Later update:<p>> A Tesla owner who accused the electric vehicle maker of improperly accessing and sharing video recorded from his car must pursue his privacy claims in an individual arbitration rather than a proposed class action lawsuit, a judge in California has ruled.<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-says-tesla-privacy-case-belongs-arbitration-not-court-2023-10-13/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-says-tesla...</a>
Discussion from April, 501 comments:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35468855">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35468855</a>
Your car is watching you, soon enough your AR glasses will be eye tracking you all day long to learn everything about you. Everything. Privacy laws? Ha… not in America. Besides, governments don’t care about laws when they want to spy on you. We will willingly become enslaved to companies and authorities in return for technological convenience masqueraded as “progress”.
Between this and the horror stories coming out of the Midwest[1] it is not a good week for Tesla<p>1. <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/01/16/1224913698/teslas-chicago-charging-extreme-cold" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2024/01/16/1224913698/teslas-chicago-cha...</a>
“For example, when a Tesla hit a child riding a bike, a video of the child flying through the air went viral among employees. They shared it in private one-on-one chats “like wildfire,” according to another ex-employee.”<p>This is disgusting and if it’s true and especially if Tesla management was aware of these issues and failed to take action, we can but hope a judge and jury will see fit to award the class an enormous sum.
"A California man is suing the company-on behalf of all Tesla owners-over this practice."<p>After this was published Tesla successfullly forced the plaintiffs into arbitration.<p><a href="https://ia802608.us.archive.org/14/items/gov.uscourts.cand.410887/gov.uscourts.cand.410887.52.0.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://ia802608.us.archive.org/14/items/gov.uscourts.cand.4...</a>
(edited)<p>NPR also wrote this about Tesla batteries: <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/01/16/1224913698/teslas-chicago-charging-extreme-cold" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2024/01/16/1224913698/teslas-chicago-cha...</a><p>From that article:<p>> The challenges Tesla owners are facing aren't specific to the carmaker.<p>I ask myself why is the title not about EVs generally?<p>I will offer a very cynical answer: NPR and The Guardian (which is misrepresenting the scope and cause - see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39065628">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39065628</a>) have an axe to grind, but need to walk a fine line as to come across as being anti-EV.<p>I want to see my news sources be more even handed and objective.<p>Call out the privacy issues like this article, but refrain from "going after" an organization or person in order to create sentiment.
I guess basic human decency and respecting the privacy of your customers is too much to expect from Tesla. Elon will make for a fascinating case study for business schools someday, building a spectacular brand and burning it all down.
Looks like China has known about this for years:<p><a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/23/business/tesla-barred-china-suspicions-intl-hnk/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/23/business/tesla-barred-chi...</a>
Will never park next to a Tesla.<p>After reading the original leak in April and knowing about the Reddit group where Tesla owners post videos of anyone/anything online.<p>If you value your privacy, never go near a Tesla.<p>On the other hand, cant even imagine why people driving one and being recorded the whole time by the internal camera.
Just noting that Elon Musk now owns Twitter, rebranded as X. You can expect the same degree of indecency with your data there. Grimes and (now defunct) circles? Creepy.
Why are these things uploading videos at all? And, particularly, why are they uploading videos _when not in use_?! And, if they must upload videos, why are employees able to access them without good reason? This whole thing just seems like a tower of terrible choices.
What a whopper of a combo of incompetence and malfeasance! Any sanely competent s/w dev team would have totally easily come up with a scheme to encrypt the videos and upload them to vehicle / owner authenticated areas of some cloud bucket somewhere with audit logging and the employees could have had their activities monitored and audited - looks like it is no one's interest at Tesla to give a crap about their customers.
> Some of the images shared in Tesla employee chat rooms included full nudity. Others depicted car crashes and road rage, which, it might be argued, were necessary for the “enhancement of Tesla vehicle driving systems.” But even some crash videos were abused.<p>> For example, when a Tesla hit a child riding a bike, a video of the child flying through the air went viral among employees. They shared it in private one-on-one chats “like wildfire,” according to another ex-employee.<p>Yeah, yikes.
A lot of people around me roll their eyes at the things I do to actively avoid surveillance. If I walk into a relative's house and they have a fscking camera pointed at me, which believe it or not is usually the case, I will complain about it, turn around, and walk back out of the house. If they have a device under the control of a third party that has a microphone on it, I will shut down any conversation that I wouldn't want said third party listening to.<p>This is beyond what I do with my own personal devices.<p>I know this must make me seem rude or anti-social in many cases, but I really don't know how to get the message across about what's happened along with its very real impact.<p>Not long ago the partner of a relative of mine decided to get drunk when the relative was visiting me. Because they were drunk they weren't answering their phone, my relative got themself all worked up about it. They called the alarm company and talked to what sounded like some 19 year old kid who said, "I see a naked person walking around in the living room on your video feed." Somehow my relative was actually okay with this. It didn't occur to them that maybe they probably didn't want random kids staring at them naked in their own living rooms, which is exactly what was happening at that very moment.<p>I gave an ultimatum that I would never visit their house again so long as they had those cameras installed. Only then did my relative remove them. I couldn't believe that they actually seemed okay with the fact that this kid was looking at their naked partner in their own living room.<p>Now I guess I have to have a new rule: Do not get in vehicles that spy on you. The trouble at this point is that it may become more and more difficult to tell for sure which vehicles do that and which don't. There is an increasingly lengthening list of reasons why I would never want to be in a Tesla specifically, so that's an easy one to avoid, but many other car manufacturers at the very least track your location all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them also uploaded video and audio feeds from surveillance devices integrated in the vehicle, right along with your location telemetry.
Don’t worry, other car manufacturers are clear to delineate this in their privacy policy.<p><a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/" rel="nofollow">https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...</a>
Yet again, my dumb 2005 Toyota and 69 Bug prove the value of 'old is gold'.<p>Don't get me wrong, of course I love technology ... but to see it being used like this is dispairing.
I wonder if law enforcement have access to the camera footage? This makes it every car a mobile CCTV on wheels?<p>How difficult would it be for Tesla to implement ANPR and upload every number plate spotted together with GPS coordinates, to a central server? The chances of them doing it are very low, but it's still interesting to consider such possibilities.<p>Maybe 20 years from now they could implement facial recognition? That would be an absolute nightmare scenario. If every car has that many cameras, essentially privacy is finished, it's worse than Orwell's 1984 book.
This is reason enough to never own a Tesla.<p>I wanted to buy the new Cybertruck when it finally launches, but when this first came out, it became impossible for me to ever buy one.<p>EDIT: I'm fully on board with the idea of electrifying cars and it wouldn't be a thing at all without Tesla. That they can alienate a potential super fan like me with stupid own-goals like this is super sad.
I really wonder whether we at some point are gonna get physical switches to disable camera’s and microphones. My iPhone camera is also pointing at me while I type this and the microphone can record the room. Also interesting: people keep raving about the Chinese EVs, but what about those camera’s and microphones? There was a big scandal about the Chinese spy satellite but I hear nobody about Chinese cars with cameras.
Tesla stock is an avalanche in waiting. Passive index fund investment, tax credits and stimulus put this con company on top. Little by little the cracks reveal its true nature beyond all the BS promises. RUN while you still can. "*This is not financial advice."