Tesla sued after report that workers shared invasive images from car cameras

Lawsuit: Images were shared "for the tasteless entertainment of Tesla employees."

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[SixDegrees]

""

...Sorry. That's a different company that the child owns.

Yes. Tesla will respond with their new Naked Poop Emoji.

 

[SixDegrees]

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!

Tesla needs to know when they have to delete/corrupt footage that might expose them to liability.

 

[SixDegrees]

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.

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.

 

[SixDegrees]

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!

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.

 

[SixDegrees]

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.

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.

 

[SixDegrees]

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.

What kind of training is the car going to glean while sitting in the garage or driveway?

 

[SixDegrees]

What they're doing is probbly not illegal, in the US anyway.

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.

 

[SixDegrees]

The recordings are useful for when people "key" or otherwise damage the car.

edit: I've seen recordings of kids kicking and attempting to unplug the charger of a charging tesla in a parking garage. Some people let their anger at Elon, or at electric cars maybe getting good parking spaces, or even jealousy, get them in trouble.

If you have such problems in your own driveway or garage, you have problems no car camera is going to solve.

And, again: what sort of "training" is being done that justifies uploading these videos to Tesla servers? The incidents you're citing are incidents of vandalism; Tesla learns nothing from these, even if they serve some purpose for the individual owner.

 

[SixDegrees]

Data is not collected from parked cars. You are confusing the FSD beta clips of incidents with people viewing sentry cloud videos that once existed. You put the car on sentry mode and it tells if you if anyone is doing something to your car, thats called a "sentry event". You can then view a livestream on the app or when you get back to the car you can access a clip from the cars touch screen when youre parked off the usb stick. I do sentry stuff all the time.

They record locally, you can get them off the usb to view on your computer but thats it. Its actually kind of a pain to do so, i wish they allowed it to go to the cloud more easily. I repeat: They do not record to the cloud and they have never used them for training data. I guess they used to record to the cloud, but i cant confirm that and i dont know what that looked like.

In the quoted stories the owner took the files off their usb and shared the file with the inquiring reporter.

what happened was employees with admin rights went into the cloud backups of sentry events (that existed at some point) and viewed it without permission. Its the same as fb employees reading DMs of their ex and getting fired. The employee who told reuters about viewing sentry events is likely shitting their pants and probably getting their own lawyer, because they snitched on themselves doing something they werent supposed to.

So how did Tesla employees get hold of videos from the cars taken in people's garages and driveways?

This doesn't sound like "sentry events" (nice buzzword, by the way); it sounds like flat-out spying.

 

[SixDegrees]

Do you only park your car in your own driveway or garage? You never drive somewhere and exit the vehicle?!

I suppose they could include a geofenced deactivation feature. I imagine sentry mode to be a toggle that you set once and forget.

The problems noted took place in garages and driveways. Why is Tesla bent on filming people in their own private residences?

And - again - why is this being uploaded to Tesla servers? Vandalism alerts are really only useful locally; there's no reason for Tesla to be involved at all.

You're really desperate to change the topic here.

 

[SixDegrees]

It probably works much like a Ring camera and just sends any motion-detected video into the cloud for customers to view on their cell phones.

...and for Tesla employees to point and laugh at, pass around the office, and deface.

 

[SixDegrees]

The trend to sticking internet functionality into everything is everywhere. Half of the reason in most cases appears to be utter laziness in regards to the engineering teams for many of these products (near as I can tell). It is simpler nowadays with many of the software tools to write back-end cloud services than to do the same with firmware. It also means they can have more bugs and fix them on their server rather than needing to push out firmware to end-users. But it still makes for a garbage product much of the time in my opinion.

A while back I bought a couple smart light-bulbs for our bedroom. They are app controlled and you can change colors have a dimmer slider, etc. They can use bluetooth, but they mainly use wifi and require a freaking login. There is literally zero reason to add an account layer and cloud server. It's a goddamn light bulb! All I need from a FANCY light bulb is to turn on/off and let me set some mood lighting. The internet connectivity and account layer only make this thing harder to use as now I have trouble using my light-bulbs if my wifi is having issues...

I feel that we as a people continually get more technologically advanced while also getting dumber in how we think to apply just about any technology.

What's in everything everywhere is data collection. It's because companies can make good money selling your data to others, and there's nothing you can do about it because in the US you don't own your own personal information.

It's not laziness so much as greed.

 

[SixDegrees]

Yeah, I definitely have a problem with this ..even though I don't have a Tesla, makes you wonder about all the others too.

I'm not sure if this extends outside of my state, but here insurance companies and law enforcement are not allowed access to information contained in black boxes without a court order, despite their obvious usefulness in accident investigations. That additional layer of oversight is what's sorely needed here, and in pretty much all other electronic venues.

 

[SixDegrees]

This, lord all mighty this. I was looking at the new prius prime and the damn thing has a driver facing camera for attentiveness tracking. I don't care if it does seem like the ultimate road trip vehicle, I'm not being watched while I'm driving.

Fwiw, sounds like nothing a small piece of electrical tape can't fix.

 

[SixDegrees]

It defeats a safety feature. Whether I agree with the need for such a feature is not relevant, It is how they built the car. We can certainly debate their design choices.

Sounds like the OP is worried about being monitored by the camera. There's a simple solution for that, as I noted.

Or - and I know this is anathema to a lot of corporate deep thinkers these days - they could just allow the owner to, you know, turn it off. Or - even worse, from the corporate data-hoovering perspective - keep the data strictly local and don't share it with anyone at all outside of the car.

 

[SixDegrees]

When I bought mine in 2022 I needed to optin for the interior camera to record.

What about the exterior cameras, which seem to be the issue here?

 

[SixDegrees]

That's the mistake you're making. Trump merely turned over the log. It had been rotting for decades in darkness already. Trump would never have won if his views weren't popular.

Let's be clear: Trump didn't win, not by any standard definition of winning. He lost the popular vote both times he ran. He "won" by a bizarre quirk of the US electoral system that needs to be done away with.

"The winner is the guy who gets fewer votes" isn't a definition of democracy anywhere except in the US and it's political namesake, Bizarro World.

 

[SixDegrees]

That's the system we're under, he won the game we played, and that's what matters in the end. The fact that it was even CLOSE enough to allow for that electoral win is enough to prove the point. It's certainly less than half or even less than a third of the US, but at the end of the day, Trump DID win, and he only could have done so by the activation of that significant group. They had to exist in the first place to net him that win.

In the end, it doesn't matter to any of the people he's hurt what rules he used to win, just that he got power in the first place. He DID win, and we need to accept that so long as we have this system, we have to win by the rules of the game in play, not the rules we wish were in play.

The rules do not add up to a democracy. They're a recipe for tyranny.