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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

#261

Post by Terr_ »

dragonwriter wrote: post #66
darth_avocado wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 po…

This is a lengthy quote, but it's relevant and from one of my favorite authors:

> Ah... Keep the peace. That was the thing. People often failed to understand what that meant. You'd go to some life-threatening disturbance like a couple of neighbours scrapping in the street over who owned the hedge between their properties, and they'd both be bursting with aggrieved self-righteousness, both yelling, their wives would either be having a private scrap on the side or would have adjourned to a kitchen for a shared pot of tea and a chat, and they all expected you to sort it out. And they could never understand that it wasn't your job.

> Sorting it out was a job for a good surveyor and a couple of lawyers, maybe. Your job was to quell the impulse to bang their stupid fat heads together, to ignore the affronted speeches of dodgy self-justification, to get them to stop shouting and to get them off the street. Once that had been achieved, your job was over. You weren't some walking god, dispensing finely tuned natural justice. Your job was simply to bring back peace.

> Of course, if your few strict words didn't work and Mr Smith subsequently clambered over the disputed hedge and stabbed Mr Jones to death with a pair of gardening shears, then you had a different job, sorting out the notorious Hedge Argument Murder. But at least it was one you were trained to do. People expected all kinds of things from coppers, but there was one thing that sooner or later they all wanted: make this not be happening.

-- Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

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

#262

Post by thfuran »

tptacek wrote: post #208
throwup238 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With proper checks and balances in a civilian government, sure. The problem is when private companies help police departments do a runaround constitutional protections. Users have no sovereignty over their data (so to speak).

To which Constitutional protections are you referring?

Probably the fourth amendment.

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

#263

Post by rbalicki »

pmichaud wrote: post #152
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…

Setting aside the obvious dystopian next steps, I think the main problem with automated traffic law enforcement is that our laws are quite bad in the sense that they rely on enforcement being loose and somewhat subjective to even work at all. The speeds on various roads, the timing of traffic lights, the places one can park and for how long, etc, are not carefully planned or thought out enough to actually work if eve…

I would think that once enforcement becomes automated (and thus applies to those with resources, who currently get away with it), there would be a lot of pressure on the legislature (by those who currently get away with it) to make the rules better. Legislatures can move fast, but only when they're motivated. e.g. if every NYC taxi suddenly got a ticket every time they stopped in the street to pick up a passenger, those laws would be updated very quickly.

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

#264

Post by swayvil »

eastbound wrote: post #137
Lammy wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like if it’s technically possible, it will happen, and we can’t stop technological progress. ‘The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread p…

I don’t know. People have been living without reliable access to food and potable water, not even talking about sore deformations on their faces, for a thousand years. But somehow their lives were fulfilling?

>sore deformations

Is that what's referred to as a "wen"?

(Onomatopoetic term, that. Think of how you'd talk with a golfball in your mouth)

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

#265

Post by rbalicki »

rcpt wrote: post #241
ryandrake wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real money would be in giving civilians whose footage leads to a successful prosecution for moving violations a percentage of the fine. I don't know where you live, but around me, the police are so disinterested in traffic safety that roads have turned into a Mad Max free-for-all. Red light running, stop sign running, lack of signaling, weaving in and out of lanes, and general belligerence on the road. That and…

California?

Also NYC, also Miami. I never got this impression in the Bay Area when I lived there (10 years ago)

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

#266

Post by 14 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #252
aftbit wrote: post #122

Creepy stuff. Maybe we ought not to constantly record everything happening around us all the time.

Is there any tangible reason that would actually weight enough to justify not actively wanting to provide basically free resources in help of uncovering (and in effect: preventing) a violent crime? Because, if not, this is about as "creepy" as those nerdy guys sitting in their bedrooms and basements, tinkering with their silly computers all day, meaning: Non-conformist and something you might just not be ready to thi…

yes there is a valid reason to be opposed to this. Yes everyone one wants to stop violent crimes and murders and that is not a bad thing. But as history has shown time and time again if the people in power decide to become a tyrant and start to abuse the technology then we have a problem. Imagine if this was around 60 years ago. You go into a bar. Some cars have driven past the bar right as you entered a few weeks past. Now police realize this is actually a secret gay bar. They take all cars whose gps shows they passed the bar and take their footage. You are seen on camera entering a gay bar and now you are on a list and they start to harass you and question you. Seems like an unlikely situation that is far fetched but I like to remind people it was only in 1965 that the last person was arrested in Canada for homosexuality. He was even declared a dangerous sex offender. So no we don't want cameras recording every second of our lives. Things that may be legal today might not be tomorrow so we should have privacy from constant surveillance. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/everett-klippert-lgbt-a...

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

#267

Post by teslacams »

gruez wrote: post #70
tamimio wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-destructiv…

Search warrant for what ? Is footage of something illegal illegal too ?

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

#268

Post by Terr_ »

sowbug wrote: post #190
mullingitover wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real money would be in giving civilians whose footage leads to a successful prosecution for moving violations a percentage of the fine. I've heard lots of talk of civil war in this country, but this is the first serious plan I've seen for how to start one.

Contracting out patrolling to private citizens would be a brilliant way to get around that pesky Bill of Rights.

Can you elaborate on what would be bypassed by "patrolling?"

If the government was really contracting something out, then there's an argument to be made that it's on behalf of the government therefore it's government action and therefore it may be prohibited.

If nothing else, I'm pretty confident that my 3rd-amendment rights to not have soldiers crashing on my couch is safe from whatever my neighbor does with their dashcam.

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

#269

Post by mangosteenjuice »

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.

If we're talking about the Bay Area, anecdotally my experience is the percentage of uninsured drivers seems MUCH higher than other California metros.

I have used footage from my Tesla to get evidence and plate # that I could hand over to my insurance company and the police three times. 2 out of 3 were uninsured. This was during the past two years.

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

#270

Post by rbalicki »

croes wrote: post #30
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…

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.

I'm honestly surprised that businesses in shady areas don't have ubiquitous cameras around their properties and signs that "just do your crime one block away, that's all I ask". (Presumably that invites vandalism and there are consequently practical issues, but has no one pulled this off?)
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