Lawsuit: Images were shared "for the tasteless entertainment of Tesla employees."
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Tesla sued after report that workers shared invasive images from car cameras
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
A fish rots from the head. Corporate culture is created by executives at the top who set the example for the rest of the employees.
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I fear this is just the start. The more we allow companies to install cloud-connected cameras into devices over which we have zero control, and absent any kind of privacy legislation, this kind of thing will keep happening over and over again.
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WHY is this data even going onto Tesla's servers in the first place?! Shouldn't anything recorded on the car's cameras be stored entirely locally? That's how my dashcam/rearview cam works!
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They are going to totally fry for this. I hope they get a truly staggering punitive damage judgement against them. It's just so insanely obvious that you don't do what they did. The rot clearly started at the top.
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Yes. Tesla will respond with their new Naked Poop Emoji.""
...Sorry. That's a different company that the child owns.
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Tesla needs to know when they have to delete/corrupt footage that might expose them to liability.
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Maybe. Maybe not. Privacy laws in the US are pathetically weak, and class action suits most always occur to reward the lawyers who preside over them, leaving pennies for the actual individual victims to squabble over even if the suit succeeds.
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This case is going to be a field day for the plaintiffs. It's such a gross violation of any reasonable expectation even under a EULA or Privacy Statement
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I think I would have highlight "tortious" in the headline, rather than "tasteless". Seems "tasteless" is the least interesting part in a class action lawsuit, but maybe I'm just being silly.
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Legal penalties are unlikely. However, anyone considering purchasing a Tesla should definitely take these reports into their decision-making process.
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completely agree, but maybe not precisely the start. getting everyone to buy, with their own money, a tracking / recording device, and habituating them to carrying it at all times over these past <15 years was a big jump start.
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Any pictures of Europeans in there? Time to enforce those fines of up to 4% of global turnover under GDPR article 83 section 5...
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No, they won't. They are an extremely large corporation, which means any financial penalties resulting from the lawsuit will be capped at a laughingly low number and be the equivalent of a slap on the wrist that they will write off. The DoJ can't go around actually punishing companies. They're "job creators".
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I think another interesting question is: Why is this data being collected at all? It sounds like most/all of it was recorded while the car was parked and quite possibly off - in people's garages and driveways. The idea that it was somehow being collected for "training" purposes sounds like a flat-out lie. If the car's parked, there's not a whole lot you can train it to do - other than spy, I guess.
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Good. I've had a Tesla during that period. I wonder who'll be able to sign onto the class action suit. I can't think of any situations where I would have had compromising images taken by the car, but such behavior is unacceptable, and they should be held accountable.
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"Tesla uses images from car cameras to train its artificial intelligence systems and reportedly has over 1,000 workers in the team that labels videos and images. We contacted Tesla about Yeh's lawsuit and will update this article if we get a response."
1000?! Yeah, that thar AI sure is scalable and a threat to all our jobs!
1000?! Yeah, that thar AI sure is scalable and a threat to all our jobs!
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There is only one possible case for it, and it's one my rearview camera/dashcam combo is designed for. If the car gets a shock heavy enough to trigger the display or camera's motion sensors while it is in park, it starts recording front and back for a few minutes (including audio, but that's going to be muffled by the exterior of the car since the microphone's on the inside). This helps in the event my car was struck for a hit and run.
So, while I can see a situation where something like that can come in handy, it certainly has no business doing so without the user's knowledge or at any point involving Tesla's servers. Suppose someone willingly signed up for sending in testing data however. In that case, it still has no business sending parked recordings to Tesla as you say.
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IANAL, but…
Class action lawsuit won’t be approved by a judge unless it actually benefits the class. That’s all part of the settlement. The reason class action lawsuits don’t convey that much to the members of the class is in the name itself. By definition, a class may and often does represent a lot of people, and the compensation to the class has to be divided among the members of the class.
Whatever the attorneys make is generally divided among a relatively small number of attorneys. But, they also put in the work to win the case, and typically they only do it because there is the potential for a big payoff. Otherwise, the lawsuit would never happen.
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I don’t understand how Tesla employees have access to data like this and are able to share it. The whole company is acting like immature ten year olds. Why doesn’t the CEO set an example?
The CEO is who? Oh… That explains a lot.
The CEO is who? Oh… That explains a lot.
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I wonder if they have a system in place to filter out images/videos from EU customers, because this is definitely not legal in the EU.
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You can also stream the feeds from the cameras in real-time to your phone when it's parked and Sentry Mode is enabled. That can only work if they're cloud connected.
If I recall correctly, there's also an option to donate your camera images for the purposes of training its AI. You can opt-in/opt-out. If I'm remembering right (can't check as I'm at work and I'm not going to go out to my car to look just for the sake of an internet post), what they did was very likely a violation of the user agreement in that case.
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I feel like there's a weird process by which the personality of the founder comes to permeate the entire organization. Like, Apple took on Jobs' fastidiousness, obsession with detail, and idiosyncrasy, Amazon took on Bezos' obsessive optimization and suffocating ambition, Zuck's creepy, predatory blandness suffused Facebook.....and Elon's personality, which is basically that of a particularly odious, 4Chan-obsessed, socially maladroit eleven year old with no parental controls enabled on his internet browser, became that of Tesla.
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The word "benefits" is doing some heavy lifting there. I've been part of a few class action suits, and my benefit in all cases has never totaled more than $3; it's mostly under a buck. Now, multiply that by millions of plaintiffs and you're talking real money - for the firm handling the case - but the individual plaintiffs usually wind up with very little.
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What kind of training is the car going to glean while sitting in the garage or driveway?
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I doubt that. And if somehow we've allowed privacy policies, that most people don't read, to govern appropriate use to the extend that they can be used to humiliate customers or circulate child pornography, then these types of software and service "agreements" need to be more heavily regulated and restricted. I would argue that any settlement of this case that doesn't potentially bankrupt Tesla is a very strong case for heavy regulation.
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Maybe. Maybe not.
But once some footage of a naked minor makes it up to the office for ogling, that's gonna leave a mark.
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
Discovery is going to be fun. We probably only know the tip of the iceberg level of tastelessness. Going into the chat logs, the emails and every other bit of stored data is likely to open even our jaded eyes.
Popcorn time, again.
Popcorn time, again.
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