Seems like a lot of commenters came away from this article thinking that Tesla employees are seeing and sharing images from inside the car?
Because that’s not what was reported, and it’s not what happened. But they certainly didn’t go out of their way to make that clear.
If the car drives past someone who is naked, the cameras record it, and the driver has opted in to data sharing, then someone on Tesla’s labeling team might see it.
I think it’s bad the videos were being pulled out of the controlled labeling system / screen-shotted and shared.
This is video that drivers opt-in to sharing with a very clear description of what is being sent back to Tesla in the UI. It obviously doesn’t say they’ll make memes out of it, but it’s no surprise at all Tesla has snippets of the external camera video feeds that are being labeled by humans.
> thinking that Tesla employees are seeing and sharing images from inside the car?
It's worse! The cars recorded videos (while off) of private residences, garages etc. The lead quote is "we could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids"
If that doesn't cause you concern, I don't know what would.
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?
> If the car drives past someone who is naked, the cameras record it, and the driver has opted in to data sharing, then someone on Tesla’s labeling team might see it.
I'm not sure how the opt-in procedure works for Tesla. Is it truly opt-in? That is, does a Tesla driver positively select to share data, or are they "opted-in" by default? If the latter, are they presented with the option to opt out, or do they have to dig around in the menu to find where to opt out?
Regardless, it's not informed consent if Tesla misrepresents how it uses that footage, as it seems they do.
They've also got a really different definition of anonymous data than I've ever seen...
You’re familiar with the Anker/Eufy cameras storing all video unencrypted and unprotected in the cloud?
Or Amazon sharing all their Ring footage and Alexa recordings with the police?
Almost all these devices share their recordings to the cloud and have employees watch/listen to it. Tesla at least asked first if you want to share the clips.
Because that’s not what was reported, and it’s not what happened. But they certainly didn’t go out of their way to make that clear.
If the car drives past someone who is naked, the cameras record it, and the driver has opted in to data sharing, then someone on Tesla’s labeling team might see it.
I think it’s bad the videos were being pulled out of the controlled labeling system / screen-shotted and shared.
This is video that drivers opt-in to sharing with a very clear description of what is being sent back to Tesla in the UI. It obviously doesn’t say they’ll make memes out of it, but it’s no surprise at all Tesla has snippets of the external camera video feeds that are being labeled by humans.