Tesla Employees Using Vehicle Cameras to Spy on 'Private Scenes;' Owners Suing (2023)
motorbiscuit.com
motorbiscuit.com
> A Tesla owner who accused the electric vehicle maker of improperly accessing and sharing video recorded from his car must pursue his privacy claims in an individual arbitration rather than a proposed class action lawsuit, a judge in California has ruled.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-says-tesla...
https://ia802608.us.archive.org/14/items/gov.uscourts.cand.4...
1. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/16/1224913698/teslas-chicago-cha...
> The challenges Tesla owners are facing aren't specific to the carmaker.
One should wonder why the title (and story) is not about EVs generally?
I will offer a very cynical answer: NPR and The Guardian (which is misrepresenting the scope and cause - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39065628) have an axe to grind, but need to walk a fine line as to come across as being anti-EV.
Because you're taking it out of context? The story is about Tesla owners having issues getting their cars charged and long supercharger lines which both occurred. There were no reports of long-lines at CCS chargers that I heard of on any of the EV forums I participate in.
The "not specific to the carmaker" was in regard to Lithium batteries (generically) struggling in super-cold weather.
Furthermore, you completely disregard the fact there's an entire section about how other Tesla owners weren't having issues charging in the cold. Between the two I guess the question is do you have an axe to grind with NPR or are you just upset there's negative (deserved) press about Tesla supercharging struggling in sub-zero temps? Some of it is their fault, some of it is an education thing, but Tesla also does a pretty horrible job of educating owners on charging etiquette.
The story seems blown out of proportion. News outlets get to choose what they report on, which itself is part of sentiment making.
There are way more interesting and important issues to report on, and I wish that NPR, which is one of my main news sources, would do a better job.
So yes, as a customer of NPR I am voicing my dissatisfaction.
Not really? You had large numbers of people literally having to get their cars towed. If I lived in Chicago and needed to charge my car, I'd absolutely want this reported on.
Anytime there has been a gas shortage and long lines (like when Florida faces a hurricane) it is quite newsworthy. Both for the people that live in the area (so they can make other accommodations) and nationally so they know they should probably stay clear of the area. Are you running around complaining about that reporting as well?
>There are way more interesting and important issues to report on, and I wish that NPR, which is one of my main news sources, would do a better job.
Like what? You're acting as if there's some major breaking story they ignored to report on this. Can you point to anything beyond a vague "there's other things they could report on and this isn't interesting to me personally"? You haven't actually stated why this isn't newsworthy beyond you don't feel it is. What about "hey don't go to a supercharger if you live in Chicago and it's super cold" isn't important or newsworthy to Tesla owners/renters/drivers?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/business/tesla-charging-c...
https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/dead-teslas-oak-brook.amp
https://abc7news.com/amp/chicago-area-tesla-charging-station...
I think what it is is that you are coming out to defend Tesla because you’re taking this as a personal attack.
Ok this particular issue I would defend Tesla because I do think the story is blown out of proportion (with different news outlets having differing motivations).
There are other issues on which I am very critical of Tesla, such as hiring and labor practices.
There are very few, if any, people or companies or organizations who are “all evil” or “all good”.
The problem is that as humans we tend to pick a side and then confirmation bias kicks in. We can all be better.
Seems like all the horror stories about people being stranded in 20F with a dead car and no heating come from Tesla owners.
I'm happy nobody has died yet, but from what we saw it's just a matter of time before whole families are found dead
In some way, this is actually useful as people need to know the differences and possible new risks with an EV. On the other hand, it’s still biased.
That is indeed a story, and should caution those in certain environments not to buy that brand. It also shows a lack of testing, to sell cars into a market, where they won't work reliably for part of the year.
And a completely different tact, a car breaking down is expected. An entire production model being flawed, and defective, is not.
This is not even slightly biased.
But the particular cases where the car itself has broken down seem to be limited to Teslas.
Even in the heavily moderated Tesla Club Sweden forum people have started questioning the reliability of these cars in the winter.
My conservative friends in Scotland are all eager to share “horror stories” of Teslas in Chicago with me. When a Tesla has a problem it literally makes world news. That should tell you how often these things happen.
This seems like a bad faith comment when looked at in that context.
Here it is again:
* I live in Scotland * I am subject to Scottish weather * In my Scottish weather the car operates just fine * My conservative friends are sharing stories of a handful of issues people are having in another country as proof of… something. Not sure exactly what but some culture war thing they have been tricked into spreading by their influencers. * Tesla stories are therefore amplified. There were a bunch of ICE cars also having issues but you don’t hear about them.
Frankly, you're making a false equivalence here. You're conflating "teslas in perfect factory delivery order" not working at normal winter temps, with "a poorly maintained or defective ICE car" not working. It's not the same thing. At all.
I've driven all sorts of cars sold in North America, and -40C? Fine.
I've owned VWs, Toyotas, GMs, my neighbours have all manner of cars. No one has problems with -40C. No one.
ICE cars, in good working order are fine, and start and work reliability at -40C. Teslas, it would seem, do not.
That is not someone picking on EVs.
Really, EV tech is very new, compared to ICE.
They seem to be saying,
> ICE cars, in good working order are fine, and start and work reliability at -40C.
...and they're mostly correct.
In that sort of weather, you just use a bit higher concentration of antifreeze in your coolant mixture. Fuel will usually start freezing at a colder temperature as well.
Hope you enjoy doing your things!
p.s.) fun fact: one need not specify C or F or K when the value is -40 degrees :)
Given that I think if we had a -40 snap in Scotland a great many brand new in-spec ICE cars would fail to start.
Or is this all wrong and you can just turn the key on any old ICE and go? Genuine question since I don’t live in conditions like those.
And reading the Reddit thread here suggests that a great many EV owners are doing just fine in extreme temperatures: https://www.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/194yg8x/how_are_yo...
Maybe that’s not -40 and they’ll all fail then?
- They don't need "a whole host of ways to deal with it".
- They don't need "special fluids", just normal ones any other car needs, properly selected for the climate.
- They don't need block heaters
- They don't need systems to automatically start the car if it falls below -39 degrees.
Given that, I don't think if there was -40 degree weather, a great many brand-new in-spec ICE cars would fail to start. After all, some places reach that weather, and the cars don't.
Yes, you can turn the key and go, in -40 degree weather. You will be cold while the car heats up, but it will turn over, at least within 2 or 3 tries. The requirements are the ones you have for maintaining an ICE car in any weather: proper oil, proper coolant mixture, and proper battery maintenance. You can admittedly get away with failing at these, in less extreme climate. For example, in the south, it can be hot enough that you can use water, with no antifreeze at all, as coolant.
As for your reddit thread, I wouldn't trust it as an accurate measure of anything, but that's neither here nor there. I'm not interested in a contest between the two, so I'll remain on the topic of whether a properly-maintained ICE car would just work in -40 degree weather (it would).
Any way you try to walk it back is just that. I’m not missing the point, you’ve changed the point now that you’re being downvoted for this obviously false equivalency.
I don’t know why I’m being downvoted, maybe there are other people like you determined to interpret it the wrong way.
Just guessing, but could it just be that rapid EV growth resulted in a lot of relatively new EV drivers in Chicago? And some of these new drivers didn't know yet about battery behavior in the cold, and how to mitigate it with battery preconditioning?
On the other hand, the event in Chicago was clearly a freak event and in no way reflects the normal operation of Tesla charging infrastructure in cold weather (elsewhere in North America, where it was also very cold, the vast majority of Teslas were fine).
Gives me something to report if it's broken into, hit, etc. I'd like an inside camera as well but haven't felt like adding it.
Also the Tesla uses Cameras instead of Lidar which is mentioned in the article, so they already had a million cameras they could give a driver access to.
Jeep having access to my cameras though? Super weird. Jeep can do literally nothing to assist me in any situation that I would have a recording of something happening. But that's possibly much different with Teslas camera system where it's used for self-driving etc.
Though Tesla probably did it because they could and Elon said so.
Being German I can't say much about others, but German luxury might be the least similar. Based no doubt on there having been a time when generational wealth was going all in on understatement not by choice, but because showing off would have inspired curiosity about how exactly that wealth found its way into the second half of the 20th century. And then with the tone being set, those who actually did make their fortune post-war followed the pattern.
This is disgusting and if it’s true and especially if Tesla management was aware of these issues and failed to take action, we can but hope a judge and jury will see fit to award the class an enormous sum.
I'd prefer a 3rd party investigation, and I'm guessing the ex employee would, too, and that Tesla would oppose and obstruct.
Do you mean that people are only willing to talk about this once they've quit the company and don't have to worry about losing their jobs to talk about this kind of ongoing behaviour?
It seems like people would be far more likely to discuss this and expose it once they left the company and their job wasn't on the line than when they worked for the company.
That's a mismatch in moral expectations. One of many in our increasingly divided society.
I don't know the best way to lower/reduce such mismatches, but doing it thru the courts reactively seems arbitrary and unfair. It's hard to follow rules that haven't been written.
After this was published Tesla successfullly forced the plaintiffs into arbitration.
https://ia802608.us.archive.org/14/items/gov.uscourts.cand.4...
NPR also wrote this about Tesla batteries: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/16/1224913698/teslas-chicago-cha...
From that article:
> The challenges Tesla owners are facing aren't specific to the carmaker.
I ask myself why is the title not about EVs generally?
I will offer a very cynical answer: NPR and The Guardian (which is misrepresenting the scope and cause - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39065628) have an axe to grind, but need to walk a fine line as to come across as being anti-EV.
I want to see my news sources be more even handed and objective.
Call out the privacy issues like this article, but refrain from "going after" an organization or person in order to create sentiment.
I would argue both. The art then for an observer is to sort through the sentiment making to calibrate more towards reality and know what is noise and what is not. In my ideal world we have more news sources that can and attempt to do that more effectively.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/23/business/tesla-barred-chi...
After reading the original leak in April and knowing about the Reddit group where Tesla owners post videos of anyone/anything online.
If you value your privacy, never go near a Tesla.
On the other hand, cant even imagine why people driving one and being recorded the whole time by the internal camera.
Oh how I would love if this became a common sentiment. It's hard to get door dings from careless morons if they refuse to park next to my car.
> recorded the whole time by the internal camera
Covered that ages ago, it records nothing.
How do we now prove liability in cars that don't have cameras pointed inward at the occupants, recording and sending to random anonymous viewers at tesla?
Joke aside, probably the same way Roomba employees posted pictures of people in the bathroom or Apple partner leaking recording of people having sex: horny employees + zero oversight from mgmt.
How else would you find the naked riders in the haystack?
SELECT *
FROM tesla_telemetry_videos
WHERE town = 'Austin'
AND postal_code = '78733'
AND content LIKE '%funny%'
AND (sex = TRUE AND nudity = TRUE)
AND violence = FALSE
AND cursing = TRUE
ORDER BY upload_date DESC
LIMIT 20;All you had to do is use the built-in "goatness" evaluation function!
The overarching concern is that Musk’s national security portfolio is too broad, which presents a unique risk without precedent.
As an owner of a model Y, I’m beyond pissed off they’re so lackadaisical with this stuff, to the point where I may just buy a different car.
[1] Asymmetric crypto KEM + ephemeral symmetric key + encrypted block. eg. <https://libsodium.gitbook.io/doc/public-key_cryptography/sea...>
I love this line of rhetoric. Seriously, I doubt that you will. If you consider all of the shenanigans that Tesla is known to do, you shouldn't have bought the car if you're concerned about privacy. Any car that has cameras on the car that looks at the interior of the car should not have been purchased in the first place. OF COURSE they will be looking at video when they shouldn't be. Has there ever been an example of a company that hasn't? Ring has done it. Roomba has done it. Open it to any data not just camera, and people like Uber have used that data for nefarious purposes.
Any device that sends back data to the home office is just too ripe for misuse. Then, when it comes out in examples like this that it has occured, there is 0 liability for the company involved. Maybe the company makes an example out of the employees in various ways up to dismissal, but the company just shrugs it off.
Arguably that benefits their insurance company more than it does them.
For making sure liability is properly ascribed, I solved that problem by installing cameras that write to a MicroSD card that's under my physical control.
AFAIK, the footage upload was a data sharing toggle, and the videos were supposed to be used as training data for FSD. Why garage videos, or any videos with the car not in motion are being uploaded is a big question.
A friend was able to use the video to track a parking lot hit-and-run while his car was parked at his wife’s workplace.
Bit, there really should be an easy switch to turn off recording while the car is parked. Maybe even geo-fenced -record in public, but don’t at your home.
That's already the case for what he's talking about.
Owners manual for that: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-F311BBC...
Tesla also does let you do geofencing with Sentry mode, but I opted to have it running at work and off at home.
But none of this addresses the violation of trust that comes with a company having shitty internal controls and shitty auditing on users' data. The US desperately needs a law that makes it clear that user data is owned by users and our rights can't be waived away.
Absolutely agree.
The first terrible choice is someone choosing to purchase a surveillance device that isn't under their control.
Of course it's misused, there are humans involved.
To be clear, I am also very uncomfortable with the idea of being monitored by my own car, but I think that's how it's gonna become normalized.
if there is software running on a computer in your house or your car, it is absolutely essential for that software to be answerable to you in these ways, not to the manufacturer of some product. currently that perspective is far outside the overton window, so we can expect to see increasingly egregious abuses like this for decades
Leaving a door open, as the article relates, is incompetence.
> For example, when a Tesla hit a child riding a bike, a video of the child flying through the air went viral among employees. They shared it in private one-on-one chats “like wildfire,” according to another ex-employee.
Yeah, yikes.
This is beyond what I do with my own personal devices.
I know this must make me seem rude or anti-social in many cases, but I really don't know how to get the message across about what's happened along with its very real impact.
Not long ago the partner of a relative of mine decided to get drunk when the relative was visiting me. Because they were drunk they weren't answering their phone, my relative got themself all worked up about it. They called the alarm company and talked to what sounded like some 19 year old kid who said, "I see a naked person walking around in the living room on your video feed." Somehow my relative was actually okay with this. It didn't occur to them that maybe they probably didn't want random kids staring at them naked in their own living rooms, which is exactly what was happening at that very moment.
I gave an ultimatum that I would never visit their house again so long as they had those cameras installed. Only then did my relative remove them. I couldn't believe that they actually seemed okay with the fact that this kid was looking at their naked partner in their own living room.
Now I guess I have to have a new rule: Do not get in vehicles that spy on you. The trouble at this point is that it may become more and more difficult to tell for sure which vehicles do that and which don't. There is an increasingly lengthening list of reasons why I would never want to be in a Tesla specifically, so that's an easy one to avoid, but many other car manufacturers at the very least track your location all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them also uploaded video and audio feeds from surveillance devices integrated in the vehicle, right along with your location telemetry.
What sucks though is that basically every modern vehicle egregiously violates our privacy [1]
[0]https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
[1]https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/article...
car accidents kill less than that, though by a factor of less than four, about 1.3 million per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...)
so probably you should re-evaluate your risk assessment: even if you're only concerned with pieces of metal traversing people's bodies, rather than people being maimed, enslaved, raped, and kept in poverty, ignorance, and disease, you should weight the denial of fundamental human rights as a much larger threat than unintentional automotive injury
you can sell the car, but you may find yourself walking to work, and you can't un-record the videos the car already recorded of you; and, if your neighbors still have surveillance cameras the police have access to, you may not have achieved any actual privacy
privacy, in the civil liberties sense, is a collective good, not an individual good
Your general point is quite correct, though, and I am avoiding surveillance more than most people.
One thing I know for sure isn't spying on me is my e-bike, and that's what I use for the majority of my around-town trips.
New cars appear safer because the scores include stuff that is not directly related with crash safety, so if a car does not have a back camera, or some "active safety" stuff they will get a very low score. but that does not mean that the car is made of paper and you will be less safe in a crash.
In Europe "eCall" functionality has been mandatory since 2018. This means your car will automatically call 112 (911) when it detects it has been in an accident, relaying realtime audio and location data. You're only a software update away from it also being sent to The Cloud for "theft prevention" or some other bullshit.
Then when they ask why you want them to unplug their router, you can have a friendly chat about the risks of using cloud IoT devices.
Although that might not disable a camera-enabled alarm system which sometimes have a cellular backupy.
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...
Don't get me wrong, of course I love technology ... but to see it being used like this is dispairing.
My impression is that cars started turning into mobile surveillance posts / attack vectors around 2008, but it varied among brands and certainly was slower among commercial vehicles, as well as certain brands like GM (with OnStar) and Lexus/Toyota (with their licensed version of OnStar) that began including these features in the mid-90's.
How difficult would it be for Tesla to implement ANPR and upload every number plate spotted together with GPS coordinates, to a central server? The chances of them doing it are very low, but it's still interesting to consider such possibilities.
Maybe 20 years from now they could implement facial recognition? That would be an absolute nightmare scenario. If every car has that many cameras, essentially privacy is finished, it's worse than Orwell's 1984 book.
Realistically, probably not hard at all. Car already has "enough" (debatable) processing power to run FSD on it, and afaik ANPR would be a much lighter load than that. Built in cell connectivity that you can't kill without some hardware work is another aspect.
I wanted to buy the new Cybertruck when it finally launches, but when this first came out, it became impossible for me to ever buy one.
EDIT: I'm fully on board with the idea of electrifying cars and it wouldn't be a thing at all without Tesla. That they can alienate a potential super fan like me with stupid own-goals like this is super sad.
If they'd just done it as a concept car it would have been cool.
I've also read that the range is far below advertised and below that of a modestly priced mid-range EV due to the Cybertruck being so heavy and chunky.
But I'll probably buy a Jeep or a Ford next because those employees don't watch me as I drive
Manually-closing doors have pinch points, but every major manufacturer that has auto-close doors includes force sensing to avoid damaging things (or people, or digits). Power windows usually have this as well, at least on modern cars.
I will say that the automatically closing Tesla trunks I've seen won't crush someone if you get in its way. The video in question implies it would crush anything in the path of the hood when they actually found a very particular unprotected spot. But, Rivian for example does protect against this happening at that particular location, so it's still a fair criticism.
Why? I don't get it. Most people don't need a truck. And if they do, the Cybertruck is probably far from what they need. It has little use except showing off. (Well, I guess that might be true for most trucks bought, though..)
But they do need better internal controls on customer data, obviously. This is table stakes for any big company, and Tesla is huge. Somebody there, probably in their legal department, has some appreciation for how tempting a target they are with those deep pockets.
Andrej Karpathy has a talk about this. That's probably how it's happening.
Act accordingly.