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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

#381
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…

The proliferation of dash cams and the (...paltry) threat of having footage of bad behaviour put on the internet, or more importantly, having proof of what happened in an incident/accident to be able to pass onto insurance or police (where there's consequences from determining fault, theoretically) hasn't magically stopped people driving like homicidal maniacs, has it?

There's a million reasons why a dystopic snitch on your neighbours program isn't practical, as others have highlighted. I love the idea that insurance companies would be afraid of backlash lol. There's also easier options like I imagine asking car manufacturers to hand over data collected on driver behaviour would be. Don't US insurers already collect data like that from willing customers? Why not get that data from all customers regardless of consent? We've seen time and time again that most car manufacturers will throw all the data they can at whichever corporation asks for it. Even lower tech than that, speed and red light cameras have existed for a long time and they work on vehicles regardless of how many touchscreen tablets have been glued into it. Stupid(er) comment time: even lower tech again, the potential threat of gun violence in road rage incidents doesn't seem to disincentivise driving like a homicidal maniac, judging by how much worse US dash cam captured accidents seem to be compared to those from Europe or Australia. Maybe that's more to do with how many giant yank tanks there are on US roads and how much more effective they are at obliterating other road users and the sense of safety that comes with driving such huge things?

Jokes aside, road safety is a complex problem and insurance companies have other ways to protect their interests with significantly less effort.

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

#382
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you conveniently left out the fact that anyone driving a car or truck is driving a dangerous vehicle that can trivially kill or maim others. Driving is supposed to be a privilege, not a right. That comes with responsibility. How you think this is the same as “being naughty while walking outside” is hilarious to me.

Mobility is a right, that includes driving. And walking comes with responsibilities too, a ruthless walker also endangers others, it's just harder to kill somebody by bumping into them, until you bump them in front of a car or train or down the stairs.

I'm having trouble understanding the tone of your comment.

If it's not satire, driving as a right can be restricted (or even denied if you fail the driver's test) far more easily than walking. Because it's far more dangerous.

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

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't ever need to slam on your brakes or speed up for yellow lights, that's the entire point of the yellow light existing instead of just going straight to red.

Some yellows aren't too well timed, especially if on a downhill slope.

Again back to control of your vehicle. I would expect a first time driver to make your complaint. A driver for multiple years should be able to adapt their speed for their surroundings

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

#384
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At the majority of signal-controlled intersections with city limits there's plenty of visibility even (or dare I say especially ) at 3am and the scanning can happen as you approach. (Also, the kind of rolling stop I'm talking about isn't a 5mph roll, it's a near-stop that feels like a stop to the driver but technically doesn't actually bring the tires to stationary. Odds are even you have done this kind of stop prett…

Depends on your state. In my state we can take driving actions that violate the law as long as we can prove it was safe to do at the time. Your state may not be so lenient.

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

#385
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Worked in NYS auto insurance. The government provided us an APi which we could use to pull driver records. While we could pull anyone that we want via the api, we get audited and must show reason for the pulls (such as a newly insured driver or renewal etc).

I assume other states are similar

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

#386

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…

If we're looking at pas examples, the reverse happens a lot more: rules and environments are made stricter with stronger passive enforcement to get rid of the infractions.

Setting automated speed traps where drivers don't respect the limit, physically forcing lower speeds where traps didn't work or closing whole streets to regular cars to get rid of the problem altogether.

The main issue isn't just the rules, and if the infrastructure has to be adapted as well, it's often cheaper to get rid of traffic than to rethink a system that work better in adversarial situations.

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

#387
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.

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?)

Most criminals will just cover their face to avoid CCTV.

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

#388
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…

> 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? What has stopped you from doing that personally?

I've done it. When i saw a driver run a red light (intentionally, they slowed down, and then gunned it through) and almost killed 3 people legally crossing the street.

It took a while though. Maybe 10 minutes in total to pull the dashcam clip and upload it to YouTube.

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

#389
I was once pitched a business where external-facing cameras would be provided to car owners, distributed through auto insurance companies. The business intended to make money from selling the video data to law enforcement. I'm skipping a lot of details, but one of the main objections is that the police wouldn't pay for the data, they would just take it.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the idea of an insurance company deputizing millions of cameras to perform mass surveillance to make a buck is suddenly okay because drivers that make us angry on the road get hurt by it. I'd word it more like drivers who put me and others around me in danger should be punished for driving recklessly.

Fair enough. After all, as we all know, the only reason to object to massive surveillance nets is if you're a criminal who has something to hide. Since I keep the law all that tracking and monitoring won't affect me.

Sorry about this, but a law was just passed making posting anything to a public-facing web site without prior government authorization a serious crime with a five-year forced-labor-camp sentence.
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