies like this of illegal data collection there's an army of Tesla defenders demanding proof. Well, here it is. Remember it, it will be viable as long as this company exists.

And this is why the GDPR is so wide. And really so many things can be PII. On individual level yes, location might not identify a person, but with enough data of it combined with other data it can.

Enforcement might be lacking, but at least the intent does make sense each time you hear about cases like this.

had it been a more tasteful sharing, all would have been fine

It’s always weird when lawyers qualify their rhetoric using non-legalese to make their case stronger in the court of public opinion.

When you have infinite money like elon, what exactly is a good punishment? I'm sure most of us want to launch him into the sun, but that would never happen.

Fines, Barring from executive positions (ex: illegal for him to be a CEO, or other kind of officer in US Companies), forced loss of control (ex: forced to sell shares and/or give up companies). Jail.

For example, Elon Musk used to be the CEO, Largest Shareholder _AND_ Chairman of the Board. Due to various errors on Elon's part, the US Government stripped him of his chairmanship. Additional stripping of his titles / positions is perfectly acceptable.

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Alternatively, you can force him to buy Twitter, as per the October court case. This has clearly been a punishment for him.

> I'm sure most of us want to launch him into the sun

I'm wondering what makes you so sure about it and why you are so eager to project your own opinion into "most of us"

My personal opinion is that whole twitter drama is really unimportant, yes, twitter is unimportant. Other kind of advancements: Tesla which sparked EV movement, batteries, spacex - materialized grand visions moving forward the world as whole.

TBH I'm kind of puzzled about negative perception about him - especially when it comes from his countrymen because I think that US really gets a lot of value added thanks to him (I'm not from US so might not "read the room" well enough) - looking objectively his companies brought to US hundred of thousands of jobs and not only this kind where selected few at the top in the SV benefits the most - apart form software/design/services positions in hard, modern, advanced manufacturing appeared as well. And it seems like he is a human like most of us and makes mistakes sometimes.

Other kind of advancements: Tesla which sparked EV movement, batteries, spacex - materialized grand visions moving forward the world as whole.

It's not like Toyota popularized efficient cars, or Chevy popularized EVs with the EV1, or California incentivized EVs with credits and HOV access, or Panasonic made the batteries for every model of Tesla sold to date...

Oh wait. All of those things happened.

Musk's only accomplishment is taking credit for the work of others.

Tesla is the reason that EVs are even going anywhere. The amount of foot dragging by car companies was frustrating to watch for years on end.

I don't think that's fair. He made EVs desirable, he's reduced space launch cost by a factor of ten, and I've benefited greatly from PayPal.

His deficiencies as a tech leader are on show at twitter, his involvement with twitter is a result of his bone-headed arrogance, and he's a complete tool who owes his success to family money as much as to his own talent, but his achievements stand nonetheless.

SpaceX used plans and research originally performed by NASA, which NASA was unable to implement due to congressional interference.

And Paypal's tech and business model that you benefited from was from Thiel's X.com. Paypal used literally none of Musk's tech or business model. Musk did such a bad job running Paypal that they fired him for cause (which is one of the reasons that Musk is always trying to fire his own executives for-cause).

Why should Elon Musk be personally punished for this?

Culture is set from the top.

My wife is transforming the culture of the small org she directs.

My employer replaced operational leadership with bean-counters, and the culture has gone to shit.

Musk has prioritised engineering results, which is reasonable, in the only way he knows, which is not reasonable: namely, inhumane tech-bro-ism. He built the company absent any shred of compassion. At least, that's my reading. Happy to hear any counterpoint, if anyone has stories of him being kind or accommodating or interested in people's welfare.

> inhumane tech-bro-ism. He built the company absent any shred of compassion

You want to give prosecutors and courts the power to punish based on their judgements of excess bro and insufficient compassion?

Saying he prioritized engineering results is VERY generous with respect to their autonomy efforts. I think they've prioritized hype and cost and part of the cost priority was not setting up guardrails or culture to protect the data.

Elon might be kind of an idiot sometimes killing somebody over what he did is utter ridiculous.

And this is about Tesla, Musk personal wealth doesn't matter. Tesla does not have infinite money, no more then any other company.

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