Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for

Tesla has a history of using remote diagnostics to snitch on drivers instead of allowing investigators to do their job.<p>It’s a valid concern that your car manufacturer will use the interior cameras to blame a crime on you.<p>These automatic tagging features also bring to question the bias in algorithms. What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? Is it possible that a safe driver with ADHD or Turrets etc might be flagged as inattentive during an autopilot crash and therefore at fault?

Hah, if the main barrier to autopilot for cars is liability and insurance, passive biometric monitoring of the driver is certainly one way to shift liability around.<p>The real feature should just be a button that shifts insurance liability to Tesla for the period of the autopilot engagement and charges you a floating premium for it based on traffic conditions per mile&#x2F;km while the autopilot is on.<p>The real problem is &quot;free&quot; auto pilot means people will use it often enough to make a catastrophe an actuarial inevitability, whereas if they have to pay to text while driving on autopilot, they&#x27;re going to do it less, and live long enough to be killed by something else.

Comments on the site itself are pure gold as some are pointing out the various (mostly humorous) events that are not being actively tracked with their driver-facing camera. I will try to compile this list below:<p>- DRIVER_ON_PASSENGER_SIDE<p>- DRIVER_MISSING<p>- DRIVER_PICKING_BOOGERS<p>- DRIVER_SEAT_FULLY_RECLINED<p>- DRIVER_SNORING<p>- DRIVER_SHAVING<p>- DRIVER_VAPING<p>- DRIVER_LIVESTREAMING<p>- DRIVER_ADJUSTING_MAKEUP<p>- DRIVER_APPLYING_LIPSTICK<p>- PASSENGER_ON_DRIVER<p>- PASSENGER_UNDER_DRIVER

On a related note, I often wonder how many Tesla owners are aware that their cars take images&#x2F;video from the external cameras and send them back to Tesla. This happens remotely at any time and you have no idea when or if it has happened.

I realize that this is still supposedly a “help us improve”&#x2F;“data gathering” step, but I’m having trouble deciding how I feel about it.<p>Yes, of course, safer drivers (whether automatic or fleshy) is a great thing, but this still hits that deep-seeded paranoia level for me.<p>I mean, what if FaceID had been proven out the same way? The number of times I unlock my phone every day and the number of times I’m doing it somewhere that the government&#x2F;my employer&#x2F;my significant other&#x2F;a random hacker would find objectionable or lucrative to exploit... That’s with just me there (or an ex, or a former employee or prospective employer, or someone I met at a bar who turns out to be on some list...).<p>Turn this back around to the car I’m driving and it’s honestly slightly terrifying for me. It could be the next evolution of those devices insurance companies want you to plug into your OBD port so they can monitor how quickly you accelerate, take turns, etc. Except now Tesla (and whomever they decide to sell it to) know that when that innocent-seeming accident happened you seemed to be looking down, so now you’re completely liable for damages.<p>With the good comes the bad, but I’m terrified of the bad and the good doesn’t seem that much better than the current.

The &quot;hacker&quot; is greentheonly and has a fun twitter feed if you&#x27;re into the guts of Tesla. He reverse engineers just about every Tesla firmware:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;greentheonly" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;greentheonly</a>

Sadly, one of the reasons I will never buy a Tesla. The lack of privacy concerns me.

So having worked in the space of driving facing cameras here are my 2 cents.<p>- Why use it? If you have the car driving autonomous and you want the driver to take over, you need to know if they are able to take over or not (sleeping)<p>- Placement The placement of the camera needs to be well below the head, otherwise you will not be able to fully see the eyes and also not be able to tell if a person has it&#x27;s eyes open or not. This is more true for Asian people.<p>The placement of this camera shows a lot of the inside of the car compared with other OEMs. This is an interesting feat and could for example be used if you see the temp in the car incrase during parking you might want to turn on the AC if a child or animal is left in the car.

Driver monitoring is most important at night, when the camera Tesla included can&#x27;t see anything in the cabin. I bet Tesla is kicking themselves for not putting an IR camera + LED in, like the front facing camera on Comma.ai.

This is creepy. I don&#x27;t want more electronics keeping eyes on me.<p>In fact I don&#x27;t want to be driving at all. Bring on the full-on self-driving car.<p>I don&#x27;t have a car though as I live in a city where I don&#x27;t really need one (or could even park it if I wanted to). But in some countries you can&#x27;t do without one sadly.

I love that the car is capturing this data. I would imagine Tesla engineers on the analysis side of this data are thinking &quot;holy shit, look how much time our drivers are spending not paying attention at all, we need to do something about this.&quot;<p>They need this data for regulatory reasons, anyway. At some point they need confidence to say how people are really (ab)using their self-driving tech.

I wonder if they car will stop working if you put a piece of tape over the camera.

This will be very useful. I&#x27;m always watching the road anyway, it would be nice not to have to put the right tension on the wheel the whole time.<p>This is what I envied about other lane keeping cars, I think Cruise uses eye tracking, or maybe it was something else.

Anyone else get the impression that this is to head off litigious drivers?

&#x27;graybox&#x27; AI products (mostly automatic but periodically return emergency control to pesky human) are going to need to model driver alertness<p>the car certainly should warn you at lower danger threshold if it thinks you&#x27;ll need more time to return to full attention<p>(even in a zero-shame case, like for example you&#x27;re checking your mirror but the car thinks there&#x27;s a hazard in front)<p>separate question of 4th &#x2F; 5th amendment consequences of using this for crash liability

For context, a camera monitoring the driver for attention isn&#x27;t anything new or specific to Tesla. Many cars from other makes are already doing this, and they tout it as a feature of their driver assist systems.

&gt; better driver monitoring because it’s currently one of the biggest weaknesses of Tesla’s Autopilot<p>Isn’t the biggest weakest all the edge cases that the AI has troubles making decisions on?

This should have been done much earlier. Its a great thing for safety. I do have concerns with privacy, but not much you I can do about that.<p>Elon was to bullish on self-driving and believed this &#x27;transition&#x27; technology was not necessary. I hope they role this out soon.<p>And its not just safety, it just makes sense to not having to torque the wheel.

Since it isn&#x27;t an IR camera with illumination, it won&#x27;t be useable at night, right?

The high end trim Forester already has this. I assume a lot of cars do. Is there anything particularly special Tesla offers other than also taking your data for themselves?

Spoiler: they use the driver-facing camera to watch the driver.<p>Edit: why downvote? This is a pretty clickbait story. Feel free to comment if you have another perspective.

So wait they have this capability and they still don’t disengage their “autopilot” when they identify a distracted driver?

&gt; Tesla’s upcoming self-driving robotaxi network<p>Heh.

One of the reasons I would love to have autopilot is because I have a history of dozing off at the wheel. Never so much where I&#x27;ve had an accident, but bad enough where I&#x27;ve scared myself badly.<p>I don&#x27;t want autopilot so I can actually sleep at the wheel, I want it <i>in case I do</i>. I&#x27;d vastly prefer if the car noticed I was inattentive that it notified me. My feeling is for long drives this would be a safety feature, but I&#x27;m concerned that the way it&#x27;s built it will my worst driving behaviors instead of helping compensate for them.

HEAD_TRUNC? Is this to detect when Autopilot has driven through a freight trailer and severed the driver&#x27;s head?

Clickbait title.

The font on that blog is awful.

Eh, it is yet another reason for me not to own a Tesla. There seriously needs to be a bigger outcry against this. There is no benefit to the user. Your ( supposedly ) car actively works against you and your interests ( even if that interest is to be a stupid person who applies make up during driving ). Seriously, why is there a need to be cameras everywhere? And why do they need to watch me blink?