Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

sfchronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 683 posts

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

#331

Post by alkonaut »

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.

Is it legal to film anywhere? In Sweden filming in public places with fixed equipment (a car counts apparently) is illegal. But on the other hand any evidence is admitted in court, even material obtained while breaking a law. So there has been a few cases where police have caught the person vandalizing the car and also needed to consider whether to fine the owner.

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

#332

Post by c22 »

ta8645 wrote: post #257
mft_ wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m struggling to understand your point, or to imagine many examples which support it. I agree that brief minor parking infringements may occasionally make people’s lives more efficient; but I can’t think of any examples where traffic lights and speed limits need to be routinely disregarded?

It's not just about efficiency, it's also about quality of life. There is a reason that a cop has permission to use his judgement when deciding to write a ticket or not. Because life is better when we don't live under the oppression of draconian rule keepers all the time. Rules are meant to protect people, and as such are often specified in terms of the lowest common denominator, with the understanding that the syste…

Frankly I'd rather just get a ticket when I speed by a traffic camera than rely on the discretion of a random police officer who might just be looking for a pretense to search my vehicle or hassle me in some other way.

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

#333

Post by c22 »

lolinder wrote: post #300
askvictor wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you in that much of a hurry to not be able to wait 30 seconds for the traffic light?

We're talking about a rolling right turn on red, not crossing the whole intersection on red. The turn is allowed but the camera took issue with how much of a stop came first. I don't know very many drivers who wouldn't recognize that camera behavior at 3:00 in the morning as unreasonable.

Why not just come to a full stop? It's presumably dark out at 3am so you may have missed a pedestrian or a vehicle with no headlights. It only takes an extra second or two to stop and look around.

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

#334

Post by Vegenoid »

akira2501 wrote: post #329
PeterisP wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps in the urban setting but the majority of this country is not contained within cities. 83% of USA population live in urban areas, and that proportion is still steadily growing. The same trends apply everywhere else in the world as well.

> 83% of USA population live in urban areas If you combine dense urban areas with suburbs. It's about 33% in dense areas and 55% in suburban areas. Which actually doesn't improve the driving situation. > and that proportion is still steadily growing Which is why I specifically mentioned motorcycles. In areas of the world with even greater urban density than the USA there are a lot of these on the road. > The same tre…

> It's about 33% in dense areas and 55% in suburban areas. Which actually doesn't improve the driving situation.

Are the suburbs not one of the easier places for autonomous vehicles? I’d think the lower traffic, larger roads, and reliance on cars to get around (due to low density and lack of transit) would make them the ideal place for self-driving cars to succeed.

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

#336

Post by clankyclanker »

rbalicki wrote: post #263
pmichaud wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

That seems optimistic. I would instead expect that those VIPs would be added to a table of folks who don't get tickets, codifying the current semi-formal process.

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

#337

Post by froggit »

repeekad wrote: post #295
askvictor wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you in that much of a hurry to not be able to wait 30 seconds for the traffic light?

That’s not the point, a surveillance state where the panopticon autonomously gives $250 tickets is the issue Rules aren’t meant to be cold hard algorithms to blindly punish people with; we wouldn’t automate a judge with an algorithm why is it somehow different to automate a police officer with one?

> Rules aren’t meant to be cold hard algorithms to blindly punish people with; we wouldn’t automate a judge with an algorithm why is it somehow different to automate a police officer with one?

The role of enforcing certain laws can be easily fulfilled with simple algorithms as the logic required is on early grade school level. In this case it's something like: if "stoplight is red" and "car doesn't stop", then "driver gets ticket." That's all the algorithm has to do, super easy to automate. Automation allows for enforcement where it would otherwise not be cost effective, like when it's 3am and no one else is around.

The judiciary, however, has to interpret all kinds of crazy edge cases that people come up with to try and get out of tickets for rolling stops or whatever legal case, for all laws, because every now and then someone has a valid case. That's a bit harder to do with a couple lines of code and some low cost hardware.

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

#338

Post by whaleofatw2022 »

ryandrake wrote: post #198
iwishiknewlisp wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 10-30% of drivers in the United States don't have car insurance depending on the state. It really depends on the state on how strict they are with car insurance. My state is very lax and they don't even really check at the DMV. The fine for not having car insurance is also only ~300 bucks and a 90 day license suspension and it only goes up slightly until like the 4-5 time you get caught. It just honestly doesn…

It's shocking how many people are uninsured or underinsured. Plus, insurance minimums are absolutely ridiculous. Florida's minimum is $10K property damage, $10K personal injury, and they don't even require bodily injury liability. Total insanity. You crash into a Porsche full of doctors with that kind of coverage, and you're going bankrupt. Most states have a minimum of around $25K for bodily injury liability. You ca…

My state (MI) has an unlimited PIP option (used to be mandatory) but it's also no fault.

It also has lots of subtle penalties for not having insurance that bite people in the butt.

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

#339

Post by whaleofatw2022 »

baby_souffle wrote: post #141
morkalork wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the catch, using ML to scan a plate doesn't confirm who was driving.

Nor does it actually confirm that the plate _matches_ the car. Otherwise i'd spend some time 3d printing something that looks a LOT like my neighbors license plate and wait until 1 AM and just blow the same red light over and over and over.

Idk about your state, but many have a 'swizzle' vertical or two that I'm pretty sure is to assist readers and detect fakes...

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

#340

Post by froggit »

39896880 wrote: post #292
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…

Informing the insurance company… how? Everything done by a large corp like an insurer has a specific workflow. There is no form to upload a video of someone behaving badly. Emailing some rando at Geico with an mp4 is going to be met with total indifference because the corporate drone answering whatever emails aren’t autoreplied or spamcanned will have no process by which to respond

There's no way insurance companies haven't already done the cost-benefit analysis for implementing a way to take videos from randos and turning it into actionable rate hikes. If it were favorable to their bottom lines there'd already be a link to "submit evidence" on every insurer's home page.
Post reply on HN