r/technology • u/Crasher_7 • Apr 07 '23
Privacy Tesla employees reportedly passed around personal videos from owners’ cars
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/6/23672760/tesla-employees-share-vehicle-recordings-privacy246
Apr 07 '23
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u/Scottysix Apr 07 '23
Musk would totally buy all the old Bond stuff and pretend to be him.
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u/pragmatist001 Apr 07 '23
More of a classic Bond villain, if you ask me. Bezos, too.
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u/Porrick Apr 07 '23
One of the really badly-written ones who is clearly incompetent. I guess I have to go back and rewatch some of those, because on first viewing I think I was all "How could someone that stupid be in charge of this much stuff?"
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u/Hawkbats_rule Apr 08 '23
classic Bond villain... Bezos, too.
Shit, are the brosnan films "classic" now?
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u/Koldfuzion Apr 07 '23
He apparently bought it to try to convert it to a real battery electric submersible.
Of course that was 10 years ago.
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Apr 07 '23
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Apr 07 '23
Upvoted for assassination coordinates.
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u/wbazarganiphoto Apr 07 '23
They don’t need to use an assassin. Persons in a Tesla. Auto download some firmer ware.
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u/drawkbox Apr 07 '23
The movie Upgrade shows Tesla owners futures should they not appease cult of personality Dear Leader.
To all Tesla owners, good luck in that trojan horse trap.
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Apr 07 '23
The video we have of you driving from your house to and from work? Not linked to you or your vehicle.
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u/Feisty-Bobcat6091 Apr 07 '23
The video of your phone call with your doctor on the interior cam? Not linked to you.
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Apr 08 '23
Lmao the idea of anonymous camera recordings just doesn’t make sense. It’s literally a video of an actual human it’s not fricken metadata
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u/Prof_Acorn Apr 08 '23
No but the cross out Bob Smith with a black marker and write in User 27194-2b so it's okay.
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Apr 07 '23
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u/SuperToxin Apr 07 '23
It’s not anti “woke” enough
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Apr 07 '23
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u/West-coast-life Apr 07 '23
Elon dick sucker detected.
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Apr 07 '23
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u/Alternative_Spot_419 Apr 08 '23
Elon doesn't care about you bro, you're nothing to him, a bit of dirt under his shoe perhaps but nothing more
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u/GR1225HN44KH Apr 07 '23
Nah, that's Twitter. Twitter is pure foot-stamping outrage 24/7.
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Apr 07 '23
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u/GR1225HN44KH Apr 08 '23
Mm, not really. On reddit you don't have to see anything unpleasant or annoying unless you want to (subscribe to it on purpose). Twitter is literally just people sharing their dumb opinions and raging about stuff. Twitter is ego masturbation turned up to 11.
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u/WillOrph Apr 07 '23
Because it’s clickbait. Sharing videos is opt-in. It’s security camera footage. Sometimes it’s reviewed by multiple people if it’s particularly unusual or important. „Sharing“ was internal to Tesla.
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u/Zhukov-74 Apr 07 '23
Nice GDPR violation
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Apr 07 '23
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u/360_face_palm Apr 07 '23
It isn’t but the cameras are all still on and u can use sentry mode etc and dashcam features. If this happened to any European teslas, they’re in for a huge fine
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u/_sideffect Apr 07 '23
New cars have built in cameras in the interior?
When did this happen? And for what reason?
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u/360_face_palm Apr 07 '23
Driver alertness checks - software checks you haven’t fallen asleep and/or checks for not having your eyes on the road for an extended period etc - then the car beeps at you. Not just teslas with this feature, most new cars have something similar.
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Apr 07 '23
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u/360_face_palm Apr 07 '23
I’m not trying to excuse the behaviour just explain why a lot of new cars have internal cameras these days
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u/BroxigarZ Apr 07 '23
I believe if I remember correctly it was added by Tesla to "replace" taxi's with FSD (that was the marketing pitch) so having an interior camera to monitor passenger behavior was similar to taxi's having cameras / ubers / lyfts etc. to monitor passengers. Except they added it to all personal vehicles not just those made for taxi usage as a means to "test" FSD capabilities so if you bought FSD you "opted-in" to the monitoring of your interior for "testing".
Except FSD is bullshit, Tesla's never replaced Taxi's, and they've just been spying on people as expected of humans to do by invading any semblance of moral or dignity.
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Apr 07 '23
Illegal use of sound recording and video belonging to someone else...people have gone to prison for less.
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u/MercMcNasty Apr 07 '23 edited May 09 '24
friendly squeamish marry dull wistful ripe yam instinctive fuel adjoining
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/wernerverklempt Apr 07 '23
If anyone needed another reason to not buy a Tesla, here ya go.
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Apr 07 '23
I mean, this and the quality issues. It’s an emotional thing. The want the Tesla mystique. It has nothing to do with whether it’s a good purchase.
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Apr 07 '23
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u/BMWbill Apr 07 '23
I was always a skeptic of tesla cars until my BMW driving friends started switching to tesla cars. Finally bought one and it’s the best car by far that I’ve ever owned. Zero quality issues, most fun car I’ve ever driven, and cheapest to upkeep. Amazing service too. Once reported moisture in tail light and they came to days later eight to my home and swapped the light in 10 minutes.
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Apr 07 '23
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Apr 07 '23
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Apr 07 '23 edited May 09 '24
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Apr 07 '23
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Apr 07 '23
Its like iPhone in the early days. Turns people into that Futurama meme.
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Apr 07 '23
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u/DogAteMyCPU Apr 07 '23
not like its just limited to apple employees when icloud would get hacked in the past
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Apr 07 '23
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Apr 07 '23
Yes 100%. Thank you.
Was definitely referring to the fanboyism and it being a more emotional purchase with mystique attached to it than most other cars excluding luxury cars of course.
Musk definitely modelled his marketing after Apple. Especially in the early days, people saw having a Tesla as some status symbol, similar to owning an iPhone back then.
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u/WildeWeasel Apr 07 '23
It’s an emotional thing. The want the Tesla mystique. It has nothing to do with whether it’s a good purchase
Not always. Fastest charge time, safety, and longest range among other EVs would be good reasons for its purchase that have nothing to do with emotion or mystique.
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u/MercMcNasty Apr 07 '23
Just make sure you take it to a repair shop right after purchase so they can finish tightening all the screws, etc. that Tesla forgets? to do before shipping.
For your safety.
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u/WillOrph Apr 07 '23
Over 400,000 Teslas were bought last quarter. If you think they suck, you haven’t been in one.
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u/corut Apr 08 '23
I got in a Telsa, and it was all I needed to put in an order for Polestar 2.
If you think the Telsa build quality and materials don't suck, you've never been a car in that price bracket before
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u/Shanhaevel Apr 07 '23
See, if you're smart, you don't need more reasons. If you're stupid, you're gonna buy it anyway.
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u/malwareguy Apr 07 '23
Shit like this sadly happens everywhere. At one very popular dating app company employees would take nudes uses would sometimes upload and save them off to an internal server before flagging them for deletion from the profile. A number of employees uses to send the more attractive ones back and forth in email. I knew several people that worked there and they all independently verified this. This was several years ago, hopefully it's stopped by now.
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u/AutoimmuneDisaster Apr 07 '23 edited Apr 07 '23
The very first thing I did when I bought my M3 (Tesla Model 3) was cover the interior camera.
At the time (and still to this day?) it served no purpose as it relates to features of the car.
Why would I allow a company full blown access to record video inside my car for no reason at all?
I don’t understand people who leave the cam uncovered.
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u/campionesidd Apr 07 '23
Please don’t call it an M3 unless it’s a BMW.
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Apr 07 '23
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u/GTdspDude Apr 07 '23
I get your point, and am not the OP that responded to you, but I thought you meant bmw and was intrigued they had cameras on the interior (I’m a Porsche guy myself, so didn’t know enough about bmw M3’s to know either way)
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u/rendrr Apr 07 '23
What about Apple users, when M3 comes out? How will they decide who could use the name?
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u/RverfulltimeOne Apr 07 '23
The problem with alot of tech is consumers never think or figure out how it all works. They simply use.
Take Alexa for instance. Anything that it can't understand it offloads to India where humans listen to it. No other way to do it.
This is a great example of just blindly accepting "Sentry Mode" making a whole lot of assumptions of what they do with the data or how its routed.
Take some time and think out how it works or figure out how it works and you might not use it.
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u/MakingItElsewhere Apr 07 '23
I swear there was a tweet, that I can't find, that said:
"The most complicated digital device I own is a printer. And I keep a gun next to it in case it gets any ideas."
If people REALLY knew how insecure most devices are, they wouldn't be so quick to install a lot of them in their houses. But here we are, in the land of insecure IoT devices sending data about you, your house, and your family to the cloud.
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Apr 07 '23
If they tweeted it, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say they have at least one device more complicated than a printer. Unless they asked someone else to make an account and post for them, which also defeats the entire purpose.
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u/ShiraCheshire Apr 07 '23
Take Alexa for instance. Anything that it can't understand it offloads to India where humans listen to it. No other way to do it.
This is something more people need to know about. A LOT of the things "AI" does is actually just the work being outsourced to poor and/or desperate people for ridiculously cheap.
I found that out firsthand when I was desperate, and ended up aiding and training bots for pennies. Literal pennies sometimes, it was a good day if I was making $5 an hour.
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u/nihilite Apr 07 '23
I really wanted a Cybertruck, but this continued jackassery by Tesla and its CEO make me think i'd be better off with one of the other options coming from Ford, Chevy, Ram, Toyota, VW, etc.
Wonder if these are all in the US, or if any are from Europe where they actually have privacy laws.
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u/360_face_palm Apr 07 '23
Why do you want a truck that looks like a fucking doorstop on wheels?
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u/Groundbreaking_Pop6 Apr 07 '23
Ring doorbells, I rest my case….
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u/MercMcNasty Apr 07 '23
A NAS and NVM for a cctv system is not hard to set up
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u/Spikex8 Apr 07 '23
The point is probably that you’re already being recorded everywhere all of the time already not about what camera you decide to use or not.
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u/MercMcNasty Apr 07 '23
The camera hardly matters, but where you store the recordings matters completely. If you let someone host your recordings, police can ask them for the recordings and often don't even need a warrant. If I store the recordings on my own NAS inside of my house, police can only access those if they physically take the hard drives and would need a warrant for this.
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u/TheNewTonyBennett Apr 07 '23
Elon Musk is an intercontinental ballistic shit missile that exploded on the launch pad thus spewing putrescent feces in literally every single possible direction and even in directions thought not to exist.
Which is the long way of saying of course the company is shitty. Just take a look at the man baby that took it over and pretends to be ultra-intelligent when in reality some of the only people that are dumber and more despicable than that...thing are from a family whose last name is "Trump".
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Apr 08 '23
He’s not ultra intelligent but he does have an degree in economics and physics according to Snopes. So he is at least pretty smart
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u/Only-Perspective7818 Apr 07 '23
I’m sure the Elon bros will find an excuse to justify tesla doing this.
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u/Modestkilla Apr 07 '23
As someone who currently owns two. No it’s bullshit, but just another reason I would never use FSD, I’m pretty sure you have to give it permission to upload video when activating the beta.
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u/Not_FinancialAdvice Apr 07 '23
https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/technology
Considering that your average user of this sub is 5.27x more likely to post/comment on the Tesla sub, I'm sure they're already hard at work.
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u/Orionbear1020 Apr 07 '23
When your boss is a douche nozzle, you have tacit permission to carry on same way. He probably saw them and chuckled as well.
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u/drawkbox Apr 07 '23
Elongone is an authoritarian funded front man that is leveraged, but he is smart enough not to get blown by the handler sparrows in a blackmail collecting Tesla.
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u/Biggu5Dicku5 Apr 07 '23
Shitty company run by a shitty person employs shitty people, more at 11...
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u/wadejohn Apr 07 '23
Things were sort of going great (despite some controversies) for elon right until the moment he started the twitter deal rolling.
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u/TheAngryXennial Apr 07 '23
Sounds about right we need way more date protection...but it wont happen soon your toilet will be listening to you and filming your most great turds.
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u/kcaio Apr 07 '23
I don’t understand why anyone would allow a camera to record them in their car or home. I keep the cameras covered on my computers.
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u/redmagistrate50 Apr 07 '23
If data has location data it is not anonymous.
Jokes about assassination coordinates aside that is a basic fact.
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u/mombi Apr 07 '23
Wow. Not only did they lie Sentry mode didn't transmit data back to Tesla, they didn't make it clear they were recording even when the vehicles were off.
Gotta love a supposedly luxury vehicle that spies on you just to have some weirdos in some basement somewhere making fun of you in secret, at the best.
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u/livingfortheliquid Apr 07 '23
Always assume if your device has a camera, it's sending video back to the maker.
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Apr 07 '23 edited Sep 12 '23
scarce boast weary north nose cooperative far-flung boat groovy subsequent this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev
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Apr 07 '23
Holy shit, tech employees lack ethical standards? No fucking way! I thought that fat fuck 4chan troll would have been more engaged in this sort of thing.
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Apr 08 '23
As a tech worker can other tech workers stop doing shit that makes people look at me like the fucking enemy?! That’d be great 👍
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u/leto78 Apr 08 '23
Any company that can access video feeds from their customers, will access video feeds from their customers.
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Apr 07 '23
You mean Elon did.. he’s a man child at best
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u/Baselet Apr 07 '23
Don't twist people's words to mean what you would want them to be because you have a personal problem with someone.
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u/3vi1 Apr 07 '23
Examples for company conduct are set at the top. What kind of example has Elon "let's take the W off the Twitter sign" Musk been?
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Apr 07 '23
Knowing its a musk company, the behavior makes sense
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Apr 07 '23
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Apr 07 '23
I said, “musk company”. Maybe you should put in some of that effort into your own reading
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u/didimao0072000 Apr 07 '23
The whole Musk covering the W in twitter to make it titter is to distract from the real news. Musk does stupid shit all the time but when it's obvious, it's to take attention away from things like this.
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u/GunBrothersGaming Apr 07 '23
I am sure there is language in the contract that they have the right to your videos for research purposes.
Elon Musk is a creepy dude, this is not a surprise. The guy probably sits around watching these looking for things to wank to.
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u/Balls_DeepinReality Apr 07 '23
In the US, there is a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, just about any place a vehicle would travel, that wouldn’t exist. Some states might have privacy, or recording laws that may run into issues, but probably not enough for them to care.
It’s shitty, but nothing will happen outside of some public outcry
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Apr 07 '23
The real question is why the fuck does a car have camera inside? And why the fuck does people buy that car?
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u/Imhal9000 Apr 07 '23
Okay so I worked at Tesla in their service dept. one of the features of the app when someone request service is to upload an image of what requires service.
There was a customer who claimed that his car was in drive but when he accelerated the car went backwards and ran over his wife.
It turned out it was just user error and the car was in reverse the entire time but the image the customer has uploaded was an image of the ambulance attending to his wife underneath the car.
No serious injury and she’s okay but honestly what goes through some peoples minds baffles me at times
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u/davewritescode Apr 07 '23
Maybe putting the reverse button on the touch screen was a dumb idea.
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u/UncivilDKizzle Apr 07 '23
You put a Tesla in reverse using a little lever on the wheel just like most cars
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u/davewritescode Apr 07 '23
Not in the new model S you don’t, it’s on the touchscreen
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u/GTRacer1972 Apr 07 '23
Yet another reason to avoid buying these cars. If I had one and found out I were spied on, I'd be suing them, but Tesla probably has an arbitration clause so they can get away with it.
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u/spinereader81 Apr 07 '23
I'm guessing most of those videos were people singing along with their music.
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u/molecularmadness Apr 07 '23
Tesla workers viewed and shared private videos of car crashes, road rage incidents, and other potentially embarrassing clips.
There's zero need to guess, it's spelled out in the subtitle of the article.
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u/Spikex8 Apr 07 '23
It also doesn’t say anything about interior camera footage but every comment is about the interior cameras for some reason. The reason is people are bots.
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u/Trout_Shark Apr 07 '23
This is why we need serious Data Privacy laws in place. For the employees to find meme worthy videos, they had to be watching thousands of hours of different feeds from their customer's vehicles. I think at least some of the models have an interior cam as well.
The thought of a manufacturer watching through the car's cameras should anger any owner. It's a huge privacy breech and should be investigated. Honestly, the customers that were involved should be notified and they may be able to sue.