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Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

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Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#61

Post by IncreasePosts »

tamimio wrote: post #54
rbalicki wrote: post #6

Genuine question: What is stopping some small percent of drivers from installing cameras and using ML to identify cars driving dangerously (e.g. speeding, running reds, changing multiple lanes at once, etc.), and when their license plate is identifiable, finding and informing their insurance company? If even a small subset of users did this, and insurers did something with this information, it would substantially dis…

It won’t work as you expect. Most of these drivers don’t have insurance. Second, you might make things worse, as now you have other Karen-like drivers who will eventually start threatening other people to report them, and that will escalate a situation from flipping a bird to a more dangerous situation. I sometimes watch dashcam rage videos on YouTube, and these drivers won’t care or even become more aggressive once…

It's not clear to me how you can claim most of these drivers don't have insurance.

Also. Nothing is stopping Karen's from reporting things right now. So what if they do? If you've done nothing wrong then the reviewer would just trash it. And probably put Karen's reports in the "immediately discard" pile in the future if she sends in frivolous claims all the time.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#62

Post by tamimio »

chacha102 wrote: post #3

This makes me _not_ want to get a Tesla, just to avoid the inconvenience of getting my car towed because of what it _might_ have inside of it. And the opposite, doing what Ring is doing and simply streaming it to the police directly, might be easier but I still believe a major privacy concern. Sure, it could be helpful. But at what cost?

My car isn’t a Tesla, and the dashcam has a “parking mode” that records everything while parked. So, do that, don’t get a Tesla, and never get towed to access the camera.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#63

Post by neilv »

snozolli wrote: post #51
neilv wrote: post #35

Who gave Tesla and their drivers the right to set up video surveillance cameras in public?

Unless they're parking in an area with a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as a locker room, it's perfectly legal to record in the United States.

You can argue what exactly is and isn't a reasonable expectation of privacy, and someone else can argue differently.

For example, the upskirt "street photographers" have long argued one way, and eventually they get smacked down, legally.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#64

Post by darth_avocado »

gruez wrote: post #10
darth_avocado wrote: post #4

I used to keep my Sentry mode on all the time. Then my car got broken into twice. The police didn’t bother to follow up despite having a video footage of what happened. Now I never turn it on. And now police wants to tow vehicles for the footage.

The article mentions that they tried towing a car because they were investigating someone who got shot and stabbed. While it'd be nice if police could investigate every type of crime, I don't see the contradiction between "police didn't follow up about your car being broken into despite footage" and "police towed a car to get footage about someone getting shot and stabbed"

> While it'd be nice if police could investigate every type of crime

That’s literally their job, which they get paid for. But anyway, my comment was more referring to the fact that if they had done their job, I’d be more open to keeping my Sentry mode on.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#65

Post by zerocrates »

brvsft wrote: post #49
gruez wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do police have the legal right to access/take people's private property like this? I thought the 4th amendment of the constitution protected against unreasonable searches and seizures? Search warrants specifically exist to give police the "legal right to access/take people's private property", and are widely accepted to be constitutional.

You pretend this is some obvious fact, but obtaining a search warrant against a person or property that were uninvolved in the crime but may have only been 'witness' to it is not obvious or clear to me.

The standard for getting a search warrant is probable cause, and that includes just probable cause to believe that there is evidence of a crime at the place to be searched.

Taking the witness analogy, even an actual person who's a mere witness can be compelled to testify with a subpoena.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#66

Post by dragonwriter »

darth_avocado wrote: post #64
gruez wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions that they tried towing a car because they were investigating someone who got shot and stabbed. While it'd be nice if police could investigate every type of crime, I don't see the contradiction between "police didn't follow up about your car being broken into despite footage" and "police towed a car to get footage about someone getting shot and stabbed"

> While it'd be nice if police could investigate every type of crime That’s literally their job, which they get paid for. But anyway, my comment was more referring to the fact that if they had done their job, I’d be more open to keeping my Sentry mode on.

> > While it'd be nice if police could investigate every type of crime

> That’s literally their job, which they get paid for.

It's literally not.

Their job is to do a variety of things, including investigation, according to the priorities of the higher, within the financial constraints they are given and according to the priorities of the authority placed over them (which in many cases is the top leadership of the police department themselves, because lots of times they are given a broad degree of structural independence from the local government they are associated with.)

What you say may be what you'd like their job to be, but it is not literally what their job is.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#67

Post by tamimio »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #61
tamimio wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won’t work as you expect. Most of these drivers don’t have insurance. Second, you might make things worse, as now you have other Karen-like drivers who will eventually start threatening other people to report them, and that will escalate a situation from flipping a bird to a more dangerous situation. I sometimes watch dashcam rage videos on YouTube, and these drivers won’t care or even become more aggressive once…

It's not clear to me how you can claim most of these drivers don't have insurance. Also. Nothing is stopping Karen's from reporting things right now. So what if they do? If you've done nothing wrong then the reviewer would just trash it. And probably put Karen's reports in the "immediately discard" pile in the future if she sends in frivolous claims all the time.

I watched dashcam videos, and most times after accidents, it turned out that there is no insurance or, worse, wrong insurance information is given, only to be found later that it’s fake. Obviously, this is not real statistics, but something I observed.

> nothing is stopping Karens from reporting things

True, but when you provide a platform for that, you incentivize the behavior. As mentioned below, you might start getting “points” in the app for these reports, just like how you report gas prices and get points that might win you free gas.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#68

Post by gruez »

snozolli wrote: post #48
gruez wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search warrants have existed forever, and allowed police to compel production of certain evidence. This includes breaking into residences or offices. I don't see how towing a car is any different. Unless you think search warrants themselves are "completely unacceptable", I don't see how towing teslas should be singled out.

I don't see how towing a car is any different Before modern FISA courts, we generally had faith that a search warrant was warranted , based upon other investigation. From what the article said, this sounds more like a "fishing expedition".

They did investigate. A guy was stabbed nearby, and the car was suspected to be recording. On a more practical level, the car was recording a public area (ie. the road) anyways, so it's not like that much privacy was lost by granting access to the video.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#69

Post by gruez »

dylan604 wrote: post #46
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that they're doing it at all is completely unacceptable.

Very much this. Towing by the police should only be something done when the car is in violation of something. I did not see anything about the expense of retrieving the car. You took the person's car so there is definite expense of getting there. Did you force the person to miss a flight, a meeting, a date? WTF do these people think they are so above and beyond rational thought is ridiculous.

>Very much this. Towing by the police should only be something done when the car is in violation of something.

If the police has a search warrant for your home and you're not there, they can break in, even if you're not "in violation of something". I don't see how this is any different.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#70

Post by gruez »

tamimio wrote: post #62
chacha102 wrote: post #3

This makes me _not_ want to get a Tesla, just to avoid the inconvenience of getting my car towed because of what it _might_ have inside of it. And the opposite, doing what Ring is doing and simply streaming it to the police directly, might be easier but I still believe a major privacy concern. Sure, it could be helpful. But at what cost?

My car isn’t a Tesla, and the dashcam has a “parking mode” that records everything while parked. So, do that, don’t get a Tesla, and never get towed to access the camera.

If the police sees the dashcam and suspects that there's footage on there, they can apply for a search warrant and seize that footage as well. It's unclear why they needed to tow the tesla in the first place. The article says that the footage is on a USB drive, so presumably they could just pull it out and make a copy. If they're towing it because they couldn't locate the owner and want to open the car non-destructively, then your suggestion of not driving a dashcam and using a tesla probably isn't going to save you either.
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