From TFA:
Elon Musk remotely unlocked the Cybertruck for law enforcement and provided video from charging stations that the truck had visited to track the vehicle’s location
Wow… Telsa remote controls your car and watches everything you do with your car.
…with YOUR car.
Dystopia much?
Yet another reason not to buy a Tesla. Although in fairness, all cars are privacy nightmares nowadays. It’s just that most manufacturers, being less stupid and less in-your-face than Musk, try to stay low-key about the privacy invasion and don’t go around showing off their dystopian oversight capabilities over your property.
This isn’t surprising at all to anyone paying attention to what the Tesla app lets you do with your vehicle, or if they have interacted with Tesla support. All of that info is available in the app, including viewing not only live camera feeds from sentry mode, but also saved recordings from the USB drive installed in the vehicle now. Clearly if you can do that from the app, the company can do that and more.
Similar stuff is almost surely possible with any of the other manufacturers that have mobile apps with similar functionality as well.
Hell, shit like OnStar had similar functionality to remotely unlock vehicles before Tesla even existed.
OnStar freaked me out after an accident in a rental car a few years ago. We had no idea the rental car had it. We got rear ended by a drunk driver and spun 360 degrees off the road. Within a second or two of coming to a stop a voice was asking if we were ok.
Yeah but the crucial bit of difference was, if you thought OnStar was too invasive, you could turn it off or buy a car without it.
Good luck buying a car that isn’t online and snitching on you all the time, or disabling the telemetry today.
Yeah but the crucial bit of difference was, if you thought OnStar was too invasive, you could turn it off
You can disable your own access to the service. Short of ripping out the cellular module, you can’t disable OnStar’s access.
What I mean was you can not subscribe to OnStar, and then you don’t have OnStar no more. The spying hardware is there, just not used.
As opposed to modern cars with which you don’t subscribe to anything and they spy on you without your consent, and there’s nothing you can do about it short of - like you said - ripping out the spying hardware.
With Tesla you can opt out. Other brands that do the same generally have no way to opt out
It’s part of the current trend to not let you be the final decision maker on IT equipment you own. Your phone does all it can to prevent you getting root access. Your home computer/laptop has a second processor in it running code you can’t change to enforce DRM
YOUR car? I don’t think you’re understanding this correctly…
My impression is the charging stations have cameras to deter and catch thieves. Tesla isn’t looking at your camera feeds unless you’ve enabled the right data sharing setting, in which case I imagine they could. Otherwise the charging stations / video comment is pointless because they could have watched the driver the entire way, not just at the stations.
Edit: Also the sharing of camera feeds if enabled, I’m pretty sure is only the external cameras, not the cabin camera.
And yes if you go to a charging station, of course they know you were there and can track your path between stations. You use a credit card when you’re at them and it authenticated your vehicle.
So a guy is found shot in the head of a car that advertises self driving features and nobody’s got their tin foil on?
Wait the guy was dead from gunshot not the explosion? I’m OOTL
When does Tesla assume liability? They’ll be sued soon enough. The more data they analyze, the more they’re responsible for, for example, stopping bad drivers, or catching terrorists installing bombs. But they won’t want to feel that heat, now will they.
Car manufacturer neutrality legislation incoming.
GM has been remotely unlocking cars and harvesting their geolocation data (via onstar) since the mid 2000’s. Elon is late to the party.
Did Luigi get the right CEO?
So, was entering the exploded vehicle an extreme difficulty without the remote unlock, then? Because I don’t think it was, exploded or not.
How exactly is this information helpful to law enforcement in this case?
I think the main motivation here was to find the suspect and disprove that the truck exploded due to fault or defect. Elon was saving his brands image here and 0 to do with national security or public interest.
“Everyone may be surprised to learn that our car didn’t just explode on its own. We can prove it using the spy camera recordings we have of the owner!”
Xelon likes to control people, he thinks he’s powerful. If you let this psycho in your life, you deserve the exploitation you suffer. He’s just a junkie with a lot of money.
I wish we didn’t fucking subsidize his capital. We’re forced to suffer him.
I don’t even know why people are surprised… Would they flip out if they heard about OnStar, which was super common to see in most cars made in the mid to late 2000’s/2010’s? They could do the same thing. They GPS track the vehicle, can remotely shut it off, open doors/windows, etc. And I know Teslas advertise this kind of functionality, having worked there and seeing that shit in the dealer at the front of the plant.
Would they flip out if they heard about OnStar, which was super common to see in most cars made in the mid to late 2000’s/2010’s?
You could opt out of OnStar. It was optional.
Can you opt out of the current car surveillance collective? I don’t think so.
Just because you could choose not to subscribe to the service doesn’t mean the car still can’t be monitored or controlled by them and they very likely still collected data regardless.
