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

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421–430 of 683 posts

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

#421

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…

The whole concept of calling people NPC’s is weird as fuck. You aren’t a superior being, Derek.

The idea that we are all on “equal” footing in this world is even more asinine. Some folks are indeed the “main characters” and others are background filler. This is the only explanation for the “reality distortion fields” that larger than life personalities possess, well, outside of some SCP object style explanations…

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

#422
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…

In Switzerland it would be the law preventing that. Running ML on public footage of people who did not consent is a huge no-no. Dashcams are already a problem and technically illegal although tolerated. The footage can't generally be used on court.

Very very good, and I want more societies which give a bigger middle finger to the karens of their world.

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

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so if someone is carrying a baseball bat, a knife, or any other sort of weapon that can trivially kill or maim others they should be wearing the body cam?

They should expect to be filmed in public more than people not carrying weapons. This already happens.

Would you have that same viewpoint if the goal of the person with the camera was to setup outside of addiction centers, abortion clinics, strip clubs, casinos, etc and publically identify people anyone coming or going? I mean they are public so should they "expect" to be filmed or should there be some sense of privacy?

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

#424
post #268
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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

Well, we saw this play out in the last couple years in Texas—they set up their laws so that abortion enforcement was performed by civilians (i.e. not cops, not the government), specifically to throw sand in the gears of any countervailing judicial efforts (i.e. making it impossible to sue anyone to force them to stop it, because it's just a game of whack-a-mole at that point).

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

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don’t agree. The problem is suburbs have a lower cost-per-mile for trips than urban areas. It’s way more common to take a taxi in the city than the ‘burbs. Behavior for car ownership and expectations around waiting on rides is different. Self driving taxis are an easy transition in cities. In the suburbs, you need to sell people on expensive vehicles that cost a lot per trip (whether owned or hailed).

Ultimately I think it’s the same city/rural (really dense vs less dense) divide between a lot of things.

In a suburban area, it could take 15 minutes for a taxi to get to you. In a rural area, 30 minutes to an hour. Inconvenient, especially since you could hop in the car you already have because of this situation, and probably already be where you want to go by the time they arrive.

In an urban area (especially a super dense city like Manhattan, Tokyo, Mumbai, etc.), you probably spend more time figuring out if you need a taxi than actually getting one (literally seconds in most cases), and god help you if you’re trying to park. It will not go well.

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

#426
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…

The loose laws you describe are a problem that needs to be solved regardless, because they allow for selective enforcement against specific people or demographics by police departments acting in bad faith. A law that everyone is technically breaking but is generally not enforced can be used to target ethnic groups, or individuals that a particular police officer has a personal vendetta against. It essentially turns the police into judges, because it gives them the guaranteed ability to get a conviction somehow against anyone they want.

I assume a way for any civilian to activate those laws against any other civilian would result in the legal code being cleaned up quite quickly.

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

#427
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am hoping for an urban camouflage fashion revolution as a response to more pervasive monitoring: https://www.axios.com/2019/09/07/fooling-facial-recognition-... Public access to object recognition models may be important.

Surely object recognition models will catch up to whatever attempts to thwart it (especially if it becomes popular). As long as a person is recognizable to another person, a computer should also be able to recognize them. Trying to camouflage seems like a losing battle.

Computers are a lot better at recognizing people than people. Simple things like your gait are enough.

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

#428
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incidental and systemic benefits of the recordings are exciting to people and celebrated with stories. The hazards of this constant "pollution" of data — how it is slowly changing our society, our economy, our humanity — is harder to quantify or build opposition to. It's a bit like climate change. Slow, invisible poison.

> and celebrated with stories. Are you sure those are organic?

I've definitely heard organic stories from people who got favorable insurance/legal outcomes after a traffic accident because they were using a dashcam. Generally, if you're not doing anything wrong, it is a good idea to record whatever you're doing, because it's proof that you're not doing anything wrong (police departments use this to great effect; they love bodycams in 99% of cases, and simply turn them off when they're about to do something that they wouldn't want to have a bodycam for). The negatives are second-order effects that only come about when everyone is doing it.

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

#429
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this plays out where it becomes a luxury to drive oneself. Over the next 10-15 years it looks like self driving will continue to advance and will likely become safer than the alternative. Once that happens insurance companies will start charging more for people that drive themselves compared to people that let the car drive. I can see some states outlawing that practice. Then it’s left to see who is still und…

> I think this plays out where it becomes a luxury to drive oneself. Over the next 10-15 years it looks like self driving will continue to advance and will likely become safer than the alternative. I think this is a long way away and will vary geographically. For a long time, self driving cars will be more expensive because they’ll have expensive sensors on it. Not many people will want a $100K self driving car inste…

I wouldn’t be surprised if safety requirements will gradually tighten until every car will need most sensors. Manufacturers have an interest in selling expensive difficult to manufacture cars and politicians like to reduce traffic fatalities.

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

#430
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second stop is legally irrelevant—if your first stop is insufficient you've run the red as far as the camera is concerned. The second stop may actually be illegal in its own right depending on the state.

It's what I was taught to do in driver's ed. I know of no state where turning right on a red light is compulsory so I don't see how coming to a complete stop at any point could possibly be considered illegal.

You have a STOPPING line that is on YOUR side of the crosswalk. That is the line you stay behind during a red light, if you stop then cross the line and stop again in the eye of the law it's no different than if you hadn't stopped behind the line at all.

You are correct that it's not compulsory to turn right on a red, however, if you are going to turn right you can't just stop in the middle of the intersection you either stay back or you go.

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