Asking some reasonable questions about Elon Musk's "help" with the Cybertruck bombing case

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You think tesla is awful for this (they are) because elon is the current boogeyman but most if not all modern vehicles have eulas that reserve the right to save an obnoxious amount of data including images, voice recordings, routes driven, etc. you almost always have no way to opt out despite spending tens of thousands of dollars and almost all of them have absolutely horrible data security practices
It’s a serious concern already when it’s concerning vehicle telemetry and autonomous features like adaptive cruise control and automatic braking but they pretty much rely on imagery outside of the vehicle. That can and will of course pick up images of you. However an increasing number of cars are including facial recognition inside the cockpit to identify the driver, sold as a “comfort feature” for households where multiple users drive the same vehicle. The facial recognition IDs who is driving and will automatically set the seat, climate, etc. sounds fancy right? But they overwhelmingly reserve the right to store that data, absolutely will share it with law enforcement, and will sell it likely for advertising as well
The scummier manufacturers have eulas that say something along the lines of you give tacit consent to this by simply riding in the vehicle as a passenger. So your friend buys a nice new subaru, you have a conversation with them, and that data could be harvested, sold, shared with law enforcement, etc, solely because you were stupid enough to accept a ride. You were never presented with an eula, you were never given a chance to give informed consent, but it doesn’t fucking matter to Subaru, apparently (who also does the facial recognition thing)
- I recall Nissan reserving the right to sell info on your sexual orientation in one of their EULAs. Ridiculous and dystopian
  
  EULA for what service?
  Or do cars come with EULAs nowadays?
- Hangin' out the passenger side
  Of his best friend's ride
  
  Tryin' to holla at me
- That will be very illegal in some European countries, no EULA is going to save you from the law
- Get yourself a Chinese car to escape 14Eyes and embrace the CCPyware
  
  It's better than having your data in American servers where they can do the most damage.
- I think you have to see and accept EULA in EU for it to be respected
  
  At least in some EU countries EULAs aren't even valid in any way form or shape because they're considered an unilateral attempt to force new contract terms after a sale, which is an implicit contract.
  Absolutely, put a contract in front of people and say "sign here" before they pay and it's valid (although even then, some terms are never valid since certain things can't legally be signed away in a contract), try and force new contractual terms after a sale has been closed and it's not valid.
- And, sadly, according to Mozilla's report Subaru isn't even the worst! And, not in their defense, but the facial recognition stuff was a driver facing camera so it wouldn't be facing the passenger... Always watching your friend though!
- There is a website that allows you to opt out of some of that info I believe, I can't remember the site, but I assume an insurance company will raise your rates if you opt out?

It's no secret that Tesla has full access to telemetry and videos taken by Tesla cars. If you buy one, your only hope is that your footage is not interesting enough to be watched by Tesla employees. I remember reading a story about Tesla employees having internal memes made of footage that showed people captured by Tesla's surveillance in various (mostly unflattering) situations.
- All the video/telemetry etc is like HR.
  It's not to help you.
  
  I have a vinyl cutter, can anybody tell my the diameters and quantities of the cameras on these cars? I’d like to start making and selling stickers to cover over them all.
- Place your naked kid I front of a Tesla camera
  Sue Tesla for CP
  ???
  Profit
- https://gizmodo.com/tesla-elon-musk-car-camera-videos-employees-watching-1850307575
- You still need to enable sharing for this to happen, but if you do, then they can probably do anything.
  Otherwise they probably need a court order to violate their policy and would be open to lawsuits if it was discovered they were looking at video feeds with the setting disabled.

answer: The target demographic of the car does not believe in privacy
- They want everyone to know who they are and what they are doing at all times, and they have no sense of shame when they should.
- Until someone is suspected of a crime, and subjected to a warrantless search when the feds ask Elmo for that data and receive it. Sure there's not a lot of overlap between Tesla owners and petty crime but I'm willing to bet there IS a lot of overlap between Tesla owners and guys growing pot in their garage.
  
  They had probable cause for a search; didn't need a warrant.

In the system your country created rich control everything. Illusion of freedom is strong.
- I think it was Carlin who had a bit about the choices at the grocery store are a distraction from the lack of choices at the voting booth. I can get 15 types of corn flakes but only 2 sides of the same party.
  
  And there are 1-2 actual parent companies selling those corn flakes
- This reminds me of the movie upgrade :/

Everybody laughed when China put cameras everywhere and gave their citizens a social score to maintain. It's coming here. The bill of rights have no power when the ruling party chooses to ignore them.
- It's been here, trumps original supporter peter tiel created palantir back when still working at paypal
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies
  
  My favorite part of the Palantir story is that everyone who gets to use it, without exception, immediately uses it to monitor their coworkers, family and ex partners.
- What do you think a credit score is exactly
  
  It's measures your compliance with the banking industry. No bearing on how well you treat others.
  
  Credit score doesn't care if you're buying Bad Dragon dildos, just that you pay for them.
  Credit score doesn't care if you want a lifted Cummins diesel or a Smart Fortwo, just that you pay for it.
  On the flip side, social credit cares if you use your blinker or not... So, which one is worse?
  They both are but let's move past that.
  
  That's where it started, but a social score can ding you for not smiling while crossing the street.
- Why do you think China has a social score? If you look up information on it, you find many scores / systems for different domains. Or how national policy and local policy can be different or at odds. You see China announced it in 2014 and barely put out a draft in 2023. The "trustworthy" score is tied to fraud, cheating people, selling counterfeits, etc. One local government is apparently trying to tie blood donation to financial breaks. Like giving you a tax break. Just an example of how the national policy can be interpreted and used in practice.
  The idea of our governments scoring us for every little tic is scary, but the danger of overreach is different than "in China, your social score goes down for not smiling." What exactly are people referring to?
  
  lmao downvoted for giving details on how their social credit score works, when you're not even saying 'china good'.

I mean it sounds like it could be video from the charging facility but what the actual fuck they can unlock your car.
And yeah y'know what I bet they can get the video. Dear God why would anyone buy a Tesla
- but what the actual fuck they can unlock your car.
  Unfortunately, any car that has an 'app' where you can unlock your car... They can unlock your car. Whether or not you use or have the app. This includes onstar and all the rest
  
  The capability I'm not against. It is nice that when the kid/dog locks the door or you lose your keys or whatever you don't have to wait for someone to show up. Car keys/locks aren't all that secure either. It should all be local PKI over bluetooth or something, but that's another discussion, and even then an override if your phone/key gets lost/corrupted would be necessary.
  The legal framework for if/when it's fine to get a locksmith or break a window to get into a vehicle is pretty well established. Like a lot of other things the law for remote unlocking is lagging far behind tech.
  
  I’m not disagreeing with you, but it’s definitely possible to have that functionality without the ability for the provider to unlock the car.
- I mean it sounds like it could be video from the charging facility
  I mean that's what I assumed. I can't imagine a reason one would want a camera watching you charge - like that's an expense for little if any benefit. And if it was charged at a charging station owned by Tesla, I would be shocked if there wasn't camera footage or if Tesla didn't have access to it.
  but what the actual fuck they can unlock your car.
  I would imagine any car with keyless entry can be unlocked by the manufacturer if they have your VIN. They build the system and pair the keyfobs and locks, they're bound to have that ability in case something happens to your keys.
  
  I'd qualify that with a modern car with wireless connectivity, which, of course, all Teslas have.
  As far as Elon himself having access, I doubt he sits there surfing camera footage like the most boring cable package in the world, but he owns the company, America's privacy laws are sadly lacking, and he likes attention, so of course he's going to get his name on this, whether he had a hand in it or not.
  
  Cameras at a charging station are obvious - the wire in those stations are extremely valuable. Or, vandalism.

On the third one, looking through the Cybertruck's manual, there's a bit about data sharing in regards to the car's cameras to where the car can send its camera data to Tesla if it detects an accident or some kind of incident.
These cars have a few different scenarios in which they'll just sit there and record their surroundings. As far as I can tell, it normally saves that locally, but I guess it has the ability to send it back to Tesla. All of their cars creep me out

Imagine your car bursts into flames, and as you are going for the door, it locks up and you hear: "I'm sorry, but I can't do that, Elon".

Remember when Angela Chao was caught locked in a submerged TESLA for hours and died ?
I wonder if Elon can account for that ? What was he doing during that "accident" ?
She was the sister-in-law of Mitch McConnell.

Having security cameras at the un-manned charging stations doesn't seem unreasonable to me? Surely this is pretty standard to prevent/catch vandalism.
The other stuff, might be a valid explanation but since it's tesla probably not.
- The question is if it was security camera footage from the facility or from the cybertruck itself. One is fine, one clearly is not.
  
  Here's your answer. It's not a new thing.
  https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars-2023-04-06/
  
  it's the first one (that i know of), however musk also said that telemetry looked normal until it burned, which is not fine in any sensible way
  
  The in-car footage of the driver is for insurance reasons. If the Autopilot crashes, the footage will show that the driver was not paying attention or did not have the hands on the wheel, therefore it's not teslas but the drivers fault.
  
  I was specifically referring to security cameras. Cameras at the un-manned charging site, recording video only in a public area where there is no expectation of privacy. Any gas station would have the same.
  Now other commenters have pointed out they likely accessed the footage from the truck itself. This is a different ballpark.
- The question is why does Elon have access to it?
  Perhaps "Elon helped" is Musk-washing "Elon put us in contact with the folks who could get us access to those videos". But that manbaby likes getting his clammy grabbers in the mix, so I wouldn't be surprised if he personally demanded access and handed it over.
  
  I mean if Tesla owns their charging stations and has their security cameras there then it makes sense they can access them, and it also seems not unusual to me that the CEO of a company can ask an employee to send them the security footage of one of their cameras?
  I might have overlooked something but I'm struggling to see how this is different from what you'd expect. I get that this is c/Privacy and may not be what you'd want, but it seems in line with what you'd expect. The recordings are in a public place and presumably video only so I'm not sure what privacy is expected.
  Definitely seems like a normal process would be for police to ask Tesla for the footage, but because a Cybertruck exploded and people just kinda accepted it as something they might do before finding it's likely a car bomb, Musk probably wanted to try to get in front of it and likely contacted the police and offered their help to get answers quicker (and therefore help resolve the bad PR).
- I had no idea they had those, considering there's so many cases of vandalism that Tesla (both to cars and charging infrastructure) seemingly didn't do anything about.
  
  Having footage and getting the police to action that info are two very different things

i dont care who opens it. this is not the first story I hear about it locking upon catching fire
- That's how it keeps the fire inside
  
  Tesla trying to apply the trolley problem to the Three Laws of Robotics.

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