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

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101–110 of 683 posts

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

#101
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>People will move out of the cities onto land where they can remove/shoot down cameras. >Drones, country where owning a gun is right. Shooting down someone else's drones/cameras however, isn't.

It was on my property. Spying isn’t legal because you can fly a drone over my fence. My places have a right to defend yourself. How do I know it’s not an attack?

I'm not sure how you got the impression that the discussion was about cameras/drones on your property. The OP talked about "Cameras everywhere all the time. No more anonymity in public soon". It's clear that we're talking about other people's cameras in public spaces, not voyeurs trying to look in your bedroom.

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

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it'd tell them any more than they already know. These drivers tend to have been given citations already. The real money would be in giving civilians whose footage leads to a successful prosecution for moving violations a percentage of the fine. NYC already has something like this for people who catch too-long idling trucks and photograph/video record it.

Do insurers really know about citations?

Are you kidding? Absolutely. For moving violations you can look forward to the ticket itself plus increased insurance premiums.

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

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Towing cars at all without a very crucial reason should be illegal in general. Taking someone’s transportation that they assume they have access to, without their knowledge, and without them being able to find out until the very second they need that transportation is dangerous. Emergencies happen. If you’re taking someone’s car you better have a damn good reason. And “you accidentally parked in the wrong parking spo…

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Imagine trying to go to work and you don’t have your car. Are you going to say “well I guess driving is a privilege and not a right so its fine that the police repossess my vehicle at random times” or are you going to be livid like a normal person?

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

#104
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…

Where I live, speeding and red light cameras can only issue fines to the plate holder and don't affect the demerit points of the driver because they don't have evidence of who was driving the vehicle. I imagine it would go the same way with insurance. Unless a cop pulls the person over and gets their ID, tough luck.

The comment you’re responding to is postulating enforcement via higher insurance costs. If insurance gets ~20 reports of someone running a red light, maybe they’ll double the cost to insure that person.

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

#105
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well its quite different as they don’t put your home on a trailer and haul it away across town without telling you.

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

#106
post #57
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next step, we all wear body cams and they identify people with inappropriate behavior. For every mistake you get a point and with enough point a punishment. Sounds familiar.

Yeah, I am personally against that as well. Enforcing laws is a police job, not the average citizen's, because they “supposedly” undergo certain training to do that. If everyone started acting like a police officer or reporting insignificant things, it would get chaotic, and it incentivizes people being hostile against each other. The only exception, in my opinion, is someone reporting something that’s substantially…

reporting is not the same as policing. Telling the police about a crime is the norm. Then the police police based on the report.

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it'd tell them any more than they already know. These drivers tend to have been given citations already. The real money would be in giving civilians whose footage leads to a successful prosecution for moving violations a percentage of the fine. NYC already has something like this for people who catch too-long idling trucks and photograph/video record it.

Do insurers really know about citations?

I don't know how much detail they have but yes, insurers in the US do know if you've received a ticket for a moving violation (parking violations are irrelevant).

Many of them use solutions like LexisNexis Risk Solutions (which is like a 3rd party API that can return this data). How LNRS gets the data, I'm not sure.

For example, insurers also get data for stolen vehicles since it affects claims. I know this because in a previous (local government) job, I literally sat on calls about building an integration where we sent license plates of stolen cars (officially reported stolen to the police), if we wrote parking tickets for those cars, since we (another local gov agency) spotted the stolen car.

To me, even though I have strong feelings against privacy and surveillance, this felt like a totally pragmatic (and laser focused, it only affect cars that were currently designated stolen) use of the data.

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

#108
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. From the article: >Therriault said he and other officers now frequently seek video from bystander Teslas, and usually get the owners’ consent to download it without having to serve a warrant. Still, he said, tows are sometimes necessary, if police can’t locate a Tesla owner a…

So they say in the interview. Irregardless, if I own a car and it is legal for the police to take it so they can hold onto it until they have a warrant of I give in? No thanks.

>Irregardless, if I own a car and it is legal for the police to take it so they can hold onto it until they have a warrant of I give in?

The article says they got the warrant before towing it.

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

#109
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>People will move out of the cities onto land where they can remove/shoot down cameras. >Drones, country where owning a gun is right. Shooting down someone else's drones/cameras however, isn't.

It was on my property. Spying isn’t legal because you can fly a drone over my fence. My places have a right to defend yourself. How do I know it’s not an attack?

Do you own the airspace above your property?

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

#110

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.

I don't turn it on simply because it drains an absurd amount of battery. I don't even understand why it does so. Is it old tech? My Blink cameras have 2 AA Lithium batteries that take motion-activated video all day on a busy side-walk for at least a couple of months. Yet one shopping trip drains like 2% battery in Sentry mode, wtf? That's a lot.

I’ve wondered this myself, how could 50 miles of moving 5000lbs at 60mph be equal to sitting running a camera for a day or two.

When I had a model 3 it also had an absurd amount of drain over night, 4-5% battery when it was just sitting there (without overheat A/C)

Leaving for vacation before I had a home charger was always fraught.

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