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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

#411

Post by zaroth »

bjacobel wrote: post #368
zaroth wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The car doesn’t have an “on” and “off”. There is no switch. The car specifically has Sentry mode for recording continuously while parked. There’s a very detailed Data Sharing settings right in the UI where you turn on or off sharing any clips with Tesla, and you have to click Yes for the car to share these clips.

Let's allow for a minute that the existence of the privacy-intruding footage is, as you insinuate, the user's fault. Is it also their fault that it was shared for entertainment and turned into memes?

I’m saying the car owner opted-in to send the footage to Tesla. It’s not a matter of fault, they chose to share their video clips.

The fact that the humans doing the labeling are “entertained” by certain clips… how could they not be? Imagine what that job is like for a minute.

Take this ProPublica report about Facebook hiring thousands of contractors to read through private WhatsApp messages for instance. [1]

Did users in that case opt-in for their messages to be read? No, in fact Zuck went on the record saying they never see them. But turns out when another user on the chat flags messages as spam or abuse, or an algorithm scans it and decides it could be illegal, they do look, and even report it to authorities.

Going back to Tesla, the article says video clips were allegedly shared on an internal chat between the labelers. How is this in any way surprising? The job is to draw bounding boxes around objects in an endless list of videos. Short of implementing some sort of mind control a la the show “Severance”, how could we possibly expect that the employees who do the labeling all day not talk and joke about the strange or scandalous things that they came across?

[1] - https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-p...

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#412

Post by ColanR »

GavinMcG wrote: post #43
ColanR wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a horrifying view of the world even on its face The alternative is easily classified as naiveté.

Yes, fine, but lacking all naiveté is a horrifying view of the world . We must have mechanisms for achieving justice after wrongdoing, and have faith that we can trust each other to do the right thing. Cf. Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

But even the unreasonable must first see the world as it is, so that he can adapt it to himself.

I'm not advocating that we accept the status quo, but I do take issue with not seeing the status quo for what it is.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#413

Post by rootusrootus »

brandonagr2 wrote: post #366
rootusrootus wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I expect the company will face a mass lawsuit from Tesla EV owners Doubt it. Tesla still hasn't really faced any consequences for selling FSD capabilities that don't yet exist, and for a lot of money. They haven't faced any real consequences for removing capabilities from their customers' cars with no renumeration. Tesla owners are a loyal bunch and forgive a lot.

Not sure what capabilities you think don't exist, everything I paid for is working on my car right now.

Sure, not everyone is impacted. Some people had significant battery capacity removed without any compensation. Others have had hardware disabled (the most obvious recent example being radar).

Edit: oh, you were probably talking about FSD.

It can't drive itself yet, in case you didn't notice. Not across the neighborhood, much less across the country. At the risk of being uncharitable, I'm going to assume you're going to disagree about whether sufficient fine print exists to absolve Tesla of responsibility, legally or morally, for what they've advertised FSD to be over the years. We don't need to rehash that, you won't convince me to change my position either. If I had bought FSD for either of my Model 3s, I'd be quite irritated by now.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#414

Post by recursive »

Phlarp wrote: post #278
recursive wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't own a Tesla, and I'm not an apologist. But there are multiple reasons to own the car. And not all of them have to do with saving the planet, cameras, or the glovebox.

"Actually the rolling spy box is a good thing for reasons I'm not able to articulate, but please trust I am very smart."

Did you think I was trying to convince you that I was smart? Apologies for being unclear.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#415

Post by rootusrootus »

aeyes wrote: post #316
rootusrootus wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple would be the most shocking, given their ingrained company culture of secrecy and compartmentalization.

> Apple has paid a multi-million dollar settlement to a woman whose photos and videos were shared online by technicians repairing her iPhone. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57399627

That's kinda like saying that Best Buy shared photos and videos from a customer's iPhone. Different from data ingested during normal operation and being processed by the corporation.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#416

Post by rootusrootus »

lostlogin wrote: post #205
rootusrootus wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple would be the most shocking, given their ingrained company culture of secrecy and compartmentalization.

It would be harder for Apple employees to do too. Have you tried the Mail search? I can’t find things that are definitely there.

> Have you tried the Mail search? I can’t find things that are definitely there.

I hate the Mail search, because I know it misses all kinds of things. I have to go open up my gmail account in the web browser to find things that I know exist.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#417

Post by opportune »

jboy55 wrote: post #410
opportune wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t recall the source, it may have just been anecdotes online that aren’t easily verifiable, but even after Facebook went legit as a company I’m pretty sure access to data (who’s looking at whose profile, stuff like that) was marketed as an employee perk.

Not a perk, if you look at personal info of anyone in your social circle, you are fired, no matter who you are, for what ever reason. If you need to fix a bug, and you need to look at personal info, it is logged and reviewed, go snooping, you are fired. You use your friend as the example for that bug, you are fired. In fact, when I worked there, I was paranoid I'd accidentally look at personal info and get fired, and…

This was from the early days (a few years after scaling out employees), not recently. Thanks for confirming that is no longer the case

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#418

Post by nickff »

jacquesm wrote: post #299
bhelkey wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The important question is: what would the consequences be to a German car manufacturer given similar circumstances?

German regulators are notoriously understaffed, see 'Wirecard'. I would not be surprised if there were no consequences at all until it hit the press or someone in a position of power was embarrassed.

Missing Wirecard seems to be a product of arrogance and incompetence. Under-staffing could have caused the regulator to overlook the fraud, but the continued obstinacy of the regulators in the face of overwhelming evidence was incompetence. Attempting to prosecute the journalists revealing the fraud was incompetent arrogance.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#419

Post by zaroth »

opportune wrote: post #277
SoftTalker wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you must understand is that this is human nature not "private companies." When I was in high school I had a friend who worked at one of those 1-hr photo processing places. People would bring their film in to have prints made. And there were no small numbers of "intimate" photos on those rolls of film. Yes even in the days of film cameras, people took photos of themselves in sexual situations. Of course my friend…

Right, so the problem is still private companies not putting in the effort to build in privacy to prevent this. For physical film it’s hard, but for software you should at the very least record access to personal data and audit it to make sure people actually need it and aren’t abusing whatever permissions they are using to get the data.

The employees in this case aren’t going looking where they weren’t supposed to. This isn’t an auditing problem, like the Google/Facebook/Amazon employee snooping where they aren’t supposed to.

In this case employees are tasked with watching the video clips that car owner intentionally shared with them in order to label it (draw boxes around specific objects).

After spending 8 hours a day drawing boxes around fire hydrants, they would joke about the funny things they saw with their coworkers.

This is literally how all human labeled AI training works. You can’t teach an AI to identify crucial features on the road without building the labeled data set to train it with.

Amazon does the same thing with Alexa. Apple does the same thing with Siri. Security camera companies all do the same thing with their motion and object detection software.

Re: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars

#420

Post by rvnx »

rootusrootus wrote: post #135
squarefoot wrote: post #65

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.

This is true. And it does not exonerate Tesla in the slightest. There need to be consequences.

+71% year-to-date. Seems like they are paying the consequences.
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