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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Unusual that car black box data is not available to the car owner. I would expect it to be. With some effort, perhaps we can get it to be this way in California, though I suppose the fear is that the manufacturer will simply remove car telemetry in California if almost every car has something that could be twisted to be liability.

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They eventually did in this story.

    Tesla had finally given Zhang what she’d been asking for, but they’d published the data publicly and included her vehicle identification number. She said she and her family started getting threatened and doxed online. Besides, she wondered, how could she be sure Tesla hadn’t modified or redacted the data from her car? It was less than the victory she’d hoped for. Feeling besieged, she sued Tesla a second time, in March 2022, for invading her privacy.
    
    Zhang lost both cases she brought against Tesla.

The problem isn't that the owner didn't get the data. The problem is that the method for getting the data is that you must beg Tesla for it, rather than just slurping it out of a USB port inside the car.

If Tesla is going to go to the trouble of uploading all this shit to the cloud anyway, the least they can do is give customers a no-questions-asked download button.

Not only do you have to beg Tesla for it, but you have to trust that Tesla hasn't doctored the data to corroborate the narrative that Tesla wants.

You say that like there's any plausible alternative. Unless you're compiling the source code running on the car, you are trusting the manufacturer.

I agree with the sentiment, but in practice this is a horrific idea. Make it easy and it’ll be snaffled up by law enforcement, whether covertly, with intimidation, or with routine warrants.

It's currently accessible to law enforcement via the law-abiding manufacturer acting as sole custodian. I don't see how this makes any difference.

This is factually not true. You fill out a single form on their website and get it less than a week later:

https://www.tesla.com/support/privacy#data-provided

There’s tons of anecdotes of people doing this very easily online. Good luck getting data this easily from any other major manufacturer

That counts as begging from my point of view.

> Good luck getting data this easily from any other major manufacturer

This is an industry-wide problem.

If that's begging then signing up for literally any website is begging the website for an account

I believe massachitses has such a law on the books but is currently being sued by aitomalers so can't enforce it

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/11/business/automotive-r...

>massachitses

>aitomalers

Are you feeling OK?

Consider just ignoring posts with bad spelling altogether: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/strikeout/

Wow. That's... Dramatic.

If you internally transliterated it correctly without much effort, why do you care? They might as well be the same word.

Correct/incorrect spelling/grammar/vocabulary only matters practicalky if using the "incirrect one" causes ambuguity in the giben context.

My mind stumbles upon it and loses the flow of thought. I tend to just ignore posts like that too after a couple of strikes (mistakes are fine, second language-ing is fine, leftovers are not fine). Don’t have linguistic respect, don’t have my attention.

I upvoted the post just to show solidarity with the auto-correct gone wrong tribe

That's the result of 2am swiping on my phone without looking, lol.

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