Live data from Hacker News

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

sfchronicle.com

501–510 of 683 posts

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

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Editing to add, I actually think we'll see a new class of Drivers License, one that allows you to operate semi autonomous vehicles, and one that allows you to operate fully manual vehicles with a higher level of continuous written and on the road testing required to hold it. Which is a reasonable and non discriminatory solution to the problem. I hard disagree. I think it’ll follow a path more like gun ownership (no…

> This urban/rural divide doesn’t make for good licensure policy.

Have you spent any time living in rural areas?

> People who depend on driving themselves are less “sophisticated” - they won’t want to spend more time getting a license, because they live farther away, they’re less likely to take drivers classes, etc

You do realize a lot of these people have class A license already because there are a lot of those jobs out there and farmers often get one to move their own product? You couldn't be _more_ wrong.

> We already see states with smaller urban population have easier driver’s license standards

They also have wildly different politics. It turns out density has more than one impact. The largest one is suicide rates. Lowest in New York highest in Alaska. You can accidentally measure population density in all kinds of ways.

> So rural-leaning elected officials will want to keep human-driving easy to access.

It's going to come down to who controls access to the freeways. I'm actually on the rural peoples side, but the interstates as a whole are a little bit out of their typical zone of influence. Given that rural life is already very different, much more so than some people can even imagine, I would expect to be the most likely point of negotiation and the most likely outcome given the parties involved.

Reasonable people could differ I guess.

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

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it is illegal to wear a hijab / niqab?

Answered in the article: > However, it has exemptions for health and religious reasons.

I did not see that. I double checked just now and there are still zero results for "religious", not sure why.

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

#503
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hardly a surveillance state to say operators of heavy machinery should do so safely: there are many, many dead pedestrians and bicyclists who were hit by someone who _thought_ the road was empty, and American traffic laws are so lenient that it’s disturbing that people think they’re overbearing. It’s estimated that we are effectively subsidizing drivers by close to a trillion dollars annually by not requiring ad…

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/road-deaths-us-eu/ Seems to be more of an issue in the US.

Definitely: bigger vehicles, higher speeds, and because the alternatives to driving have been starved of funding or removed the entire system is loathe to punish bad drivers because taking away someone’s license largely removes their ability to function.

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

#504
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…

That was my first thought upon reading the headline. Did your car witness a crime? Yes, literally hundreds every time it hits the road. Most drivers break the law every single journey. Many do it egregiously.

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

#505
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…

It's so very HN that we get into fits about Google and Facebook and Apple and so on tracking us to make a buck, 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. The obvious answer to this proposal is that I believe that I have a right to not be monitored and penalized by auton…

The difference is it's in public. Google et al wants to get into your private life. Nobody is talking about watching you race cars on a private track.

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

#506

As a somewhat regular user of Waymo, these types of conversations seem like they're going to be more and more in the (sorry!) rearview mirror because we won't own the car nor the cameras that are recording the world as we "drive" around. That's not to say that we should give up fighting for some level of privacy even when we don't own the cars, but seems more likely that legislation would be passed that forces the ve…

> This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. This seems like an extremely myopic "tech bubble" take to me. I'm trying to find a way to put this so that it doesn't sound like an attack, but have you been to suburban or rural areas outside of places like SF, NYC or Phoenix? Being reliant on third party transportation, on roads the are of…

> most of the US population

You do realize that "most" of the US population lives in cities, right? The "rural" population has remained almost constant since the 1960s, while the "urban" population has grown to roughly 5x the rural population's size. Even just counting the largest 100 cities is more than the rural population. Setting that aside for a moment, how does poor signage affect self-driving cars? They're not like humans expecting to take the third left but miscounting, or turning right at the Dairy Queen (which has shut down). They have GPS and full maps. Those maps might not be perfect, but they'll only ever be wrong once if they're part of a system, which is what's being proposed here.

To be clear, I'm matching your tone here. Normally I'd try to be a little more understanding and tempered.

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

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the US, it is legal to film anywhere public (out on the street, in a government building, etc). You can even film inside of private establishments (restaurants, stores) until you have been asked to stop. This is part of the protection of free speech and press. You cannot use the footage gathered for commercial purposes without permission of people you filmed. Journalism for pay, and art for pay are not considered…

It is in Sweden too. And everywhere I know of in democratic countries. But here it applies so long as I’m there doing the filming myself.

The law here isn’t about filming but regulation of surveillance, and is only about installing equipment that films public spaces without permit. For example: a ring doorbell can film my driveway and porch but not the street.

The thing about the Tesla is that it counts the same as mounting a camera on a house filming a public street corner, and not as a person filming the same street corner with their smartphone.

I don’t see the connection to freedom of speech since the act of recording anything is unrelated to if and how you can use that recording (which would be when it becomes speech).

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

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so very HN that we get into fits about Google and Facebook and Apple and so on tracking us to make a buck, 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. The obvious answer to this proposal is that I believe that I have a right to not be monitored and penalized by auton…

The difference is it's in public. Google et al wants to get into your private life. Nobody is talking about watching you race cars on a private track.

So you're okay with police having access to facial recognition cameras on every public street in order to better track down violent criminals?

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

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru... > urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population

They are including suburbs in that number, so that doesn’t really counter the post you are responding to.

As I just replied, counting just the largest 100 cities covers more people than the rural population.

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

#510
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the cases when you are on a motorcycle at 3am and the road sensors don't sense you so at the advise of a police officer, you carefully and safely run the red light. I think we know what's going to happen. I've come to the conclusion that most of the dystopian movies about robots and automation are just [spoilers]. Either way I moved to a very rural and remote location. One of my many hopes is that it will buy enou…

Just to be safe, you could push the bike, at least with bicycles you're a pedestrian as soon as you don't ride but push it.

Pushing a 500 pound motorcycle through an intersection in a time there may be drunk drivers sounds extra risky to me.

I think a solution would be to first implement this AI in a tech-only city. Tech billionaires were planning on building a tech city in California. That seems like a good test-bed to fail fast and fail often. The AI need first be installed around all the billionaires homes and the system must have full transparency. Or the system accidentally leak some interesting stats including to show if anyone was made exempt. The fines won't affect them but if their personal drivers get enough moving violations and lose their license it may affect their vendors or make them late for meetings. If they are confident in AI then they would agree to the concept of shared pain. If that tech city falls through then it should be implemented in San Fransisco for five years.

Post reply on HN