Tesla: self-driving car or Big Brother?

7 April 20231 year ago babelfish

Self-driving cars must have cameras capable of filming 360°. But where does the recording end up? A Reuters scoop raises questions about the privacy guaranteed to anyone who passes by a Tesla

The first to want to see clearly about the footage that Teslas carry out "for security reasons" was the German Privacy Guarantor, recognizing the risk, for example, that within the range of the cameras mounted on the cars of the South African entrepreneur Elon Musk they could end up there unsuspecting pedestrians, who are not even warned, as the law prescribes, to walk in areas subject to surveillance. But not even China has ever trusted too much what the US electric car sees and maybe overhears, so much so that although it has the Group's main gigafactory within it, it limits the circulation of the American brand by excluding it to sensitive areas, especially when the communist party meets in congress.

TESLA AND PRIVACY

The reconstruction made by Reuters , which interviewed several former employees of the company led by Elon Musk , also suggests that Tesla is a bit of a Big Brother. It thus turned out that between 2019 and 2022, footage taken by cameras inside and outside the electric cars arrived in company chats.

In various situations, the screens and frames immortalized road accidents, such as that of a child on a bicycle hit by a car: the video, according to Reuters again, went viral inside the Tesla headquarters in San Mateo in California, in other stolen images would show a completely naked person. Bouncing from chat to chat, some have even been graphically rendered as "memes," i.e. humorous cartoons, though the matter gets very few laughs. If on the one hand Tesla is not directly responsible for the unprofessional behavior of its employees, on the other it will be held accountable for why all this material is in its possession: in short, where does the "shot" end up, who can view it and when is it trashed.

NO TWEETS FROM MUSK…

Although Tesla explains that the cameras inside and outside the vehicles are functional only for safety, with completely anonymous data, seven former Tesla employees have instead explained that the systems make it easy to identify even where customers live. “We could see inside people's garages and their private properties,” one of them explained. At the moment, neither the company nor Elon Musk , who never misses an opportunity to tweet, have commented on the story.

Until now it was thought that the recording with the car off was activated only in the event of theft or danger to the occupants of the electric car, but these testimonies not only dispel doubts in this sense, but increase others regarding the sensors and intelligent on-board instruments , from seats that detect the number of occupants to what the brain of each car can record. Do Teslas record road sections? The conversations of the occupants? Their images? These are questions that more and more people are starting to ask.

The cars of the future will need eyes and ears to drive. As we read on The Verge , the external cameras, in addition to being activated in the event of theft, are directly linked to the autonomous driving functions of electric cars. But the question is: who is listening? Because it's a moment from Big Brother to The Lives of Others …

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/tesla-unauto-a-guida-autonoma-o-un-grande-fratello/ on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 09:16:38 +0000.