It’s just worded to make this sound sketchy. I bet ten bucks “unlinked” just refers to the standard POSIX call for deleting a file.
The real issue is that Tesla claimed the company doesn't have the data after every copy was deleted. There's no technical reason to dispose of data related to a crash when you hold so much data on all of the cars in general.
Crash data in particular should be considered sacred, especially given the severity in this case. Ideally it should be kept both on the local black box and on the servers. But anything that leads to it being treated as instantly disposable everywhere, or even just claiming it was deleted, can only be malice.
Exactly. The issue is deleting the data on the servers, not a completely mundane upload-then-delete procedure for phoning home. This should have been one sentence, but instead they make it read like a heist.
My money is on nobody built a tool to look up the data, so they have it, they just can't easily find it.
Also this is not like some process crash dump where the computer keeps running after one process crashed.
This would be like an plane black box uploading its data to the manufacturer, then deleting itself after a plane crash.
Deleting the data on the server is totally sketchy, but that’s not what the quoted section is about.
How Tesla could say that detecting a collision and not locking all/any of the data is normal is just insane.
Maybe this is not appropriate for a car, but that doesn’t excuse the ridiculous breathless tone in the quoted text. It’s the worst purple prose making a boring system sound exciting and nefarious. They could have made your point without trying to make the unlink() call sound suspicious.
The rogue engineer defense worked so well for VW and Dieselgate.
The issue of missing crash data was raised repeatedly. Deleting or even just claiming it was deleted can only be a mistake the first time.
So either the problem is Tesla engineers are fucking stupid (doubtful) or this is a poor business/product design.
My money is on the latter.
So we just shrug because software boys gotta be software boys? That’s completely insane and a big reason why a lot of engineers roll their eyes about developers who want to be considered engineers.
Software engineers who work on projects that can kill people must act like the lives of other people depend on them doing their job seriously, because that is the case. Look at the aviation industry. Is it acceptable to have a bug in the avionics suite down planes at random and then delete the black boxes? It absolutely is not, and when anything like that happens shit gets serious (think 737 MAX).
The developers who designed the systems are responsible, and so are their managers who approved the changes, all the way to the top. This would not happen in a company with appropriate processes in place.
I'd argue that this data is far less important in cars. Airline safety has advanced to the point where crashes are extremely rare and usually have a novel cause. Data recorders are important to be able to learn that cause and figure out how to prevent it from happening again. Car safety, on the other hand, is shit. We don't require rigorous training for the operators. Regulations are lax, and enforcement even more lax. Infrastructure is poor. We're unwilling to fix these things. Almost all safety efforts focus on making the vehicles more robust when collisions occur, and we're just starting to see some effort put into making the vehicles automatically avoid some collisions. What are we going to learn from this data in cars? "Driver didn't stop for a red light, hit cross traffic." "Driver was drunk." "Driver failed to see pedestrian because of bad intersection design which has been known for fifty years and never been fixed." It's useful for assigning liability but not very useful for saving lives. There's a ton of lower hanging fruit to go after before you start combing through vehicle telemetry to find unknown problems.
Even if you do consider it to be life-critical, uploading the data and then deleting the local copy once receipt is acknowledged seems completely fine, if the server infrastructure is solid. Better than only keeping a local copy, even. The issue there is that they either have inadequate controls allowing data to be deleted, or inadequate ability to retrieve data.
This data is yours. You were going the speed limit when the accident happened and everyone else claims you were speeding. It would take forever to clear your name or worse you could be convicted if the data was lost.
This is more of "you will own nothing" crap. And mainly so Tesla can cover its ass.