Teslas monitor everything – including you [video] from WIRED

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7VHsDODU7E

by mdhb • 1 year ago

155 178 1 year ago

Many cars monitor the driver now, often with facial recognition enabled cameras. Mazda, infinity, Hyundai/genesis, others. It feels a bit like every brand will end up with invasive tech, ads, and subscriptions.

palata3• 1 year ago

It feels a bit like every brand will end up with invasive tech, ads, and subscriptions.

It's bad enough as it is, and consumers should try and fight against that by not buying those cars.

Especially now that we see that the CEO can turn fascist and feel entitled to do whatever he pleases with the data. How long before federal employees get fired because their Tesla showed that they arrived late to work?

At the very least, don't buy Teslas. At this point that's probably one of the riskiest choices.

pavlov• 1 year ago

Americans liked to laugh at Europe's data regulations, but they sure are effective at preventing this specific problem of "CEO can turn fascist and feel entitled to do whatever he pleases with the data."

Which surely has some connection to why Musk (like many other Silicon Valley billionaires) hates the EU so much.

DanielHB• 1 year ago

Remember when all we worried about was when government was tracking/spying on you? With illegal phone wiretaps and hidden microphones. Good times...

Now we have to worry about the government AND the big tech companies AND their crazy CEOs as the lines get blurred between the three.

mdhb• 1 year ago

This isn’t normal. Hand waving it away as nothing like you seem to be doing here comes across as extremely weird I have to be honest.

pasquinelli• 1 year ago

i don't read it that way. i take it more they're saying the problem is broader than just tesla.

fastball• 1 year ago

These are not fully autonomous systems and we live in a very litigious society.

How do you propose these driverless / driver assist systems work?

appointment• 1 year ago

Driver attention monitoring is very normal and required for any car with significant Assisted Driving technology, which is likely to be all new cars soon. I expect safety scoring schemes like Euro NCAP continue to give AD systems higher and higher weights in their scores over time.

fc417fc802• 1 year ago

A deadly piece of equipment monitoring a safety critical part of the control system (ie the driver) is totally normal and expected. That same piece of equipment surreptitiously phoning home to the manufacturer with the data is the part that isn't acceptable.

I want my car to monitor both me and the surroundings. I also want to be able to do things like speak in natural language to my phone, use my phone camera to OCR and translate documents from a foreign language, and all sorts of other 90s sci-fi stuff.

Unfortunately the future we were graced with is a dystopian reality where all of this is built on proprietary black boxes that spy on you 24/7. And somehow the government takes no issue with this state of affairs, instead constructing their own data feeds.

oneeyedpigeon• 1 year ago

How many is many? Are we talking 1% of all cars on the road? 0.1%?

dambi0• 1 year ago

Given this is about new technologies or more accurately the potential misuse of new technology, I think we can infer we are talking newer models of cars rather than cars already on the road.

hsuduebc22• 1 year ago

Even if it would be one percent, eg. every hundreth car that can store IDs and car color of cars passing by then you'r movement could be tracked easily just by being spotted by teslas. Musk has shown he's not a man to be trusted.

_kb• 1 year ago

Ford already has a patent for that [1] and Jeep has already started doing it [2] “by accident”.

[1] https://au.pcmag.com/cars-auto/107185/ford-patents-in-car-ad...

[2] https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/jeep-in-car-ads-popup-stellan...

postmeta• 1 year ago

it does help having video of virtuous people vandalizing your car to show the police

gambiting• 1 year ago

Sure, but it has the same energy as saying it's worth having a camera in your living room recording 24/7(to the cloud) because any potential recording of burglars entering your house is worth having.

Mashimo• 1 year ago

You say that, but people actually do that.

I, for one, find it weird.

SideburnsOfDoom• 1 year ago

It's only worth powering those cameras up when you're going to be out of the house for a long period of time. Power them down on return.

mnewme• 1 year ago

black mirror vibes.

akimbostrawman7• 1 year ago

no, reality of the car industry for over a decade.

amelius2• 1 year ago

SmartTV vibes

mg9• 1 year ago

I wonder if this is an argument for more public transport.

Electric buses make rides pretty cheap and comfortable. And shifting traffic from personal cars to buses would make mobility much more efficient. Because in a bus, 30 people can cross a crossing so much faster than in a line of 30 individual cars.

Would privacy also be better? Because the government is more trustworthy regarding the collection of movement data than private companies?

roflmaostc3• 1 year ago

In most cities going by bike is even faster. Ofc, it needs some effort to overcome weather, sweat.

But at the end it pays off. Full privacy, free workouts, faster commute, being outside (getting sun, maybe fresh air).

Invest in a good bike (maybe even eletric bike) and commute faster :)!

agumonkey2• 1 year ago

It's really a strange realization. If your health is fine.. and you don't live in smog.. biking is immensely beneficial. There's often multiple path to the same destination, shorter than main arteries, no traffic jam, no stress. I take my car twice a month and everytime I'm surprised by the effect of having to deal with all interruption and safety because we all drive 500-1000kg metallic buckets. It's quickly annoying.. that's a feeling you never have on bike. And no gas cost, near no insurance.. cheap repairs.

So true, weather is an issue (but in a way it's fun to now look at the sky to see where the clouds are going), clothing too a bit. My only problem is that weak health quickly cut your ability to move far.

mg9• 1 year ago

I don't expect bikes to take market share from cars.

Bikes have been around for a long time and are expected to technically stay the same in the foreseeable future.

Electric buses are so much better than gasoline buses. Fewer vibrations, less noise. Makes it much more suitable to relax or do some work on your phone. Plus, the cost (manufacturing+maintenance+fuel) of electric buses is 25% lower than the cost of gasoline buses. At the moment, only 10% or so of buses are electric. So the effect of these two improvements are mostly still to hit the market.

And in a few years, buses will start to become autonomous. Which reduces the costs of a bus operation by 70%.

Imagine we get autonomous electric buses with nice seats and tables. Then you can do your work in a bus while getting from A to B super cheap. Mobility would be so different.

llampx3• 1 year ago

I love bikes but I value my health so I keep my exercise to places where I won't be crushed to death by rogue road users.

ben_w• 1 year ago

Would privacy also be better? Because the government is more trustworthy regarding the collection of movement data than private companies?

On this topic, I think public/private ownership, and public/private usage, makes no difference either way.

Public transport can be privately owned. Back in the UK, the majority of busses I saw were Stagecoach[0].

But even when government owned, that doesn't remove the argument in favour of CCTV: here in Berlin we have BVG[1], which is government owned, and I'm fairly sure the blobs I see on the ceiling are CCTV cameras[2].

I think what does make a difference is rules like GDPR — but cookie popups have shown that it's an uphill struggle to force businesses to actually follow that law rather than demand "consent" before doing business, or to actually minimise their usage of tracking to the level where "legitimate interest" actually applies and therefore they don't need to ask (as opposed to the IMO wishful thinking "legitimate interest" used by some cookie popups).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecoach_Group

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Verkehrsbetriebe

[2] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/rechtsstreit-mit-sitz-des...

harvey92• 1 year ago

In general? no - Teslas spying on you is orthogonal to mode of transport. And specifically no where I live because all the buses have CCTV.

euroderf2• 1 year ago

all the buses have CCTV.

IF the default handling of any recordings is total erasure after some specified (and not unreasonable) period, then it's not an unleavened evil is it ?

tapland• 1 year ago

In Sweden the municipality finances 40-50% of public transport, and owns recorded CCTV and gathered traffic data (from ticket scans etc). But operations are by private companies (regular procurement stuff).

It works somewhat ok

kvakerok2• 1 year ago

In your car you have an expectation of privacy. Public transport is by definition a public space and thus has no expectation of privacy. Whole different ruleset applies. Anyone can monitor you on a bus. Without your consent too.

Ylpertnodi2• 1 year ago

In your car you have an expectation of privacy.

Though, I can freely film you from a public area.

enriquto• 1 year ago

In your car

There you said it! But, if you cannot control the software, then it's not your hardware.

QuadmasterXLII• 1 year ago

in practice, in a car your motions are tracked and stored forever (you, today, already inplemented) by both automated license plate readers, the car’s phone home gps, and typically the phone in your pocket. In a bus, if you pay with a card its tracked where you got on, and they can run facial recognition after the fact, but its at least not greppable

RoryH• 1 year ago

Possibly the point is that an individual can not be as easily tracked by first identifying the bus, however most cars are registered to their owners. Nowadays most buses and public transport are full of CCTV though so same problem really.

8bitsrule• 1 year ago

Privacy in public transport systems is poorer than it has to be, and can be enhanced. The following describes a privacy-preserving ticketing system.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-20810-7_...

No doubt many people are aware that card passes are potential trackers, and that may be why a third or so of the ridership pays no fare.

Fricken• 1 year ago

A couple days after that United Health CEO was assasinated they has video of the suspect from a deluge of sources and none of them were from busses or cars.

Nearly every business has cameras. More and more residential homes have porch cameras pointed at the street. Even if your vehicle isn't monitoring you, it has a license plate hanging off the back so it can be easily identified. We're all being tracked by our phones, and everybody else's phone will be used against you should you be caught acting weird in pubic. There are records of me in more databases than what's even knowable, the plot is so lost. We're back to being naked all the time, except now without the privilege of knowing who is looking at you.

I felt like people rallying against surveillance and tracking were beating a dead horse 20 years ago and I feel even more that way today.

IsTom• 1 year ago

In your car you have an expectation of privacy.

Less than some people assume. I've seen people eat boogers while waiting for a green light.

TinkersW• 1 year ago

No, but it is an argument for making it illegal for car manufacturers to monitor you.

m463• 1 year ago

public transportation has cameras, lots.

I remember reading about someone who had to track down incidents on the many interior bus cameras.

rsynnott13• 1 year ago

When I was a kid, buses didn't have cameras (or at least most buses didn't; it started coming in in the early 90s) but even then they had these mirror periscope things so that the driver could see the upper deck and the area behind the stairs on the lower deck.

presentation• 1 year ago

If the reason we decide to invest in public transit is privacy, we’re hopeless.

pyeri• 1 year ago

In the interest of minimalism and collective human efficiency, buses are best. Car or SUV makes sense only when a family or friends of 3-4 folks are travelling.

dudefeliciano8• 1 year ago

I started playing a game when I’m waiting at traffic lights, that is to count how many cars have a single driver and no passengers in it. A good portion of those cars are SUVs that have no business being in a city. The results are far from surprising and completely maddening.

vaylian• 1 year ago

Would privacy also be better? Because the government is more trustworthy regarding the collection of movement data than private companies?

It must be possible to buy a ticket that has at least one of the following properties:

1. It is not linked to the times when you use it (flat-rate/monthly ticket). Payment may be linked to your name.

2. It is not linked to your identity (pseudonymous numeric ID). Payment must not be linked to your name.

Otherwise it's easy to track when you travel which route.

And obviously, facial recognition must be forbidden.

szszrk• 1 year ago

Plenty of places, including my current city, have time-based tickets only. So even for the shortest ones you have to validate only once, while you can have a much longer trip.

Daily/weekend/weekly are even better, and monthly/quarterly even while they tied to your name, don't have to be validated in any particular place at all. You can do it far from any vehicles.

raxxorraxor• 1 year ago

We had electric busses in our city. They were awesome. The were far less noisy and didn't stink. But they were scrapped again. Reason: Diesel busses had a maintenance time of 2%, electric busses of 5%, meaning they spend 5% of their running time in maintenance. That was all, so we now have loud and stinky busses again.

That said, I don't think you can ever replace individual traffic. It is only possible in the most dense cities. Otherwise bus travel is too slow and unreliable for people working 40h+.

mg9• 1 year ago

Which city is that?

    bus travel is too slow

I would expect travel to speed up when we move from cars to buses. Look at what cars do most of the time. Waiting at crossings, slowing down for crossings, accelerating after passing a crossing. I have not measured it yet, but I would expect buses that carry 20 passengers each to accelerate that by a factor of 10 or so.

    and unreliable

You mean when the bus is stuck in traffic? Don't you have the same problem with a car?

    people working 40h+

I would think people who work 40h would be happy if they could do their work in a nice electric bus with a table instead of spending that time handling a steering wheel.

llampx3• 1 year ago

Does the maintenance time include regular servicing or is it only the time spent out of service in a day, for example charging?

I think electric vehicles are such a clear win for pollution (air and sound pollution) in cities that rolling back to ICEs should be clearly justified.

I_• 1 year ago

How can electric buses have more maintenance downtime than diesel?

threeseed• 1 year ago

Otherwise bus travel is too slow and unreliable for people working 40h+

This feels like a very US mindset.

In many other places buses are very reliable and cities are built around them e.g. dedicated bus lanes and so they are often much faster than driving.

shafyy• 1 year ago

They were doing something wrong. In many European cities I have lived and visited, electric buses are all over the place.

jasode2• 1 year ago

And shifting traffic from personal cars to buses would make mobility much more efficient. Because in a bus, 30 people can cross a crossing so much faster than in a line of 30 individual cars. [...] I would expect travel to speed up when we move from cars to buses. Look at what cars do most of the time. Waiting at crossings, slowing down for crossings, accelerating after passing a crossing. I have not measured it yet, but I would expect buses that carry 20 passengers each to accelerate that by a factor of 10 or so.

Your math is leaving out a lot of other waiting periods which makes it seem like buses save time over cars. Your focus on crossing intersections is distorting the calculations.

Yes, 1 bus can move 30 passengers through a traffic light is faster than 30 individual cars but you have to offset that savings with extra wait times in other places:

+ add additional time to travel to the bus stop

+ add additional time to wait at the bus stop because buses don't come on demand but at spaced intervals. Maybe once an hour or half hour.

+ add additional time for bus to stop at other bus stops that are not relevant to the passenger, or changing buses,

+ add additional time to account for the bus taking a longer convoluted route that deviates from the shortest path between points A and B because they have to accommodate for the bus stops and also optimize the # of buses in the fleet vs passenger counts.

+ add time to travel from the final bus stop dropoff point to travel to the final destination without the bus. Each mile of walking takes about ~20 minutes. If the bus stop is too far away from the destination office or house, then I guess the passenger can take an Uber ride? Not only does that add more time, it negates a lot of benefits of using the bus. People could use the Uber for the entire trip -- or just use their personal car.

There are scenarios where the bus is undeniably faster. Inside dense cities where they have special lanes that can bypass some gridlock. The tour buses with stops that have frequent pickup intervals that do continuous loops around cities for tourists is another example that's faster than cars.

mg9• 1 year ago

My perspective is from living in a big city. Hamburg in Germany. Here it is like this:

    add additional time to travel to the bus stop

That is more than offset by the time and stress to find a parking place when you use a private car.

    add additional time to wait at the bus stop

I would guess the average wait time here is about 3 minutes.

    additional time for bus to stop at other bus stops

True, but decreases the more buses there are. The more buses, the less stops every bus has to do. And also decreases the better the planning via internet becomes. We have buses here in Hamburg, called "Moia" by Volkswagen, where you announce your starting and destination positions in advance, and the bus only stops where it has to.

    additional time to account for the bus taking a route
    that deviates from shortest path

True, but decreases the more buses there are. And the better we plan the routes via the internet with people announcing their route upfront.

rsynnott13• 1 year ago

add additional time to wait at the bus stop because buses don't come on demand but at spaced intervals. Maybe once an hour or half hour.

I mean, this is enormously dependent on how busy the route or routes is. A once an hour route is _very_ infrequent. Every 10 minutes isn't unusual at peak times and of course multiple routes may work for you. I sometimes go for a drink with friends on the other side of the city after work; at rush hour, there's an almost continuous stream of suitable buses.

rsanek• 1 year ago

Electric buses make rides pretty cheap and comfortable

how much public transit have you used in the US? in NYC, busses are somehow even worse than the subway. in SF, same kind of story.

I'll choose to walk, bike or taxi to avoid the implementation of public transit we have.

cafard• 1 year ago

I can ride the WMATA Metrobus anonymously for $2.25 cash or unregistered SmartTrip. Now that I have the senior ($1.10) SmartTrip, I've blown my cover.

And an awful lot of SmartTrip cards are registered with WMATA, people use Apple Wallets, etc. But then a lot of people simply don't pay.

There are cameras on many or all buses, too.

palata3• 1 year ago

It's quite amazing how every thread related to "public transport" systematically ends up being "the rest of the world" trying to explain to Americans that they may want to get slightly informed about the rest of the world before they say "public transports cannot work anywhere, because in the US they don't work".

Sure, US cities have mostly (1) been designed as far away from anything that is not the individual car as possible, and now it's very difficult to come back. But at least Americans could pretend they are aware of the fact that cities can be built in such a way that public transports actually work.

(1) Because there are cities, like NYC, where it actually works!

lnsru2• 1 year ago

Ok, my old model Y has a camera inside to monitor me. 1€ AliExpress camera cover gave my privacy back. The new model y has a radar. So it will monitor not only my presence, but also my vital parameters as well as vital parameters of all passengers. No radar cover invented for that yet… it’s a bit too much. And since it’s already there it will be abused. That’s the path with all the technology.

genewitch2• 1 year ago

Aluminum foil ought work

amelius2• 1 year ago

But what if the car refuses to start without vital parameters?

lnsru2• 1 year ago

Probably not. Proper grounding and good shielding is needed. Eventually you can use conductive glue and attach the foil to the pcb (my guess is that Tesla uses low cost printed circuit board antenna, haven’t seen it yet) antenna directly messing its geometry and transmission characteristics.

stvltvs• 1 year ago

Does it have a microphone? I don't know the answer, but inside the car, I'd be more worried about capturing conversations than the camera.

vinni2• 1 year ago

It’s a pity original link was not picked up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43187724

squarefoot• 1 year ago

And, following recent events, now every parked Tesla is also a potential surveillance device for the surrounding area, with direct connection to the US government, possibly through famous 3 letter agencies.

ides_dev• 1 year ago

Why even bother with one of those crusty old 3-letter agencies, when you can go straight to the top via your very own 4-letter (1 better!) agency: D.O.G.E.

anotherevan• 1 year ago

For efficiency, it should be referred to as an extended 3-letter agency.

LargoLasskhyfv• 1 year ago

Debile overlords getting eager?

DODGE that shit, lasso 'em in!

shaunpud• 1 year ago

Wasn't this the same with Ring doorbells?

potato3732842• 1 year ago

Worse, not just the feds but the far more capricious state and local agencies.

whamlastxmas• 1 year ago

This is true of literally any camera provider who stores video footage in the cloud

akimbostrawman7• 1 year ago

Nobody should be suprised by this. This applies to all proprietary blackboxes with unrestricted network access. Maybe now that people are comically angry at musk they at least act like they care.

whoitwas13• 1 year ago

I would like to understand your position. Why do you think people being really mad is funny? To me, this reaction seems to be why Trump and Musk are able to troll and bully. It's because people think it's funny, but why? Are you a child? I mean literally.

akimbostrawman7• 1 year ago

Calling someone a child because you (think you) disagree with them is very mature. Thanks for the entertaining example.

fsflover5• 1 year ago

It's funny (and sad, too!) that people are so surprised, because lots of activists and NGOs have been warning against proprietary software for decades, starting with Richard Stallman [0] and https://fsf.org and continuing with Cory Doctorow [1] and https://eff.org. If your hardware obeys somebody else, it will betray you sooner or later, one way or another to extract more money for the benefit of the actual owner.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/473794/

telsor• 1 year ago

I would consider myself as apolitical as can be. I just have never cared about either side. I haven't voted since 1996. I think it is all a total fraud.

It seems obvious that people are basically being brainwashed by technology.

The story is the massive corruption and waste in the government. But this brainwashing turns the thought into ELON == BAD so government waste == good.

I feel like everyone I interact with at this point is borderline retarded.

Sparyjerry• 1 year ago

Because their trolls are very light hearted and everyone overexaggerates the pain they feel from it because they are on the other side of politics (for now). Like answering an e-mail that asked what you did this week turned into many folks doing hours long interviews about how they were wasting time answering the e-mail. comical, they could have spent 5 minutes replying and spend hours complaining instead.

benterix• 1 year ago

Except the "comically" part (what does even mean? I'd call it "sad" if anything) I agree with you. You had (1) strong marketing and (2) lack of choice on one side, and a few tech folks that were expressing their concerns on this for years, except that the public at large didn't care - or didn't have much choice (e.g. when you buy a vacuum cleaner).

I hope this whole row will make people just a bit more aware. But it's hard to say how much it will help. An average person is powerless when seeing "Connect to Wi-Fi to complete setup" on their screen - whether it's their new TV set or a new laptop.

whoitwas13• 1 year ago

It will go in the wrong direction. The people who are tricked by the marketing are persuaded by fear and greed, but also are incredibly lazy, negligent, and uninformed. In other words, they hate who the Ministry of Truth (Social) tells them to.

justforfunhere• 1 year ago

A ridiculous amount of tech wizardry goes into building software that watches over users. Most software engineers won’t blink twice before jumping on such a project—especially if the paycheck is juicy. But rest assured, they’ll still rush to HN to roll their eyes when someone else does it.

throwaway784989• 1 year ago

That Teslas are surveillance platforms makes it that much more satisfying to flip the bird at every one that I see.

netfortius• 1 year ago

How much of this is applicable to the EU (laws and regulations)?

kledru• 1 year ago

so Musk potentially has kompromat on everyone?

Teslas monitor everything – including you [video] from WIRED

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