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
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We shall see about how fast employees were disciplined over it. But from what we've heard so far, both the number of employees who were engaged in inappropriately viewing/sharing these images AND the length of time they were doing it would highly indicate that it went well beyond just random low-level employees secretly doing this.
Tesla also has the issue of losing multiple prior lawsuits that claimed the company has a massive shortfall of employees in HR and Legal supervisory roles, and has done little to nothing to address it. They try to claim that this was going on without the knowledge of management, plaintiffs will have a peach of a counter to that in noting the repeated prior failures in management catching other bad actors.
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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.
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The problem here isn't that they collected data as you have to give your consent to have the dashcam/sentry data collected. But, the way it was used.
We (as in owners of the impacted time) knew the data was going to be used by Tesla to improve the system.
We just didn't think they'd go and share internally what is clearly private information that was accidently caught.
As a former owner that is really what bugs me. I wanted them to use the data to improve the system. You might think that a garage doesn't have much training data, but it has loads of training data for being able to enter/exit a garage without hitting anything.
Human labeler are also needed to create the training sets. So there needs to be some degree of discretion, and possibility auto-delete filters that detect nudity.
We (as in owners of the impacted time) knew the data was going to be used by Tesla to improve the system.
We just didn't think they'd go and share internally what is clearly private information that was accidently caught.
As a former owner that is really what bugs me. I wanted them to use the data to improve the system. You might think that a garage doesn't have much training data, but it has loads of training data for being able to enter/exit a garage without hitting anything.
Human labeler are also needed to create the training sets. So there needs to be some degree of discretion, and possibility auto-delete filters that detect nudity.
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Can you explain what it can do? I'm curious and don't have a Tesla.
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I covered it in other post, pings my phone saying "sentry event occured", i open up app and can view the live stream of whats happening to my car. Or i can walk to my car and on the usb stick in the glovebox (which is only opened by the app when the car is on, has no handle) has the movie file saved. So like if a person keyed the car it would be on there
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One of the problems with Tesla's Sentry Mode or Rivians Gear Guard is there is no way to enable it for a persons driveway, and have it disabled for a persons garage.
With the garage I have an expectation of privacy, but with the driveway I have no expectation of privacy (at least not mine).
So I'd like to have data collection consent on for the driveway, and data collection consent off for the garage. but, there is no way to do that. So I'll just leave data collection authorization off.
I have a Rivian, but if one company mishandles the data then what's stopping another company from?
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Class actions are primarily designed to allow a group with small, easily determined claim amounts to seek compensation. The individual awards are low because the individual damages are low. The attorneys fees are typically determined by an hourly rate, and are going to correspond with the amount of work and overall benefit to the class, not to any one individual. My go to example is a bank that takes $1 from a million customers. Each customer on its own doesn't have a claim that is economical to bring in a lawsuit. Class actions allow those sorts of claims to proceed.
Though, I'm not entirely convinced this sort of privacy claim can be resolved via class treatment. Individualized issues will likely predominate. For instance, damages, to the extent they are collectable, are going to be determined based on whose images were actually shared and what was in the individual images. The person whose romantic encounter was recorded and shared is going to have much higher damages than the person who had no images shared at all. When individual issues like predominate, a class action cannot be maintained.
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I see your other comment and assuming it's accurate, this seems like a solved issue. Thanks!
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It can, and does, still send the video data to Tesla if you opt in, just not everything.
The local storage, and live stream, are just a conveniences added later. They did not replace the existing functionality, which exists for security reasons. Imagine if someone broke into your car (or crashed into you), and then took your USB drive, or it was damaged. You would lose all video evidence, rendering the feature moot. You can request all data (including video, if you opted-in) from Tesla within a certain time frame.
See: https://www.tesla.com/en_eu/support/privacy#data-provided for a full list of what is sent to Tesla.
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Remember that the attorneys aren't being paid up front. The only payment they get is what the settlement or judgement awards them. And out of that money, they have to pay office rent, pay the salaries of secretaries and paralegals, pay for travel to and from depositions, pay for stenographers for those depositions, pay for expert witnesses, etc, etc, etc. It's not, "Oh, they were awarded millions of dollars in attorney's fees; they're right."
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Its not entirely accurate. There is still video data that is sent to Tesla if you opted-in. See my other reply.
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I think a better answer is the recoding are useful In improving a sentry mode type system.
For as long as I owned my Tesla there were all kinds of sentry mode recordings that weren't useful at all. They were basically motion detected activated that served absolutely no purpose to me.
So for the most part I ignored them unless I saw something interesting in the preview.
What I hoped for from the data collection is to trim down the number of sentry mode recordings to only things where "a threat was detected". Like I don't care if a kid goes near my car to collect a ball, but I do care if the ball hits my car.
We're quickly entering into a time where there is a very real possibility of video to text description.
Maybe a better method would be not to collect any data (to the Tesla servers) that haven't been flagged as interesting by owners.
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If I had a Tesla (and a garage, for my neighbors sake), I'd stroll on by in my finest underoos out of sheer spite.
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There are controls for that. In the federal system and pretty much every state class action system I know of, the judge has to approve any settlement, including the fees to the attorneys. Fees are usually based off of "lodestar," which is basically an hourly rate for the time actually worked and documented. There is also a mechanism for class members to opt-out or object if they believe either the settlement is unfair or the attorneys are receiving too much money.
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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.
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IANAL or judge or associated with the legal profession in any way, but... seems to me that if Company A gets sued, during the course of the lawsuit it comes out the company has been running the HR and legal departments on the lean side which contributed to it... if Company A is sued again for something similar and they still haven't addressed the shortfall in the HR/legal headcounts, it should be assumed by the court that the company is intentionally turning a blind eye to bad behavior by employees and that should automatically double (at least) any damages.
What we kind of need is a national database that tracks these things which judges can review when deciding on if they need to give special instructions to the jury or when deciding on damages. So if Tesla gets sued in California and a judge notes that they seem to be intentionally looking the other way, a judge in Texas or New Mexico can see that Tesla has been given a warning about this matter already and has chosen not to do anything about it, so should be slapped around a bit. And every time they get sued and it comes up they haven't done anything about it, it just makes the penalties increase. IMO, after 3 "strikes" it's just automatic default judgment for the plaintiffs unless the company can show they have taken steps to correct this problem. I'd also be for having the CEO tossed in the county jail for contempt of court. Not to be released until it can be shown that the company has started the process of fixing the problem, and then they have to provide regular updates that they didn't just abandon the effort as soon as the CEO was released. Or, since corporations are people now, and you can't really put a corporation in jail, maybe order a halt to all sales of products/services as a kind of analog to tossing the company into jail for contempt.
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even if there are legit reasons to store those footage on tesla servers, that kind of footage should never be stored in a way that can be viewed by employees without permission. Even if they have permission to view that footage, they should not be passing it around.
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...and for Tesla employees to point and laugh at, pass around the office, and deface.
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Same here, and that goes for "smart devices" in general. I do like that smaller outfits are starting to trend towards central PCs in a home that are the only piece that even can connect to the internet for such things. You know, basically how we imagined smart homes working in those "world of tomorrow" videos in the 50's.
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God damn, there is so much cool tech I will forever miss out on in my own cars simply because I don't trust the humans behind the tech. A mistake or bad egg or two I could maybe overlook, if only they'd stop proving my very most pessimistic predictions right every fifteen minutes. Turns out that's an unconquerably big 'if' for nearly all tech firms.
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Exactly. And there is an opt-out. But what's not clear is whether this opt-out was respected or ignored. I haven't been able to find a clear answer to that. Also, that out-out should really have been an opt-in, with opt-out as the default for all vehicles.
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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.
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Look upthread - at least one Tesla owner has stated that it is opt-in. That does not address the internal misuse, however.
edit: by “it”, I’m referring to sharing video with Tesla
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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.
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I can't recall 100%, but I'm pretty sure when we picked up our car at delivery, we were opted in and had to go into the car's menu to opt-out. I also seem to recall that at least one or two updates pushed by Tesla have reset our opt-out before. I wish I had taken note of this so I could be more specific and certain.
But right you are about how this does nothing about internal misuse...
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This is all 100% fair.
I’m no attorney, and frankly, I am out of my depth in terms of fixing this. The best I can offer is a somewhat handwavey “change the rules of class action suits to incentivize attorneys to maximize payouts for class members.”
If I had a clear, workable solution for this, I’d be a law professor, not an engineer. But maybe it’s because I’m an engineer that I think that the current lack of a solution doesn’t mean that a solution is impossible. But I absolutely realize that this is a legally naïve point of view.
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“An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” - Emerson
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Feels like so brazenly sharing so many people's "assassination coordinates" merits the death penalty for the entire Tesla board, no?
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Theres two recordings: FSD Beta/Autopilot for labeling purposes and theres parked Sentry in "private" places. Almost all the uproar is about sentry recordings.
So another scenario C) Sentry was hosted on the cloud with poor permissions access, higher level employees had admin access to Sentry files, they looked at videos they shouldnt have been looking at. Those employees talked to reuters and if the lawyers call them up theyre going to get their own lawyer then not offer to talk about this because they would get in huge trouble for doing so.
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As is what we have learned about what Tesla employees were sharing.
Plus, anyone who wants to look at my skinny pale butt is welcome to it, and must absorb psychic damage over time as a result.
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Don't think for a moment I haven't done that, albeit without the Tesla give the eleven exterior cameras my neighbors have. I have no problems taking trash out with my PJs on--which rarely include a top.
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Yeah, I definitely have a problem with this ..even though I don't have a Tesla, makes you wonder about all the others too.
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There's a difference between "product capability," "company policy," and "reality."
Reality has to fit within product capability, and rarely fits within company policy. Policy only helps in figuring out who gets left holding the bag once someone discovers significant actions were taken outside policy.
And the capabilities angle here is why Tesla has been off my "next car" list. My next car will have its modem disabled by me, and I'd prefer it to be one with proper data handling and zero trust security baked into the software.
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