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Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

reuters.com

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Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having sex in front of any camera tends to end in exactly one way. Their product line spells out "S3XY." Public technical failures are glossed over or ignored. Anyone expecting integrity from this company needs a reality check.

>Anyone expecting integrity from this company needs a reality check. It's OK that some people are ignorant to what you, myself and many others are already well aware of. It doesn't make it their fault.

In this case, it wasn't ok, insomuch as they experienced consequences that they wouldn't have if they had known or had been more skeptical.

We should hold the companies accountable. But maybe we shouldn't be so quick to reassure people that they couldn't have prevented things like this, so that when the next predatory company puts out a predatory product, there will be a sort of collective knowledge that relying on a corporation's good will is probably not a great idea.

Then we might actually have people reject products that do user hostile nonsense, and the market will have to respond.

In other words, this kind of thing is the teachable moment that can make it so everyone can be aware of the things that we are.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#162
post #21

Wake me up when there's an EV that is just a car and not an always-connected surveillance device on wheels.

I work in the industry. It's not a "vehicle" any more - it's a "platform" to "engage" with customers, i.e. sell your data and lock features behind ridiculous monthly fees. That is now the mantra of the automotive industry. It really kills any enthusiasm I have for new cars.

This is the most depressing thing I’ve read all day. I have two trucks. A 2010, and 1998. I was going to sell the 2010 for redundancy, but I don’t think I can. The 2010 is in pristine condition, and should last another decade if I’m careful with it. I’ll have to acquiesce to the modern trend with cars eventually, but I hope to hold out as long as I can.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#163
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...

    > About three years ago, some employees stumbled upon and shared a video of a unique submersible vehicle parked inside a garage, according to two people who viewed it. Nicknamed “Wet Nellie,” the white Lotus Esprit sub had been featured in the 1977 James Bond film, “The Spy Who Loved Me.”

    > The vehicle’s owner: Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, who had bought it for about $968,000 at an auction in 2013. It is not clear whether Musk was aware of the video or that it had been shared.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#164

Reminds me of the time I bought lunch at work, and a colleague told me exactly what I bought and how much I paid for it. I called him out and said it was a lucky guess, and then he proceeded to tell me my entire payment history for the past 2 days. Turns out when I was buying lunch, he was on the phone with a friend who worked at Paytm and that guy gave away my transaction history for shits and giggles. My trust in p…

I was at a hackathon once, and they had a startup fair, where various companies had their booths. One startup had created a student-management system for schools. And the rep was demoing the system. Except with live data. Showing pages of real students with their pictures, home addresses, etc! So, principles aside, the actions of companies are such that there can be no trust.

Someone should have walked up with their phone camera and shouted "ooh hey, nice addresses!" And just started snapping away (or at least pretending to)

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#165

It may seem paranoid, but it is sane to expect that everything that it is closed and consequently not auditable for security and privacy, and goes online on a network we have no control over, even though not a public one, will soon or later be used for spying.

It's not paranoid, it's simple observation. Anything that can be abused by someone, will be abused by someone. The question is whether the benefits overshadow the potential for abuse. In this case, they don't.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#167

While some of the behaviour here is less professional than I'd expect for user data, I'm wondering what a good architecture for building a system to leverage visual telemetry without harming user privacy would really look like. The problem is that: 1) It's very difficult to manually or automatically scrub identifying information from video, and doing so probably greatly reduces the value of the data for AI training p…

Yeah, clearly we should be sympathetic to the difficulties AI researchers have in response to an article about how regular employees are sharing pictures of people being intimate in cars.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#168

Reminds me of the time I bought lunch at work, and a colleague told me exactly what I bought and how much I paid for it. I called him out and said it was a lucky guess, and then he proceeded to tell me my entire payment history for the past 2 days. Turns out when I was buying lunch, he was on the phone with a friend who worked at Paytm and that guy gave away my transaction history for shits and giggles. My trust in p…

I'm so glad I've never heard of that service and have no idea what it is. Thanks very much for calling them out by name, BTW. Presumably someone from that company is reading this as we speak - and soon enough, will be reporting back to us that that employee has been identified, and of course, duly fired. Right, PayTM? (BTW - that's some "colleague" you have).

Are you suggesting that Paytm is actually PayPal/Venmo?

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#169

Reminds me of the time I bought lunch at work, and a colleague told me exactly what I bought and how much I paid for it. I called him out and said it was a lucky guess, and then he proceeded to tell me my entire payment history for the past 2 days. Turns out when I was buying lunch, he was on the phone with a friend who worked at Paytm and that guy gave away my transaction history for shits and giggles. My trust in p…

I was at a hackathon once, and they had a startup fair, where various companies had their booths. One startup had created a student-management system for schools. And the rep was demoing the system. Except with live data. Showing pages of real students with their pictures, home addresses, etc! So, principles aside, the actions of companies are such that there can be no trust.

I once had a classified ad software hustle, and I needed customer data to debug things. But one of my customers was Canada's largest gay newspaper, and ts classifieds were highly sensitive.

So I wrote a routine that obfuscated the database, changing all phone numbers to 555-xxxx, changing all names to random names of fruit (So a customer might become Banana Grapes, 416-555-1234), and a few other changes to hide other possibly identifiable information.

I had a menu item to do that to the database, it was under a "developer" menu that only appeared when I was personally signed in as the only superuser. I am embarrassed to say the menu item was called "mixed fruit."

One day, I was signed in at the client's office, and the manager came by and wanted to do something or other. I gave him the mouse and keyboard without logging out and asking him to log back in. He did his job, then noticed the developer menu. "What's this," he murmured, and selected "mixed fruit."

No confirmation dialog, no warning, it begin munging the live, production database as I watched in horror. I managed to get everything sorted and the production data restored, but I learned a few lessons that day about building super-features for myself that were extremely sharp and difficult to undo.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#170

Reminds me of the time I bought lunch at work, and a colleague told me exactly what I bought and how much I paid for it. I called him out and said it was a lucky guess, and then he proceeded to tell me my entire payment history for the past 2 days. Turns out when I was buying lunch, he was on the phone with a friend who worked at Paytm and that guy gave away my transaction history for shits and giggles. My trust in p…

Tesla is the Amazon/Google of personal transportation when it comes to data overreach and data protection. It's shocking there isn't more pushback
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