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 vehicle owners/operators (Alphabet in the Waymo case) to blur peoples' faces. Then of course the state (police/gov/etc.) will clamor for a backdoor key that will unlock the blurred faces/bodies if a crime is suspected to have occurred. Speaking of, I wonder if Waymo already does blur people when they capture them through Waymo rides? I can't seem to find mention of it online.
This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. Still not sure how their adoption plays out over time because, at least in the US, people will fight against mandates to use self-driving cars because it compromises their freedom (note that the freedom crowd (no judgment) will be saying that, at first, because they will consider it their right to drive themselves, but once the privacy implications are clear there will be full-on (figurative?) wars fought over self-driving). Guessing a politician, in Texas or another red state, will sooner than later enshrine the right-to-drive-oneself into the state constitution.
> 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 often in disrepair with poor signage, is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population.
This is fun because until the last couple of decades, private transportation wasn’t very common in China at all, people simply didn’t own their own cars and taxis were (and still are) ubiquitous even in small rural towns (though they might be breadbox vans to supplement shared minibuses). Almost everyone was relying in third party transportation and even today most still are.
And really, this kind of thing was common in most countries and turned out America (along with Canada, Australia) are the odd ones out with almost ubiquitous private car ownership in most of its area.
I have no idea how self driving taxis will change the USA, but I rode in my first Waymo last week on a trip to SF and it felt very real. Having lived in a country where I took a taxi to work everyday, I can totally see that life working for me (since I already lived it anyways).
The reason it "works" in rural China is people largely don't drive places, at least not the way Americans do.
Lots of tech folks love to shit on "car-culture" in the US, and while I agree it has resulted in really crappy urban design for a lot of US cities, you can't ignore that a lot of people love their cars because it gives them a ton of freedom. People like being able to go off at a moment's notice, independently, and drive long distances.
America may be an "outlier", but that still doesn't mean that it's reasonable to think we'll move from where we are now to getting rid of our cars because that's how China does it.
Taxis give you most of that for inner city travel. I don’t mean American taxis, I mean Chinese taxis that are everywhere. If that was a fleet of self driving cars, then it really would be like wait one minute for a taxi if you aren’t going somewhere on peak.
My point, though, isn’t how China can show America how to do things, just that American car culture is unusual and unlikely to apply to most of the rest of the world. There are also costs of dumb decisions to consider, which is going to affect the competitiveness of our cities long term (Shanghai doesn’t have to make the same stupid decisions that Denver did, and eventually it just isn’t worth doing business in cities with crappy transit infra), and eventually some more optimal norm is going to affect even the USA.
Private car ownership has not been unusual in developed countries. There is a reason so many large car manufactures are not American, after all. It's not just to sell to people in NA and Australia.
What's different about the US and those other places is that far more large cities were built after private automobiles were common. There are cars everywhere in both countryside and cities in Italy, say, but there is ALSO more walkability and transit because the cities were there first (and even there, there are cities like Florence that didn't invest in rail for decades before starting to build some more light rail again very recently).
China is something of an odd one out for development patterns because of the much higher levels of state control.
What I don't really see is places voluntarily giving up point-to-point private transit after having it as an easy option for generations. Places where even the super-wealthy have turned in their private cars and drivers and take the bus with everyone else. I think the market that self-driving cars could potentially capture over mass transit is exactly those people who would rather have a private point-to-point experience. Which can be an overlapping set with the people who would also be willing to use mass transit if it was "good enough", in addition to the people who actively dislike mass transit. The total pool of users is very large.
Nothing really replaces good mass transit. But in a rural town a taxi is often the best you can manage as an alternative. Even in cities, taxis fill in gaps that make it possible to live without cars and use mass transit more. Like a trip can involve a taxi to a station then a train ride then a taxi from destination station to your actual destination.
> is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population.
I disagree.
I grew up in Rural Australia, lived in the Yukon and have driven to many of the world's most remote and undeveloped countries.
You are saying "Self driving cars will NEVER work in <this specific case>"
When what you mean to say is "Self driving cars will first work in the easy cases, and then years later will work in more and more cases until they eventually work everywhere."
FWIW, people said exactly the same thing when the automobile came around and horses were the best transport. Of course automobiles didn't work well in places with no gas stations or very nasty horse tracks for many years. But the years will always roll on, and things will change.
While self driving cars are provided by private companies, self driving cars will first work in the profitable cases, and then years later will still only work in the profitable cases.
With scale and time, the tech gets cheaper and the number profitable cases continues to increase. As long as it isn’t human labor intensive (and it’s not), they can expand profitable territory almost indefinitely.
As long as the expensive bits continue to be externalized (i.e. publicly funded), I think that there might not be any cases that aren't profitable.
The expensive bits being:
- road maintenance
- theft and vandalism policing
Surely, once Waymo covers most cities, the marginal cost of getting one extra waymo car on the road should be substantially lower than a Bus (and maybe even a Marshrutka?)
...And then, once you have the cars on the road, to avoid increasing waiting times too much (which will lead users to prefer alternative transport methods, walking, cycling, etc.) you need to have slack/extra-capacity in any area that you're serving.
This means that I don't see why Waymo might not expand even in remote mountain towns: they are not going to have a massive fleet, but keeping one or two cars there shouldn't have a different overhead than for a Waymo car serving a city.
(the only caveat might be in making sure that the overnight depot/parking lot won't be too far from the area served).
I think that would be pretty cool, if it means that people won't have to drive themselves anymore... but I'm also quite concerned about the consequences this might have for public transport: if its usage numbers falls, and thus public investments in it stops, entire small town might end up depending on extremely few (one?) self-driving taxi providers.
Having given this some thought recently, I don't actually think anyone will sell self driving cars for a long time, if ever.
I don't think there will be a big bang moment where self driving is suddenly here and it works everywhere. Instead I think it looks like what waymo is doing now, self driving taxi services that expand to cover specific regions and then expand more as they begin to handle more edge cases and more extreme weather.
By the time self driving is actually to the standard needed to sell it with a car a younger generation will probably have grown up using self driving taxi's and wonder what they need to own a car for.
I don't think I really disagree with you, but I think the economic models and tech that would be required for people in more remote areas (in the US at least) to solely rely on 3rd parties for transportation is so far in the future that it's basically unknowable from our current position.
That is, for many areas, I don't think it's just a case of the tech improving bit-by-bit and taking over more and more areas. I think that will happen in some ways, but take for example a friend of mine who lives in Pennsylvania. Where he lives is a far-out suburb, but he often drives out to rural areas on the weekend to go camping, or he drives long distances to various client sites. Forget the tech, I just don't see how an economic model of a self-driving car company would make these kinds of trips feasible anytime in the foreseeable future.
Most of the US population is urban per the census bureau but a lot of that is spread out suburbs and exurbs. I’m “urban” between many acres of orchards and conservation land. Depending on third party transportation day to day would be utterly impractical.
That will work well when one or two people in most of those houses are commuting, dropping kids at school, and/or running errands at about the same time. /s I fully expect that autonomous vehicles at some point will marginally expand the ranks of people who are marginal car owners and will just effectively taxi. But if you have daily use that Uber/taxis doesn't solve, regularly use a personal car to drive places, have your vehicle configured for things like care seats for kids, etc. you'll do without full autonomy in favor of presumably improved automation in your personal vehicle.
> That will work well when one or two people in most of those houses are commuting, dropping kids at school, and/or running errands at about the same time. /s
I don't really understand what you're arguing here.
At most, doing that with self-driving cars would require the same number of cars that already exist. Right?
That's good enough for me to put it in the "practical" category. What's your standard for "practical"?
But more realistically, even at peak use there's a lot of cars sitting there not moving. Make some do taxi work and you can cut numbers significantly.
> I fully expect that autonomous vehicles at some point will marginally expand the ranks of people who are marginal car owners and will just effectively taxi.
Not just them, it can displace a lot of second and third cars even when it's barely touching primary cars.
You said: "In a typical suburb, providing a 2-3 minute wait would require one idling self-driving car per hundreds of houses." with the implication that this is an alternative to car ownership and would vastly reduce the number of cars.
>it can displace a lot of second and third cars even when it's barely touching primary cars.
I agree although things like Uber and Zipcar have already reduced the need for lightly-used second cars which are what I mean by marginal cars.
All I'm saying is that if the only way to get fully autonomous vehicles is through a third party service, most people will pass and just take whatever autonomous features they can get in a vehicle they buy/lease and live with that. I certainly would.
Very few people would argue that having the option of owning a vehicle capable of safe fully autonomous operation (with manual override) is a bad thing. We're just saying that having full autonomy only available as a third-party taxi service just isn't very interesting relative to today except perhaps at the margins.
> with the implication that this is an alternative to car ownership and would vastly reduce the number of cars
The point I was trying to make is that you need very few idle cars on top of the ones in active use. A fraction of what suburbs already have.
It could be a vast reduction in the number of extra cars over the peak concurrent number.
> I agree although things like Uber and Zipcar have already reduced the need for lightly-used second cars which are what I mean by marginal cars.
Somewhat, but self-driving cars are more effective in multiple ways. They don't need to be nearly as cost-effective while idling, and they can come to your doorstep instead of making you walk to them. There's nothing like a zipcar near me.
> Very few people would argue that having the option of owning a vehicle capable of safe fully autonomous operation (with manual override) is a bad thing. We're just saying that having full autonomy only available as a third-party taxi service just isn't very interesting relative to today except perhaps at the margins.
I think it goes well beyond the margins if the price works out. Or maybe your definition of "margins" is a lot bigger than mine in which case we agree and even a change at the margins is a big deal.
But also, even if the average person wouldn't switch, that's different from it being utterly impractical to switch.
No attack taken. Fair question. I'm in a bubble at the moment because I'm located in one of the few areas where Waymo is available (think that qualifies as a (tech) bubble any way you look at it). But I feel like experiencing this tech answers a lot of questions about what is and isn't possible (or better yet what is and what will be possible with self-driving cars).
Also, I work in a very rural environment that couldn't be more hostile to self-driving cars, at least as I thought about them before riding in Waymos (an example: where I stay when I work there I have to give people turn by turn directions because if you rely on Google or Apple Maps your car will get stuck on a road with foot-deep ruts where you'll need to be pulled out; I mean it's not driving on those crazy roads in Pakistan you see videos about (never been) but I would be willing to bet those roads, which I transit regularly, are amongst the poorer-quality roads in the US and I can see self-driving tech working there before long).
And I have spent a few evenings trying to understand how the corporate-owned-fleet economics work in rural areas (and in urban). I don't think it works today. But I do think that when costs come down, and they will come down if regulation doesn't kill self-driving cars broadly, or if Elon's right and you can do it with "cameras only," then it will only be a matter of time before the tech is adapted to crappy rural roads.
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.
I'd like to see that too, but time and time again we've seen that:
a) laypeople aren't usually moved by privacy violations more abstract than someone physically watching you do something.
b) most people aren't willing to don practical accessories that noticably change the perception of your face unless it emphasizes qualities considered sexy.
c) safety gear generally isn't considered sexy
I think that this stuff would be perceived like wearing a physical bike helmet for your data privacy with all the cachet of Google Glass.
Also d) it's easier to update face recognition ML to see through the latest in camouflage fashion than to design, manufacture and sell new clothes after each update to the ML model. Especially that they need to keep fooling previous versions of the model too.
> most people aren't willing to don practical accessories that noticably change the perception of your face unless it emphasizes qualities considered sexy.
Does gait recognition (and body tics / unique movement style) not make this moot?
My sense is that facial recognition is a stop-gap and soon to be superseded, because the tech is there for more holistic 'reads' of a person - And that those subtle things that we humans can't see are actually plain as day and as clear as a fingerprint.
If we cover our face, then the data collected on gait etc. will be more than enough.
If we adopt a different gait, then the data on other foibles and styles will then give us away.
Etc. (we can't hope to disguise all of these at once)
A couple of years ago there were news articles that the pentagon has a "lasers that can identify people in a crowd from 200m away based on their heart rate signatures".
No idea if that's true or overblown, but it doesnt seem unlikely that such technology becomes possible in the future.
Surely object recognition models will catch up to whatever attempts to thwart it (especially if it becomes popular). As long as a person is recognizable to another person, a computer should also be able to recognize them.
surely there are simpler ways
of course if you've dealt with most hoodish ruffians, as the names tells us, the people of the hood love to wear hoodies - which generally work quite well to hide from cameras, especially those above, if the hood sags forward and over the face somewhat
or these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses
No, that's Nassau County, New York. Not the entirety of New York. Says it right there in the article you linked. There's also a lawsuit challenging it, also linked at the end of the article.
> 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.
Perhaps in the urban setting but the majority of this country is not contained within cities. Even then are you planning on banning motorcycles and RVs?
> because they will consider it their right to drive themselves
Until a law is passed otherwise they are absolutely correct.
> the right-to-drive-oneself into the state constitution.
I doubt it. The real fight is likely to be whether we continue using mixed vehicle and pedestrian infrastructure or if we force pedestrians off the roadway entirely. Then we'll have a "right to walk" constitutional crisis.
Calumet park is a village right next to Chicago with under 7000 people. Northfield village has under 6000 people and it's located within about 15 miles of Chicago. It wasn't until I was about 18 that I realized what I thought was Chicago were actually small towns/villages. There's a whole slew of small villages next to or "in" larger cities.
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 trends apply everywhere else in the world as well.
These trends are influenced by economic policy and socioeconomic mobility of the population, which are not similar everywhere, so expectations do need to be tailored to them.
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.
> It's about 33% in dense areas and 55% in suburban areas. Which actually doesn't improve the driving situation.
Are the suburbs not one of the easier places for autonomous vehicles? I’d think the lower traffic, larger roads, and reliance on cars to get around (due to low density and lack of transit) would make them the ideal place for self-driving cars to succeed.
I don’t agree. The problem is suburbs have a lower cost-per-mile for trips than urban areas.
It’s way more common to take a taxi in the city than the ‘burbs. Behavior for car ownership and expectations around waiting on rides is different. Self driving taxis are an easy transition in cities. In the suburbs, you need to sell people on expensive vehicles that cost a lot per trip (whether owned or hailed).
Ultimately I think it’s the same city/rural (really dense vs less dense) divide between a lot of things.
In a suburban area, it could take 15 minutes for a taxi to get to you. In a rural area, 30 minutes to an hour. Inconvenient, especially since you could hop in the car you already have because of this situation, and probably already be where you want to go by the time they arrive.
In an urban area (especially a super dense city like Manhattan, Tokyo, Mumbai, etc.), you probably spend more time figuring out if you need a taxi than actually getting one (literally seconds in most cases), and god help you if you’re trying to park. It will not go well.
Two ways to get these numbers. Consider the total miles driven, divided by cost of the car. Or consider the cost of a taxi if you don’t own a car.
I believe uber says their average cost per mile is roughly $1. So maybe $2 in urban areas. Waymo is $3 they said.
I saw some statistic that said a new car costs $800 a month now. Since we’re talking about selling new manual vs self driving cars, we can ignore people buying used cars or particularly cheap cars.
If you own a car in a city, you might drive to get groceries once a week and you may drive to a furniture store once every few years, and you take a couple trips to the airport every year. Cost city dwellers walk or take transit. Cities are dense, so the grocery store may be 2mi a way, so roughly 200mi a year, and then maybe 200mi a year for everything else. That’s 400mi a year (or 8mi/wk) with a car that statistically costs $800/mo in America - or 200/wk, so it actually costs $25/mi.
In the suburbs, you may drive 20mi round trip to the grocery store. Then 20mi a day round trip to commute, then 5mi a trip to a restaurant… it adds up to a lot more miles total. I googled it and the average American drives 1200mi/mo. That’s $1.5/mi assuming the same average $800/mo cost of a new car.
That means it’s cheaper for an urban dweller to take uber or Waymo instead of buying a new car. It’s almost but not quite cheaper for a suburbanite to take an uber but definitely not a Waymo.
> 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 (not trying to wade into that here though). In rural and low density areas, people believe guns provide safety, while in dense urban areas, people believe guns add risk. In low density areas, people will need to drive themselves (I doubt as many people would buy self driving cars vs use as a taxi, roads will be less well mapped, etc ), while urban areas with increased risk of driving accidents will want to restrict access of roads from humans.
This urban/rural divide doesn’t make for good licensure policy. 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. We already see states with smaller urban population have easier driver’s license standards and age requirements. Pride in vehicle ownership and car culture is already geographic simply because urban residents are less likely to own a car. So rural-leaning elected officials will want to keep human-driving easy to access.
> 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.
> You do realize a lot of these people have class A license already
Admittedly, I didn’t know that.
> They also have wildly different politics.
Yes, I’m just assuming self driving will be a topic broken down by politics. Do you disagree?
My core thesis is that rural people won’t want self driving because it’s less compatible with their existing life, and the “saves lives argument is stronger in urban areas. I think, like guns and many other political topics, it’ll be polarizing, and the rural voters will get an outsized influence to fight it. Highways are an important part of the road system. I can’t imagine rural people being locked out nor forced to have two vehicles.
Some people hunt for sustainance, and we protect that right despite being irrelevant for 99.9% of people. Many more people use trucks or heavy equipment on their farm/homestead for work (or pleasure eg off-roading). I assume we’ll end up protecting that the same way.
I don't think you mean "you" as in me specifically, but in case that is what you meant I'm of course not banning anything and I'm not even advocating for that. I was predicting what I think will happen with self-driving cars and the privacy implications if that does to come to pass (still a big if).
As for urban vs. rural, I feel like rural will benefit just as much from self-driving as urban. I won't detail why, but it's pretty much the same reasons as urban. Economics will have to be better if it's going to be corporate-controlled cars, but, really, if Elon's right (huge if) and you can successfully have autonomy with a Model 3-level of hardware, then rural America may very well have widespread autonomous car access in the next couple of years.
Motorcyles? Great point. Not sure how that will shake out. RV's? Seems like a fantastic opportunity for autonomy. Sit in the captain's seat, beer in hand, actually watch the scenery as you drive on by. In fact I think the market for RV's will grow if folks don't have to drive them themselves because there are likely many people who wouldn't be comfortable driving an RV due to its size, but if it drives itself it could open up a whole new audience.
As for pedestrians, do you think pedestrians are being restricted more and more as the years go on? I see the opposite in both urban and rural areas in the US. Genuinely curious how your experience is different and where. I tend to think autonomous cars will make walking more pleasant. No more worrying about a car clipping you making a right turn, or a car driving unnecessarily fast and losing control, or a drunk driver losing control. All of those things may go away with autonomy (I say "may" because we're millions if not billions of miles away from anyone saying definitively that self-driving is safer/better/etc. In my limited experience riding in Waymos, though, I am incredibly optimistic about the technology. And I really look forward to us figuring out the privacy implications and other negatives that could come along with it because I think the benefits are so enormous that it'll be a massive shame if the tech does not work out long term).
I think this plays out where it becomes a luxury to drive oneself. Over the next 10-15 years it looks like self driving will continue to advance and will likely become safer than the alternative.
Once that happens insurance companies will start charging more for people that drive themselves compared to people that let the car drive.
I can see some states outlawing that practice. Then it’s left to see who is still underwriting insurance in those states.
> I think this plays out where it becomes a luxury to drive oneself. Over the next 10-15 years it looks like self driving will continue to advance and will likely become safer than the alternative.
I think this is a long way away and will vary geographically.
For a long time, self driving cars will be more expensive because they’ll have expensive sensors on it. Not many people will want a $100K self driving car instead of a $30k Camry. This means the cost-per-mile goes up unless utilization rate goes up. The most effective way to do that is make it a Taxi.
The natural result of self-driving-taxis is that the people least likely to take a taxi but most dependent on a car (rural Americans) will drive themselves still and those cars will be cheaper because they’re sensor free. That will never be a luxury product.
In urban environments though, the poorest people will continue to own cars but be slowly priced out by insurance. But maybe insurance won’t go up for manual cars, but down for self driving cars. They’ve already priced the cost of manual driving, which won’t get more dangerous as less cars are human. States might try to protect them, but I think politicians and citizens will be persuaded by “safety” over “poor people need to afford transportation”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if safety requirements will gradually tighten until every car will need most sensors. Manufacturers have an interest in selling expensive difficult to manufacture cars and politicians like to reduce traffic fatalities.
The average age of a car in the US is 12.6 years old right now. History shows that we’ve not forced safety items into existing cars. (I have one car where I would be permitted to pass safety inspection without seat belts (any) because it wasn’t originally equipped. [I have chosen to add them.])
After the 15 year mark, give or take, it becomes a luxury to maintain the car. There will hopefully be a point in the nearer future where ICE will become a luxury.
If I understand your point about luxury correctly, I agree that there’s a crossover point, but I think it’s more like 35 years (1990 model year or earlier) rather than 15 (2010 MY or earlier).
I don’t think many people driving a 20 model years-old 2005 (including myself) are treating maintaining that car like it’s a classic car hobby.
Sure, but that’s assuming the technology on a Tesla Model 3 actually is capable of safely self driving. Today, Waymo is the clear winner, and the equipment costs a lot more than a Tesla.
I know Elon/Tesla can be a charged topic, but teslas don’t self drive today. It might be true, but I don’t think we can assume they’re capable with just a software update based on the info we have today.
The LIDAR sensors are significantly more expensive than 10k. There are a lot of them on it too. Additionally, I expect that the GPUs or other compute requirements are an extra 10+k at least.
While I'm sure the prices can come down with mass production, the estimated BOM for a Waymo are speculated to be >200k per vehicle. Maybe we can that down to 100K, but I'd be very suspicious of a 50k vehicle anytime soon.
Tesla Model 3 is right below that $30,000 mark, Tesla FSD does the bulk of my driving today. I think your core premise is flawed, it will be cheaper and sooner than you anticipate which will alter the conclusions you’ve come to.
And? Just a few years ago waymo had safety drivers. I really only intercede when I want to take a route different than the Tesla routes me on, or I want to be a bit more aggressive in highway traffic.
Seems like 10 years isn’t too out there for affordable self driving vehicles considering we have one working today at the high end of cost and another getting close at the lower end of cost.
Won't happen unless tradesmen, engineers, etc can use self-driving cars, which will e awkward when you need to park up onto a curb or something to inspect a downed power line.
Fourth of July, kids sports that take place outside, etc. are all regular occurrences where people need to be able to easily go up onto a curb and park in the grass.
Seems like you’re grasping at straws to find weird edge cases that don’t at all preclude a mostly self driven future. I don’t think these cars will be made without steering wheels, or a mechanism to control the vehicle directly.
But I bet they get a report of how often you manually drive and if you cross a specified threshold your rate increases.
Edit:
Also why would you need to park on grass! Hop out of the car and it will park itself wherever in a nearby lot, or just drives around until you need it.
Your suggestion that all the cars should just e driving around waiting for you is fanciful, imagine something like a live music event with 100k people? Will there just be 100k cars circling the venue waiting for pick everyone up ?
I agree with you that driving manually will become a luxury but it's important to recognise that it will manifest as a discount on self driving, not a surcharge on manual.
The only way in which I can see a surcharge on manual happening is if it becomes so incredibly rare that it becomes a niche product, or if there ends up being a bias e.g. it turns out that the pool of manual drivers is now biased towards people who like to drive in a risky manner.
If anything, in a competitive market that is able to price individual risk appropriately, the cost of manual insurance for you or I should be lower in the self driving world, because most other drivers are now "superhuman" and thus we should get into fewer accidents.
And historically has this competitive market manifested itself? Or have insurance companies instead vastly changed from their 'distributed risk' origins and instead act more as corporate entities with profits at the forefront, where the moment you actually use them the cost of being insured rises?
I don't think insurance companies need to distribute risk from auto insurance. They do, however, need it for property insurance. Floods, earthquakes, and fires and level thousands of homes quickly. There isn't any risk like that for driving.
Look at the 2020 covid vaccines. The freedom crowd said this was going to have massive privacy implications, there was a propaganda machine pushing those people as being crazy antivaxers (maybe many were, let's talk about the large subset who just had privacy concerns), and the net result is that most US citizens have their names, addresses, preferred vaccination locations, preferred vaccination times, propensity for following local regulations, ..., recorded in a database so broken it's basically public.
The freedom crowd didn't have a lot of power against a propaganda machine turning their neighbors against them. Tack in a few dozens of billions from Tesla or Google claiming their cars are safer than the average driver (in well-studied, dry, daylight, slow streets) and using that to push anyone unwilling to roll that tech out globally as a road-raged Luddite, and I'm not sure the freedom crowd are going to be able to do much to slow down our corporate overlords.
I'm not going to respond to your Covid commentary in an effort to avoid going down a rabbit hole, but I should say that when I wrote "freedom crowd" it's not some monolith. Specifically, I think there are plenty of freedom-minded folks across the political spectrum, and I do believe that those folks, again, across the spectrum, are going to have a hard time accepting self-driving cars en masse because of the privacy implications. I do think it will weigh more to the conservative side of the fence, but if you haven't hung around with extremely progressive people there is a huge contingent on that side that is very wary of government mandates and, I feel dumb even writing something this obvious, far more wary of corporate America's agenda than any other population in the country. Maybe you were talking about the left in the first place, but I think you were referring to the right based on bringing up Covid and the other language you used.
That isn't a political statement. The flow from "we won't shove you in a database" to "the non-existent database was leaked" is something that's independently verifiable.
> left/right
Yes, many people care about freedom
> going to have a hard time accepting self-driving cars
I'm usually optimistic, but I don't think public sentiment matters here. To the extent it does, it'll be some sort of Faustian bargain, where the law says your car must have a backup camera (arguably useful) and as a byproduct brings in unwanted, undisclosed tracking and also remote takeover capabilities through radio bugs (buffer overflows plus poorly designed canbus access). However self-driving inflicts itself on the masses, it'll be in a series of small enough steps that the freedom crowd can't appropriately fight back.
I'll certainly accept the possibility of bugs allowing remote takeover of vehicle cameras, but in general I don't think rear cameras are much of a risk to privacy. They're not always-on (generally they only turn on when the car is in reverse gear), and on many car models they're even physically covered when they're not active. (E.g. on my car, the manufacturer logo on the rear of the car flips up to allow the rear camera to "see" when I'm in reverse gear.)
Regarding bugs and remote takeover, the one thing that does feel like a mitigating factor is I expect for many car models it might be tough to find an exploit that enables the rear camera, but doesn't let the driver know that it's active. Usually when the rear camera is active, the infotainment display automatically switches to the rear view, and I wouldn't be surprised that there's no mode for "turn on rear camera but don't display the video feed to the driver" on most cars. Not as a security/privacy feature, but just because it's easier to write the code that links the two all the time rather than having it be conditional on something.
But yeah, as autonomous driving becomes more pervasive, there will be more cars with cameras recording everything around them at all times. I expect the manufacturers/operators of these cars to store that video for some time after capturing it, even just for quality control, bug tracking, and dispute resolution if there's a crash. And certainly law enforcement already has legal tools to compel the release of this kind of video.
I suppose this is just the next step of what's already the status quo, though. Many public places already have (stationary) cameras, either operated by the police or by private individuals, and police generally have the ability to access the latter, even. Cameras on autonomous vehicles just mean many more cameras over time, cameras that move around.
I don't really love this situation; I would like to see legislation that makes all of this data protected, and requires companies that store it to delete it after a relatively short amount of time (unless subject to a legal hold). But like most things, legal protections tend to lag behind technological progress.
My complaint (from above, not the only problem with cameras) about the rear camera is that the cheapest way for them to be installed nowadays, given that other people want infotainment systems, is for them to go hand-in-hand with an infotainment system. Whether the camera is on or not, the car is now vulnerable.
The sin being committed is having too much code, especially too much untrusted, untested code (it's "just a radio") wired into the canbus. Toss in a little auto-update functionality and some always-on antennas, and you have all the makings of a nasty exploit. Last I checked, none of those have been known to be exploited in the wild, but they've also not been patched in the last decade. It's a fundamental design flaw that saves a few dollars, so it persists.
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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 disincentivize driving like a complete maniac.
Are insurers unable to use this information? Are they afraid of the backlash from being the first to accept this information? Is there some legal reason this isn't doable?
Setting aside the obvious dystopian next steps, I think the main problem with automated traffic law enforcement is that our laws are quite bad in the sense that they rely on enforcement being loose and somewhat subjective to even work at all. The speeds on various roads, the timing of traffic lights, the places one can park and for how long, etc, are not carefully planned or thought out enough to actually work if everyone were to strictly adhere to them. It all works because lots of people can briefly park in illegal places, choose reasonable times to speed, or reasonable moments to use the shoulder to go around obstructions, etc.
Obviously you capture some craziness on the margin that you want to capture, but also on the margin is the fudging that makes the whole thing work at all.
I would think that once enforcement becomes automated (and thus applies to those with resources, who currently get away with it), there would be a lot of pressure on the legislature (by those who currently get away with it) to make the rules better. Legislatures can move fast, but only when they're motivated. e.g. if every NYC taxi suddenly got a ticket every time they stopped in the street to pick up a passenger, those laws would be updated very quickly.
That seems optimistic. I would instead expect that those VIPs would be added to a table of folks who don't get tickets, codifying the current semi-formal process.
If we're looking at pas examples, the reverse happens a lot more: rules and environments are made stricter with stronger passive enforcement to get rid of the infractions.
Setting automated speed traps where drivers don't respect the limit, physically forcing lower speeds where traps didn't work or closing whole streets to regular cars to get rid of the problem altogether.
The main issue isn't just the rules, and if the infrastructure has to be adapted as well, it's often cheaper to get rid of traffic than to rethink a system that work better in adversarial situations.
> there would be a lot of pressure on the legislature (by those who currently get away with it) to make the rules better.
Making perfect rules is basically impossible, they'd be millions of pages long to fully capture all the caveats and exceptions. The world is fractals complex and so we rely on intelligent prosecutors and police not bothering to pursue things that are illegal but fine.
It's just not worth it to try and make perfect laws.
"Better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. In my town they took down the automated red light ticket machines on many corners because people quit running the lights. So the machines weren't gathering monies in tickets yet they still cost the city to have them.
Better needs to mean something other than gather revenue. And it don't with automated things.
I’m struggling to understand your point, or to imagine many examples which support it.
I agree that brief minor parking infringements may occasionally make people’s lives more efficient; but I can’t think of any examples where traffic lights and speed limits need to be routinely disregarded?
It's not just about efficiency, it's also about quality of life. There is a reason that a cop has permission to use his judgement when deciding to write a ticket or not. Because life is better when we don't live under the oppression of draconian rule keepers all the time. Rules are meant to protect people, and as such are often specified in terms of the lowest common denominator, with the understanding that the system doesn't enforce them when they can be reasonably ignored, using good judgement.
Life will be shittier for everyone if an army of self-empowered rule-loving busybodies get to expand their current powers beyond the realm of the HOA.
Frankly I'd rather just get a ticket when I speed by a traffic camera than rely on the discretion of a random police officer who might just be looking for a pretense to search my vehicle or hassle me in some other way.
Where I lived in Europe (as an American), jaywalking wasn’t illegal. They didn’t even really consider it weird. After all, you’re just walking.
In fact, if you were in the street and a car hit you, the car driver had to prove that it was unavoidable to miss you, otherwise the driver was at fault.
It was also illegal to intentionally block traffic as a pedestrian unless you were at a crosswalk. But there was no law that made it illegal to cross the street anywhere.
Seems like the best of all worlds. And it’s easy to fully enforce the whole “blocking traffic is illegal” part.
As of the beginning of 2023, jaywalking is no longer a thing in California. The only time a cop can cite you is if you're doing something dangerous. If it's safe for you to cross on a red light, or in the middle of a road not near an intersection, that's legally fine now.
Of course, the loophole is large enough to drive a truck through: if a cop wants to, they can decide you're walking "dangerously" as a pretense to hassle you. And most of the time it'll be the cop's word against yours as to whether or not you were being safe or not, and the courts will always side with the cops absent other evidence.
I always thought jaywalking laws were just stupid. The way I looked at it was always: my parents taught me when I was a kid to look both ways, and only cross if it's safe. To me, that suggests that I should always be allowed to cross if I determine it's safe, regardless of other considerations.
(The history of such laws are quite interesting and -- spoiler alert -- surprise, surprise, they were driven by automakers.)
As someone who walks around San Jose quite a lot, on many roads it is safer to cross in the middle of the block than at the intersections. You only have one or two directions to check, and incoming cars have better visibility than at an intersection. And you don't have the failure mode of the car not stopping for the red light.
It's probably not universally necessary to jaywalk. However, I am against this on the grounds of logistics. I understand and accept the need to have a license and display an identifier while operating a vehicle, but I think this would be an extreme requirement for people walking around (and possibly unconstitutional in the US?) And without this identifier, how will the system know where to send the citation?
All things being equal though this doesn't even sound inherently bad. If every jaywalking infraction was cited we might democratically re-decide how much we want that law to be on the books.
And indeed, California no longer has strong jaywalking laws on the books. A cop can only cite you for jaywalking if you're crossing dangerously. Crossing on a red light, do-not-walk sign, or at a place where there isn't a crosswalk is no longer automatically considered jaywalking.
It's sometimes safer to speed up 5mph over the limit to get through a yellow light, than to slam your brakes with someone behind you. It's frequently safer to speed to match people speeding around you then to match the stated speed limit (usually on freeways).
These are both problems caused by poor driving (other peoples' in this case). Maybe with a traffic law panopticon everyone would drive better and these would disappear
This is actually a problem with speed limits that don't match the road or alternatively, roads that aren't designed to incentivize people driving the intended speed.
In theory, the speed limit should be set to the 80th or 85th percentile speed of traffic, and the road should be engineered so that the 80th percentile speed is appropriate to the surroundings.
I'm extremely skeptical of this idea of "speed limits which don't match the road" unless people are arguing them down. Because the whole point is that people reliably overestimate their driving ability, and thus overestimate the safe rate of travel on a road.
The road I live on displays this all the time, and that's just an advisory road: the speed limit going down the winding slope near my house is about 50 kmh...that is probably the absolute maximum you can navigate those turns at in perfect conditions, and in reality it's considerably slower - and there are steep embankments either side, so if you lose control your car is at the mercy as to whether or not a tree will stop it plunging over the edge.
Anyway, there's been a fair number of damaged cars and one near miss from said creek plunge in the 2 years I've lived here.
You live on an extreme road where road engineering can't do much due to the given environment and possibly low budget if the road is not that important. Though anything that slows vehicles before entering this stretch of road, or a much less harmful obstacle to heighten their awareness could improve the situation.
Roads where planners have a literal blank sheet is where roads need to be designed better to slow down drivers to the desired speed limit. Sometimes it's as simple as adding traffic islands for pedestrians, narrowing the road or planing trees next to the road.
"advisory" was ambiguous - I meant say, the lower speed limit is advisory - as in "45kmh an hour when wet".
I live in the middle of Sydney. This is an urban road. It is directly off a major highway in a suburban residential area.
It is a regular residential suburban street. No amount of "clever planning" will undo the natural topography of the region. It is a paved, well maintained road and that's the problem - people's judgement of what "feels right" depends on numerous factors they can't see and which don't matter.
They're in the middle of a recently resurfaced, asphalt road with a footpath down the side and what looks like trees and bush on side, and a cliff cut on the other. But it's relatively steep, winds a fair bit due to the climb, but also looks isolated when you're at the bottom because it runs through a state park area.
From street level you cannot tell how slippery it might be when wet (which people just plain suck at), how wet "wet" actually has to be (i.e. partially wet roads are more dangerous then when it's a hard downpour because the surface becomes slick), and unless you paid close attention to the area you can't know that there's no real protection along the side of the road (which shouldn't even be a factor: no one should be driving in a way where they depend on crash severity safety measures).
Observably, people's judgement of "feels right" sucks because as noted: there's been a fair few crashes basically caused by people taking corners too fast (which is to say, maybe they were speeding but that again is the point - they think they can safely go faster, and no, they actually can't and aren't good at judging that) - one of which was a car which very luckily ploughed into a very sturdy tree stump and didn't send it's occupants down the drop into the gulley.
You don't ever need to slam on your brakes or speed up for yellow lights, that's the entire point of the yellow light existing instead of just going straight to red.
Again back to control of your vehicle. I would expect a first time driver to make your complaint. A driver for multiple years should be able to adapt their speed for their surroundings
I dunno. I’d rather speed up to make it through than slam on my brakes and have someone rear end me. That’s how I drive and I’ve never been in an accident in around 30 years of driving.
I was just discussing this with my wife while driving on the local expressway on a clear Saturday afternoon. The speed limit is 55 MPH but everyone was moving at 70 MPH without any issues. The road is wide and straight with limited on/off ramps and the faster speed felt very natural.
This is a common occurrence on this road and everyone seems to abide pretty well. Sure, there is the occasional "idiot" doing stupid things (weaving in out of traffic, speeding up / slowing down, etc.) but for the most part it just works.
The big problem is when a LEO is around. Everyone slows down to 55ish MPH and traffic backs up and people do weird things.
However, I don't know the solution. If we raise the speed limit to 70 MPH does that mean that people will then feel comfortable going 80 or 90 MPH? If we lower the speed limit to 30 MPH will that cause everyone to only go 55 MPH? This piece of road just feels right and natural at 70 MPH; everyone seems to think so, if unconsciously. Will changing the laws "fix" this piece of road?
The problem with speed limits in general is that they're not universally applicable. Darkness, fog, rain, snow, etc. can all change what the actual safe maximum speed is. So even with a posted 55mph speed limit, the maximum safe speed at a particular time might be lower (even considerably lower), and a LEO could cite you for going too fast even if you're driving under the posted limit. (I've been on the interstate in the snow where you'd be likely to get pulled over if you were going much over 25mph, even with a posted 65mph limit.)
Driver skill and reaction time also plays a factor, but of course people are not so great at judging what their own specific safe speed is all the time. And all other things being equal, you're more likely to get into a crash if you're driving faster rather than slower, and the injuries you sustain will be worse at a higher speed.
IIRC speed limits are often set at some percentile (85th?) of what all drivers would (theoretically) "naturally" drive if there was no posted limit. And, on highways, cops will often not pull people over for exceeding the speed limit by a moderate amount. Once, long ago, a cop told me that, absent adverse conditions or other unsafe behavior, he usually will not stop anyone unless they're going more than 10mph over the highway speed limit. And I expect if he were hiding in a speed trap that no one could actually see driving by, and everyone was going 70mph on your 55mph road, he'd probably just sit there and not bother anyone, unless they were doing something else that was unsafe.
I guess this is a long winded way to say that there really is no single safe speed that applies to everyone, in every road condition. The law acknowledges this, and police often let you do your thing unless they believe you're actually doing something unsafe. The discretion and judgment calls can be a problem (biases, etc.), but I don't think a society where unavoidably "fuzzy" laws were always prosecuted would be a great society either.
You clearly haven’t received a letter in the mail for $250 because a camera saw you barely not fully stop for a red light right turn at 3am with zero traffic
A human in the loop needs to be the first line of defense, if an officer isn’t willing to be in the field to issue the ticket and show up in court to defend it then there shouldn’t be a ticket in the first place, full stop
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 enough time for urban and suburban areas to duke it out in courts for a couple decades before I have to deal with the fallout.
I've had to do this with an electric scooter before. Sometimes the road sensors aren't tuned for very small things... probably because most cars aren't that small.
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.
That’s not the point, a surveillance state where the panopticon autonomously gives $250 tickets is the issue
Rules aren’t meant to be cold hard algorithms to blindly punish people with; we wouldn’t automate a judge with an algorithm why is it somehow different to automate a police officer with one?
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 adequate insurance to cover the full cost to victims. Just pay your ticket and drive better before you make a mistake you’ll never recover from.
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.
> Rules aren’t meant to be cold hard algorithms to blindly punish people with; we wouldn’t automate a judge with an algorithm why is it somehow different to automate a police officer with one?
The role of enforcing certain laws can be easily fulfilled with simple algorithms as the logic required is on early grade school level. In this case it's something like: if "stoplight is red" and "car doesn't stop", then "driver gets ticket." That's all the algorithm has to do, super easy to automate. Automation allows for enforcement where it would otherwise not be cost effective, like when it's 3am and no one else is around.
The judiciary, however, has to interpret all kinds of crazy edge cases that people come up with to try and get out of tickets for rolling stops or whatever legal case, for all laws, because every now and then someone has a valid case. That's a bit harder to do with a couple lines of code and some low cost hardware.
You violated a law and received a penalty. You're not disputing that you violated said law, but are instead trying to justify it with "barely didn't stop" and "it's 3am and there is no traffic".
Isn't the point that you got punished for doing something you would have gotten away with had no one been watching?
because maybe the point is "The basic premise of democracy is that the citizens/ordinary people are trusted as the ultimate source of the law, and the law is to serve them, not them to serve the law."
Nice twist to the premise at the end, but no, the point is that the person got punished for using sound and reasonable judgement in a situation where the regulation (not law) was ill thought out.
"Sound and reasonable judgement" to save a couple seconds?
That still just seems like rationalization of bad behavior.
You're right that the basic premise of democracy is that citizens can be trusted as the source of the law, but it seems to me that this particular citizen can't actually be trusted? I mean, they're demonstrating a lack of integrity, are they not?
> That still just seems like rationalization of bad behavior.
I think the issue is that you're taking as fact that "in order to be safe, you must come to a full stop at a red light before turning right", and that not doing so is, indisputably, "bad behavior". I dispute that. I think in many situations it is just as safe to nearly-but-not-completely come to a full stop before continuing, and it's entirely fine behavior.
The law has some difficulty encoding that. (Not that it's impossible, but it's difficult, and enforcement perhaps gets weirder if you try.)
Let's take a related example: jaywalking. In many places, you can get a ticket for crossing the street somewhere where there isn't a crosswalk, or crossing against a red light or a don't-walk sign. I was taught as a child how to look both ways and only cross when and where it's safe to do so. I don't need a sign or stripes on the road to tell me that (though I do appreciate those things as hints and suggestions). Hell, in some places (Manhattan comes to mind), if you don't jaywalk, everyone around you will look at you funny and get annoyed with you.
California, recognizing this, finally eliminated most jaywalking laws a year and half ago[0]. You can only get cited here if you've failed to do what your parents told you, and you're crossing when it's not safe to do so.
Stopping fully at a red light before turning right is, IMO, similar enough. For many (most?) intersections, you're only going to be a teeny tiny fraction of a percent safer coming to a full stop. So why bother?
[0] Let's also remember that jaywalking laws exist only because car manufacturers wanted them. Walking in the street!? How absurd! Streets are only for our beautifully-produced cars! Not you grubby plebeian pedestrians. Away with you!
> I think in many situations it is just as safe to nearly-but-not-completely come to a full stop before continuing, and it's entirely fine behavior.
I'm sure the multiple people that would have hit me if I hadn't jumped out of the way because they were looking the ither way to see if cars where coming thought the same.
> Let's take a related example: jaywalking.
When walking one is not impaired in one's vision of the surroundings, and you're not operating heavy machinery. The worst you can do is get yourself killed. With a car, the most likely scenario is to kill someone else.
You're talking about someone who, from their description, slowed down to something like 0.1mph instead of absolute zero. At 3am, in an empty road. How is that bad behaviour, lack of integrity, and a sign someone can't be trusted?
Integrity is commonly defined as "doing the right thing, even if no one is watching", is it not?
I highly doubt this person would have rolled through the light if a cop were sitting at the intersection watching them, and they knew they were being observed.
To several other posters' points, the specific regulation in question exists for safety reasons. Those safety reasons don't go away just because you don't think they apply in the moment. I'm sure every person who has hit (or been hit by) another person when rolling through a right turn like that thought their judgement in the moment was reasonable, too. I'm also sure not every one of those would have been prevented by coming to a complete stop and looking at the turn, but certainly some of them would have, which is a net positive for everyone. This comes at a cost of a handful of seconds, which seems like the most trivial of inconveniences, and wholly worth paying every time.
I don't actually disagree with some level of automated enforcement, but I do disagree with your phrasing/justification of it.
I just don't believe violating the law is always wrong, always bad, or always unsafe. While I would agree that most people are bad at risk assessment, and most people are not good drivers, the law should be flexible enough to deal with cases where breaking it is absolutely fine to do.
As a perhaps weird and imperfect analogy, killing another person is illegal... except when it isn't. The law recognizes that sometimes, even if in rare cases, killing another person is justified. This is why we have different words: "homicide" is sometimes not "murder" or even "manslaughter"; sometimes it's "self-defense".
We're talking about a rolling right turn on red, not crossing the whole intersection on red. The turn is allowed but the camera took issue with how much of a stop came first.
I don't know very many drivers who wouldn't recognize that camera behavior at 3:00 in the morning as unreasonable.
Why not just come to a full stop? It's presumably dark out at 3am so you may have missed a pedestrian or a vehicle with no headlights. It only takes an extra second or two to stop and look around.
Because people don't. That's just a fact of life, and we even have silly names (like "California stop") for the all-too-common behavior of barely or not completely stopping at a stop sign before continuing on.
I'm not excusing this behavior (even though I do it myself), but it's a widespread fact of life. The world is squishy, and I don't think it's reasonable to punish everyone for not coming to a full stop every single time, even if it's 0.01% safer to do so.
It's also kinda hard to define a "full stop". Well, obviously there are some states that are very obviously a car at rest. But if you were to, say, graph my car's speed at an intersection with a stop sign, you might see a curve that flattens out to where the slope is zero. Maybe that zero-slope point is a teeny tiny fraction of a second, though. Did I come to a full stop? Yes! Can a cop actually realize I did come to a full stop? Often not. Ok, so I did stop, but did I give enough time while at a full stop in order to assess that it was safe to continue moving? Do I even need to do that after I've come to a full stop, or can I start that assessment when my speed is 3mph, and know by the time I've fully stopped that it's immediately safe to continue? I think so, yes.
It's just fuzzy. Humans are fuzzy. The law is fuzzy. Safety is not a yes/no binary, it's fuzzy. Many many people don't always come to a full stop. That's just a fact; asking why is probably pointless.
At the majority of signal-controlled intersections with city limits there's plenty of visibility even (or dare I say especially) at 3am and the scanning can happen as you approach.
(Also, the kind of rolling stop I'm talking about isn't a 5mph roll, it's a near-stop that feels like a stop to the driver but technically doesn't actually bring the tires to stationary. Odds are even you have done this kind of stop pretty regularly without realizing it, and even a cop wouldn't even notice it as incorrect unless they were actively looking for someone to ticket.)
Odds are I haven't since I'm always careful to stop twice when turning right on red. (Once before the crosswalk, and again at the far side of the crosswalk to check for cross traffic before executing the turn.)
It's what I was taught to do in driver's ed. I know of no state where turning right on a red light is compulsory so I don't see how coming to a complete stop at any point could possibly be considered illegal.
You're in the intersection at that point and blocking the crosswalk, so you're no longer behind the red light, you're in front of it. In every state I've lived in you can absolutely get pulled over for stopping in the road where there is no need and no signal.
The first stop is for the crosswalk. (I might do this even when the light is green if there is a pedestrian in the crosswalk since never hitting a pedestrian is a rule of mine.) If I see a pedestrian in or approaching the crosswalk I wait here until they are completely cleared. Then I slowly roll forward for the second stop. This is the stop I use to check for approaching motor traffic. I have better visibility now because there's no longer a lifted F150 blocking my view to the left. Assuming I do notice an approaching vehicle I'm supposed to what? Drive into it? I would love to be in court accused of failing to run a red light into active cross traffic.
Anyway, you can drive however you want. I've been driving like this for over 30 years all across the United States and I have never been pulled over, cited, rear ended, or even, as far as I can recall, honked at while pulling this particular maneuver so I think some of the risks you are imagining may be overblown.
I don't really find anything wrong with your approach (I do the double-stop sometimes too, if conditions warrant it). But coming to a complete stop (once or twice), for many intersections, for many road conditions, for many times of day, is not going to meaningfully increase anyone's level of safety (yours, another driver's, a cyclist's, a pedestrian's...) vs. a momentary pretty-much-but-not-really-stopped stop.
To use your phrasing, the risk of anything bad happening after a not-quite stop may be overblown.
Sure, I'll agree that there may be times when the "extra" caution is unwarranted by the situation at the intersection. But by doing this every time I ingrain it as an automatic habit which greatly reduces my ongoing risk of failing to use extra caution at some point where it is warranted!
Since the failure mode is an auto accident and the cost of the habit is marginal I feel comfortable promoting this behavior. I have definitely seen accidents and many near misses caused by people who failed to come to a complete stop and look around when conditions did warrant it.
Another lesson I learned in driver's ed is that traffic approaching from the left can be traveling at a speed that completely synchronizes with the A-pillar of your moving vehicle, causing it to be completely invisible to you right up until the moment it collides with your front driver's side fender. This is why I stop and move my head around while I look, to make sure I'm not missing anything. I'm just a stupid human after all.
You have a STOPPING line that is on YOUR side of the crosswalk. That is the line you stay behind during a red light, if you stop then cross the line and stop again in the eye of the law it's no different than if you hadn't stopped behind the line at all.
You are correct that it's not compulsory to turn right on a red, however, if you are going to turn right you can't just stop in the middle of the intersection you either stay back or you go.
Never while turning right on red. I was rear ended once by a fellow who was looking at his phone and did not notice me and the line of stopped cars waiting at a red light. But sometimes what can you do?
Depends on your state. In my state we can take driving actions that violate the law as long as we can prove it was safe to do at the time. Your state may not be so lenient.
That is a discussion that can be had between the offender and the police officer, also depending what you are driving (ie a motorcycle) often traffic lights may not detect you and you can be sitting there forever.
Put it this way would you feel comfortable having your phone just passively watching you and anytime you break any law that is on the books it calls the cops on you? If you can see that as over reaching you can understand why others don't want automated enforcement done to them.
> That is a discussion that can be had between the offender and the police officer
Once you've been pulled over, a police officer is unlikely to change their course of action based on anything you say to them. Especially in this case, of not coming quite to a full stop at a red light before turning right. The cop knows it was safe to do so. They just want the ticket revenue or to fill up their quota for the month. Or they're just having a bad day and want to harass someone who can't fight back. Or, if I'm being charitable, they're an incessant rule-follower who doesn't understand how reality works.
Regardless of whether he can wait 30 seconds there is no good reason to impose that cost. Its just randomly making someone's life worse for literally no gain. Time is our most precious and finite commodity and should not be wasted.
In my city (200k pop) a lot of traffic lights are turned off, or rather blinking orange during the night. The few exceptions keep operating normal for good reasons. We don't have a smart traffic control system in our city so I assume it's the bare minimum and if the light you talk about was red at 3am, then there's a good reason for it.
Hell, I've been pulled over (and given a ticket) in nearly that exact situation you describe (I think it was more like 1am for me). Reasonable human discretion didn't help me that time.
> if an officer isn’t willing to be in the field to issue the ticket and show up in court to defend it then there shouldn’t be a ticket in the first place
I'm torn on this in general. The idealist in me really really really wants to agree with your statement, but the sheer number of cars on the roads means that cops see a teeny tiny fraction of things that happen. Driving-related injuries and deaths are disgustingly high, and I expect most of them are related to speeding, and running red lights and stop signs. That is, stuff cops are supposed to be policing.
No human-powered enforcement mechanism can watch for all of those. Yes, the usual deterrent factor applies: even if you are a butthole who doesn't care about safety, you might follow the rules because of the (relatively small) possibility that there just might be a cop nearby that sees you doing something bad. But clearly it's not really working all that well; car-related injury and death statistics are still (IMO) unacceptably bad.
I feel like this is sort of unique. Like, for other illegal behaviors, you can usually reduce them through other things. Like, have a healthy economy, low unemployment, under-control inflation, and housing that's affordable enough for everyone who wants to live in a place, and you have an environment where it's rare that people feel the need to commit property crimes. But drivers who speed are gonna speed. Drivers who run red lights and stop signs are gonna run red lights and stop signs.
Maybe -- like for many things -- better enforcement isn't the answer. Better road/traffic engineering, stiffer penalties for when people do get caught doing unsafe things... I dunno, maybe that will get us there. Perhaps we'll have some sort of a transit renaissance, and so many fewer people will opt to drive, and that will naturally make things better. Or maybe self-driving will get good enough (and be used pervasively enough, or perhaps even mandated) that riding in a car will become a lot safer, on par with train or even air travel. Who knows.
Regardless, though, I think my personal level of comfort is somewhere in the middle. I certainly don't want dystopian 100% panopicon-style enforcement of every single thing, where everyone is recorded everywhere they go to make sure they aren't breaking the law. But I think a light sprinkling of automated enforcement here and there is probably not harmful privacy/freedom-wise, but can indeed be a societal good. But I don't exactly trust law enforcement to stay within the lines of their mandate when it comes to these sorts of things. And I don't trust elected officials and judges to actually do something when law enforcement gets out of control.
From what I remember of my CA driver’s license test (had to re-take the written test when I moved to CA), there is no actual speed limit in CA. The speed limit is “whatever conditions deem safe”.
No, that's not true (CA driver here too). The "whatever conditions deem safe" bit is something that can reduce the legal speed below the posted speed limit. It can never raise it above the posted limit.
Even with no posted speed limit, there is an implicit limit in CA (differs based on the type of road and surrounding locale), and "conditions" can again only reduce that.
You might want to review the handbook again. What you’re referring to is the basic speed law, which never trumps the absolute speed limits posted (or the special restrictions like the 15 mph railroad track law). Think of it as a clamped function: the speed limit is min(posted limit, safe speed under current conditions).
It's not laws that are bad, it's the infrastructure. Wide roads that give the driver the feeling that it is safe to drive a 60 mph when the sign says 45.
The loose laws you describe are a problem that needs to be solved regardless, because they allow for selective enforcement against specific people or demographics by police departments acting in bad faith. A law that everyone is technically breaking but is generally not enforced can be used to target ethnic groups, or individuals that a particular police officer has a personal vendetta against. It essentially turns the police into judges, because it gives them the guaranteed ability to get a conviction somehow against anyone they want.
I assume a way for any civilian to activate those laws against any other civilian would result in the legal code being cleaned up quite quickly.
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 autonomous algorithms, and I'm not ready to compromise on that right just because some people drive dangerously. All of the same arguments HN will reliably raise against algorithmic anything apply here, but apparently that all goes out the window when cars become involved.
> 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.
I'd word it more like drivers who put me and others around me in danger should be punished for driving recklessly.
Fair enough. After all, as we all know, the only reason to object to massive surveillance nets is if you're a criminal who has something to hide. Since I keep the law all that tracking and monitoring won't affect me.
> Fair enough. After all, as we all know, the only reason to object to massive surveillance nets is if you're a criminal who has something to hide
Yea, that's the case when i'm submitting a video of a crime being committed. I also submitted video of crimes in my neighborhood being committed (home security cams), is that also an invasion of the criminals privacy?
I mean, you do have to admit that by objecting to "massive surveillance nets", you're actively helping criminals who have things to hide, even if you don't.
If you think that's worth it, that's up to you, but you do have to admit that your position helps those with antisocial goals. You'll probably argue that "massive surveillance nets are inherently antisocial", but we both know that's not any more true than saying that "absolute freedom of speech is inherently antisocial". Arguably true, but wholly subjective.
It's just an observation: this proposal aimed at penalizing bad drivers gets upvoted and generally supported, but proposals aimed at hunting down child pornographers get attacked as dangerous overreach. "I have nothing to hide" is an invalid argument for E2E encryption backdoors, but it's the correct way to think about a dashcam botnet.
It's just an interesting insight into the collective tech consciousness.
>you do have to admit that by objecting to "massive surveillance nets", you're actively helping criminals who have things to hide
This is such a disengenious gaslighting way of framing critic it would make politicians blush. I hope none of your "positions" could ever be used for anything bad ever or its your fault wether you want or not
Sorry about this, but a law was just passed making posting anything to a public-facing web site without prior government authorization a serious crime with a five-year forced-labor-camp sentence.
One of the first things you learn when you get your drivers license is that you don't have the same rights on public roads as you do off the roads, or in private (such as requirements for carrying up-to-date license, breathalyzers, etc).
So it's also okay for police to deploy large-scale facial recognition systems to help enforce the law and catch violent criminals, right? Or is there something special about cars or about insurance companies that makes them the exception?
I doubt it'd tell them any more than they already know. These drivers tend to have been given citations already.
The real money would be in giving civilians whose footage leads to a successful prosecution for moving violations a percentage of the fine. NYC already has something like this for people who catch too-long idling trucks and photograph/video record it.
> The real money would be in giving civilians whose footage leads to a successful prosecution for moving violations a percentage of the fine.
I don't know where you live, but around me, the police are so disinterested in traffic safety that roads have turned into a Mad Max free-for-all. Red light running, stop sign running, lack of signaling, weaving in and out of lanes, and general belligerence on the road. That and 90% of drivers are playing on their smartphones. Police departments could get infinite money by just opening their eyes and pulling nearly anyone over.
That is typically a case of police trying to negotiate funding, it will go in a cycle once a contract gets renegotiated they will go on a blitz to show how effective the funding was and then over time let it start to slide again.
Enforcement of red light running has been de facto nil for the past 4 years until a couple of months ago. The cynic in me guesses that this is due to the election cycle.
This is already done via traffic cameras, which are operated by contracted private outfits. Letting any civilian submit the footage, for a judge to review, would amount to a qui tam action. It's not unprecedented. Would the average citizen want to risk his identity being exposed if the defendant demands an audit of the footage? I couldn't say.
Can you elaborate on what would be bypassed by "patrolling?"
If the government was really contracting something out, then there's an argument to be made that it's on behalf of the government therefore it's government action and therefore it may be prohibited.
If nothing else, I'm pretty confident that my 3rd-amendment rights to not have soldiers crashing on my couch is safe from whatever my neighbor does with their dashcam.
> Can you elaborate on what would be bypassed by "patrolling?"
Well, we saw this play out in the last couple years in Texas—they set up their laws so that abortion enforcement was performed by civilians (i.e. not cops, not the government), specifically to throw sand in the gears of any countervailing judicial efforts (i.e. making it impossible to sue anyone to force them to stop it, because it's just a game of whack-a-mole at that point).
> in Texas—they set up their laws so that abortion enforcement was performed by civilians
A law [0] which, IMO, is a flat-out travesty of justice, kind of like if Texas Republicans had passed a law saying: "No private citizen shall be guilty of assault or liable in a civil trial for striking someone who spoke on the Ministry of Truth's totally voluntary prohibited ideas list."
I think you're drawing the right distinction. It's likely state action if a city or county literally delegated beat-cop duties to citizens with smartphones.
I'm more afraid of the slippery slope. I'm less confident courts find state action if a government is merely encouraging private citizens to supply evidence via a bounty system. Even if it's plain that this citizen-provided evidence is horribly biased, a court might say that the prosecuting entity has the responsibility to sift through the bias, and this responsibility is the difference between the state (the government) and non-state (the citizen who happens to submit only footage of people of a certain race).
But eventually the flow of money effectively deputizes the citizen, replacing beat-cop budgets with crowd-source bounties, and years of abuse pass before the courts acknowledge that it's actually been state action for quite a while.
(Interesting reading: Yick Wo v. Hopkins, which established that a fairly written law can still violate constitutional rights if the administration of that law is unjust. The City of San Francisco required permits for laundries, which is fine, but in actuality they never granted permits for people of Chinese descent. The US Supreme Court said nope. I could see similar reasoning applying here.)
I don't know how much detail they have but yes, insurers in the US do know if you've received a ticket for a moving violation (parking violations are irrelevant).
Many of them use solutions like LexisNexis Risk Solutions (which is like a 3rd party API that can return this data). How LNRS gets the data, I'm not sure.
For example, insurers also get data for stolen vehicles since it affects claims. I know this because in a previous (local government) job, I literally sat on calls about building an integration where we sent license plates of stolen cars (officially reported stolen to the police), if we wrote parking tickets for those cars, since we (another local gov agency) spotted the stolen car.
To me, even though I have strong feelings against privacy and surveillance, this felt like a totally pragmatic (and laser focused, it only affect cars that were currently designated stolen) use of the data.
Worked in NYS auto insurance. The government provided us an APi which we could use to pull driver records. While we could pull anyone that we want via the api, we get audited and must show reason for the pulls (such as a newly insured driver or renewal etc).
I'm not an expert and I'm not one to get many tickets however my understanding is that they only look up individuals during renewal time or if you change policy or company.
If you got a speeding ticket on week 10 of the year there is unlikely to be any increase on your insurance on week 35.
Like I said this was my perhaps incorrect understanding of how it works here in Canada.
It won’t work as you expect. Most of these drivers don’t have insurance. Second, you might make things worse, as now you have other Karen-like drivers who will eventually start threatening other people to report them, and that will escalate a situation from flipping a bird to a more dangerous situation. I sometimes watch dashcam rage videos on YouTube, and these drivers won’t care or even become more aggressive once told there’s a dashcam. This is not to mention the questionable results of ML that could report false positives.
It's not clear to me how you can claim most of these drivers don't have insurance.
Also. Nothing is stopping Karen's from reporting things right now. So what if they do? If you've done nothing wrong then the reviewer would just trash it. And probably put Karen's reports in the "immediately discard" pile in the future if she sends in frivolous claims all the time.
> If you've done nothing wrong then the reviewer would just trash it.
Or, more likely, they'll just see it as a report and raise your rates, because you've been reported by someone. Because they can; all they need is a reason.
Plus, I don't like the idea that someone I don't like could editorially create a video of it looking like I was driving irresponsibly, and then my rates go up. Then they do it again and again.
Example: When I leave in the morning, I take my daughter to the bus stop. I then wait for her bus to get there, she gets on, and I wait to turn left onto the road. The bus driver waves me on, to take my left before they let the other traffic go, so I don't have to wait for 20+ cars. I turn left and off I go. I expect it wouldn't be hard to edit a video of that to make it look like I pulled up to a bus picking up children and then drove through the bus stop signal illegally.
I watched dashcam videos, and most times after accidents, it turned out that there is no insurance or, worse, wrong insurance information is given, only to be found later that it’s fake. Obviously, this is not real statistics, but something I observed.
> nothing is stopping Karens from reporting things
True, but when you provide a platform for that, you incentivize the behavior. As mentioned below, you might start getting “points” in the app for these reports, just like how you report gas prices and get points that might win you free gas.
The far more risky and dangerous - ostensibly for the original caller too - phenomenon of swatting exists despite all that. I would not be so sure about the quality of society's controls and feedback mechanisms.
If we're talking about the Bay Area, anecdotally my experience is the percentage of uninsured drivers seems MUCH higher than other California metros.
I have used footage from my Tesla to get evidence and plate # that I could hand over to my insurance company and the police three times. 2 out of 3 were uninsured. This was during the past two years.
Around 10-30% of drivers in the United States don't have car insurance depending on the state.
It really depends on the state on how strict they are with car insurance. My state is very lax and they don't even really check at the DMV. The fine for not having car insurance is also only ~300 bucks and a 90 day license suspension and it only goes up slightly until like the 4-5 time you get caught. It just honestly doesn't make sense to have car insurance with the cost/risk that low. People who pay $50-100 bucks a month for car insurance are morons btw. You can insure yourself for like $30k, and you don't have $30k lying around paying $100 bucks a month is a terrible financial decision.
Insurance in general is a whole racket. Its literally only works due to the fact people on average pay more than they receive. "Oh but what if a bad thing happens" way to live your life, disregarding economics and averages.
Take out a personal loan or save the money you would spend on insurance evry year in a liquid asset (not cash that's almost as bad as insurance). Buying insurance is for npcs.
Only insurance that makes sense to have is insurance that is government subsidized, but that isn't because its better its because you are forced to pay part of its cost with your taxes. Enjoy getting screwed sideways by big government, who literally paya middle man to help ensure their citizens get healthcare instead of directly to the actual healthcare facilities. Insurance offers no service, its a worse scam than banks and credit cards combined.
> Insurance in general is a whole racket. Its literally only works due to the fact people on average pay more than they receive. "Oh but what if a bad thing happens" way to live your life, disregarding economics and averages.
That's literally the _entire_ point of insurance. You pay a little more than the average you're expected to actually need so that, in the event of a catastrophic event, your not on the hook for an amount that would destroy you financially. The fact that any sane person would think that you should expect to collect, on average, more from insurance than you pay into it... is baffling to me. Just plain math would show that's impossible.
I wanted to add a side note that I don't believe that all insurance types make sense in every situation. For example, I was presented with the option of buying pet insurance recently. I make enough that, for any given problem my pet might have, I can cover the expense. As such, there is no "catastrophic outcome" that would cause me serious financial harm. That, combined with the fact that the code of pet insurance is slightly higher than the expected cost for everything my pet needs, means it doesn't make sense for me to buy pet insurance. As such, I chose not to.
Admittedly, having it since we got her would have wound up saving us money overall, since she's had two CCL surgeries (at ~6-7k a piece). But the decision we made was based on expected cost and averages; so the choice me made was (effectively) a bet that didn't turn out to be the right one. But it generally _would_ be the right one given the facts we had at the time we originally got her.
I am saying insurance as a concept is stupid and anyone who has insurance is dumb except in few rare cases caused by government tipping the scales of the market.
The only thing baffling here us your reading comprehension bud.
You missed my entire point. You think I think that? Well, if I was on another website I would say something about you as a person about the type of human being who can't even understand what they are reading but then replies with an ignorant comment.
> I am saying insurance as a concept is stupid and anyone who has insurance is dumb except in few rare cases
I disagree with this completely. I have a car. I drive safely. It is unlikely that I will get in an accident and hurt someone. But I pay for insurance because it's _possible_ it will happen anyways. If something goes wrong, I could either
- Have the insurance I pay for cover the expense of handling it, or
- Have everything I own taken from me to cover the expense of handling it
The cost of insurance is above the the cost of (<covering the expense of a catastrophic event> * <likelihood of me having such an outcome>), but still very much below the cost of (<covering the expense of a catastrophic event>). As such, it is my belief that it makes sense for me to pay for that insurance.
I find it confusing that anyone would believe otherwise. Unless perhaps you're saying that the government should cover all such catastrophic outcomes, which doesn't seem realistic to me.
> Well, if I was on another website I would say something about you as a person
So, you'll insult me and pretend like you didn't? What are you, 6 years old? Clearly you found it insulting that I could not comprehend your view on the subject (which was not my intent), but seriously?
I didn't read this except the last part. But don't be hostile and insulting if you don't want a responze back. In real life if someone ever talked to me the way you do, it wouldn't be words and it wouldn't a fight.
People who insult out of nowhere grew up in the softest environment where you could get away with that. You lived a privileged charmin lifestyle where you could say whatever you wanted and not have any consequences. I wish just for a second i could see you in person.
To paint a clearer picture for you since you love to twist whatever I say, certain people from privileged groups have mastered the art of aggression from a thin vaneer of social acceptability. I deny this aggression. If you show me aggression, I don't care what socially acceptable way you show it. This isn't football, in real life its not a game. Your life is a game, never experienced anything real. Suburban fraud.
> You can insure yourself for like $30k, and you don't have $30k lying around paying $100 bucks a month is a terrible financial decision.
Certainly not here (Washington), you must have at least $60,000 AND it MUST be deposited with the DOL or State, unavailable to you, and you will not earn interest on it.
How do you propose people get to and from work to come up with $30-60K in savings that they can afford just to have sitting on account with the state?
> Take out a personal loan or save the money you would spend on insurance evry year
You're generally paying around 9-12% on this personal loan. Say it's over 5 years (that's assuming you can afford the $1,300/month payment), you're paying $21,000 in interest.
> Buying insurance is for npcs.
So your solution to NOT pay $50-100 a month for insurance is to pay a lender $1,300/mo for 5 years (assuming the amounts haven't increased then)? I don't think you've actually thought this through.
It literally would take you FIFTY YEARS to break even on this plan.
And in the meantime, you're only "insured" for the minimums, and if you're in a car accident at fault can easily be sued for more.
If I'm reading RCW 46.29.560 correctly, you do get the interest, and I think you can shop around to hopefully get a decent rate on a CD to deposit?
That said, if you expect 10% returns on equities and 5% interest on a CD, you still need to be paying around $3k/year for insurance for that to be a good deal on expectation. It could make sense if interest rates are really high, or I suppose if you use a loan to buy a CD, you'd just be paying the spread. Seems like a lot of work and extra liability to maybe save a few hundred dollars when presumably anyone doing this would consider that a rounding error.
The point of mandated auto insurance is that a lot of people don't have an extra 30k, but we want even those without that extra 30k to be able to drive without those they might get into an accident with having their car damaged through no fault of their own and no way to get back the money from the person who caused it.
Makes no sense. Just have a better court system that makes people who cause damages to other's car have to pay a certain amount to that person per month. Like car insurance but there isn't a middle man and you only pay when you get in an accident.
No, just make them pay out 30k in installments if they arw liable for something.
Or take them to court. The average person will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in their lifetime from required insurance for all type of dumb things.
We need the government to force everyone to pay an organization that does nothing but hold money in case of accidents and then release it back. We need this because people are too cowardly and fearful, so they accept financial sodomy in exchange for a very small piece of mind.
If we are going to force insuramce on people, why not just go all the way and start forcing people to not eat junky food. It costs the us citizen way more to pay for the obese and unhealthy than anywhere close to the average american will pay for an accident without insuramce. Might as well start restricting all freedoms. Take my money take my freedom, here let me bend over. That is all of you. Paying 30-50% i taxes to the government accepting that they can force you to buy a service i.e. health insurance, car insurance.
Weak people vote for more government control, because thwy are cowardly rats. They desire being controlled, read anti-oedipus and you'll understand that your little brain enslaves itself in a false prison. The mind of weak disgusting borderline subspecies humans have formed a societal prison, where freedom doesn't exist. And the strong non mentally ill are forced to accept this prison or will be insulted saying "they don't common sense" or "aren't practical".
Enough talk, the fact that a lesser human like you actually gets to determine how I live my life is disgusting. The wardens of the prison are everyday "people" who should be culled like cattle. I don't dislike the system, because its an illusion. The system is just a bunch of lesser humans who have drank the koolaid, you don't drink it and they will call you crazy. Reminds me of how Uncle Ted fought against the prison after escaping from the mind control of mass psychosis, so we locked him up. I wish with all my heart God exists, so when all you die you are judged and you have your face smashed into reality and truth at a million miles per second. The few sane are forced to fit in the sea of the mental midgets, who exist not ambivalent to slavery, but as its enablers.
> The few sane are forced to fit in the sea of the mental midgets,
> fact that a lesser human like you
What makes you think anyone wants to see your deranged diatribes?
You might feel better overall if you kept some thoughts like this to yourself (based on what you're saying seeking professional help might be a good idea as well).
It's shocking how many people are uninsured or underinsured. Plus, insurance minimums are absolutely ridiculous. Florida's minimum is $10K property damage, $10K personal injury, and they don't even require bodily injury liability. Total insanity. You crash into a Porsche full of doctors with that kind of coverage, and you're going bankrupt.
Most states have a minimum of around $25K for bodily injury liability. You can't even step foot into a hospital without paying $20K, so WTF is the minimum supposed to pay for exactly?
I guess a lot of drivers have so little to their name that they are judgment-proof and just don't care if they get sued for $2M.
> You can't even step foot into a hospital without paying $20K
I had a surgery and was in the hospital for a week. The out of pocket cost without insurance was lile 20-30 thousand if I remember correctly. And that is without coupons discount you usually get from cash payment. I used insurance, so I don't know what the discount wiuld be, but usually its like at least 10-20%.
I don't know what hospitals you got to, but 20K for a hospital visit is something I have never heard of.
The idea that we are all on “equal” footing in this world is even more asinine. Some folks are indeed the “main characters” and others are background filler. This is the only explanation for the “reality distortion fields” that larger than life personalities possess, well, outside of some SCP object style explanations…
This is an idea that only sounds good when you imagine it being applied to the drivers you dislike.
When people started getting higher insurance rates because a vigilante dashcam operator caught them driving 68 in a 65 three different times or because they only slowed to 1MPH instead of 0MPH at a 4-way stop, then it wouldn't seem like such a good idea any more.
you conveniently left out the fact that anyone driving a car or truck is driving a dangerous vehicle that can trivially kill or maim others. Driving is supposed to be a privilege, not a right. That comes with responsibility.
How you think this is the same as “being naughty while walking outside” is hilarious to me.
And walking comes with responsibilities too, a ruthless walker also endangers others, it's just harder to kill somebody by bumping into them, until you bump them in front of a car or train or down the stairs.
It’s actually not a right. The proof is you need to pass a drivers test to get a drivers license. It’s not given to you at birth. I’d argue the tests are too easy in the US, but that’s a separate discussion.
I'm having trouble understanding the tone of your comment.
If it's not satire, driving as a right can be restricted (or even denied if you fail the driver's test) far more easily than walking. Because it's far more dangerous.
so if someone is carrying a baseball bat, a knife, or any other sort of weapon that can trivially kill or maim others they should be wearing the body cam?
Would you have that same viewpoint if the goal of the person with the camera was to setup outside of addiction centers, abortion clinics, strip clubs, casinos, etc and publically identify people anyone coming or going? I mean they are public so should they "expect" to be filmed or should there be some sense of privacy?
You keep misreading things. First, you thought that people said that people who are committing crimes should wear body cams. Now you think I said that everybody in public should expect to be filmed. Neither of those things are true.
however i see your point. i believe this is really a failure of police in our modern society. police don’t take driving incidents seriously! it’s their job after all.
I'm honestly surprised that businesses in shady areas don't have ubiquitous cameras around their properties and signs that "just do your crime one block away, that's all I ask". (Presumably that invites vandalism and there are consequently practical issues, but has no one pulled this off?)
With cars, you have a license plate that will usually lead you to the owner. Identifying some random person, possibly with a hood, on noisy camera night vision is a lot harder; when you don't have a reasonably small pool of suspects, it's basically impossible.
Even if it would be possible to identify people with a combination of cell phone area warrants and/or by following all cameras around, this level of effort would be far too high (and too invasive) for small crimes like theft and vandalism.
It's often a small pool of "suspects" though. Like "same group/person it was the last 3 times".
I think most camera operators make peace with the idea that randos / one offs probably can't be identified. What really aggravates people is repeated behaviour. Many people who install cameras particularly want to know "am I being targeted" vs "this is a random thing".
I mean, that already kinda happens today? Everyone carries a camera in their pocket, and public freakouts are recorded and posted on the internet, leading to social consequences for the person in question.
Which I also think has been a net negative to the Western world.
Billy the dumbass in Gary Indiana does something stupid there he should be held to account by people from there, not posted online and receiving massive attention from the rest of the planet as people get off to their outrage porn online.
Yeah, I am personally against that as well. Enforcing laws is a police job, not the average citizen's, because they “supposedly” undergo certain training to do that. If everyone started acting like a police officer or reporting insignificant things, it would get chaotic, and it incentivizes people being hostile against each other. The only exception, in my opinion, is someone reporting something that’s substantially bad, like a homicide.
when you start offering monetary rewards for non-serious crime reporting you end up where the number of reports will outrun the resources of the reviewers and eventually have someone be required to "protest" the report and claim they are innocent putting a burden on them rather than the burden being on the authorities to prove you've done something wrong first.
Look at things like DMCA reporting on youtube and how it can be abused.
What's this non serious crime you speak of? It certainly not theft and traffic violations. theft ruins people's lives. traffic violations get people killed. Since 2010, the number of people dying in car accidents has gone up 50% per capita
Theft / traffic violations / jaywalking / curfew breaking / or public intoxication type crimes can be handled by police directly - having an incentive program to have people go around recording and reporting this sort of crime if not the sort of world I want to live in.
Yes I want those type of crimes punished and enforcement, no I do not want the masses to be working in an "all seeing eye" capacity for that to take place.
If you can't understand that the nuance there then I won't have much to discuss with you.
The proliferation of dash cams and the (...paltry) threat of having footage of bad behaviour put on the internet, or more importantly, having proof of what happened in an incident/accident to be able to pass onto insurance or police (where there's consequences from determining fault, theoretically) hasn't magically stopped people driving like homicidal maniacs, has it?
There's a million reasons why a dystopic snitch on your neighbours program isn't practical, as others have highlighted. I love the idea that insurance companies would be afraid of backlash lol. There's also easier options like I imagine asking car manufacturers to hand over data collected on driver behaviour would be. Don't US insurers already collect data like that from willing customers? Why not get that data from all customers regardless of consent? We've seen time and time again that most car manufacturers will throw all the data they can at whichever corporation asks for it. Even lower tech than that, speed and red light cameras have existed for a long time and they work on vehicles regardless of how many touchscreen tablets have been glued into it. Stupid(er) comment time: even lower tech again, the potential threat of gun violence in road rage incidents doesn't seem to disincentivise driving like a homicidal maniac, judging by how much worse US dash cam captured accidents seem to be compared to those from Europe or Australia. Maybe that's more to do with how many giant yank tanks there are on US roads and how much more effective they are at obliterating other road users and the sense of safety that comes with driving such huge things?
Jokes aside, road safety is a complex problem and insurance companies have other ways to protect their interests with significantly less effort.
- elasticity of laws. If all of a sudden every well-to-do law-abiding doctor, engineer and lawyer gets a fine on their daily commute for speeding 5 mph over the limit, there's going to instantly be a lot of pressure to change the speed limit to something reasonable.
- the amount of absolutely insane, dangerous behavior on the highways (people weaving in and out at 100 mph, etc.). It may be tough for an insurance company to act on a tip that someone changed lanes without using their blinkers, it certainly won't be tough if there's video evidence of them going 100 mph.
- the fact that insurance companies (presumably) do not need to know the identity of the driver to raise rates. If your car is regularly being driven by your brother at 100mph, it's still your insurance that's going to pay if he gets in an accident.
- while the police sound like they've given up on enforcing any traffic laws, it's in the insurance company's financial interest not to insure dangerous drivers. (And while that's sad, maybe private sousveillance is better than anarchy. People can have differing opinions.)
> If your car is regularly being driven by your brother at 100mph, it's still your insurance that's going to pay if he gets in an accident.
Not if your brother isn't listed as an insured party on your insurance. The insurance company will tell you to pound sand in that case. And if your brother is on your insurance, and you're paying for it and giving him a free ride, that's on you.
> And while that's sad, maybe private sousveillance is better than anarchy. People can have differing opinions.
::raises hand:: We shouldn't accept either. Private surveillance is not the solution to anarchically poor enforcement.
Disproportionate impact is already acceptable with insurance, because they know for example that the average young woman drives safer than the average young man. And charges them as such.
I lived in east Oakland for awhile, I'm pretty sure that driving stolen cars and torching them afterward don't give a fuck about auto insurance rates. The people who are driving like that on the 580 or @ 90th & Bancroft probably are uninsured as is.
Do you really think everyone is just insured because it's the law? If so, you're fairly naive. Try leaving the bubble you live in now and then. Oakland cops stopping responding to anything less than murder at lot sooner than 2020 lmao.
Given the potential for abuse, the insurance company probably can't really do much aside from writing a letter to the driver saying someone observed them driving dangerously.
Probably the letter should be more specific, include pictures, and it should not be entirely anonymous. You should be able to find out if someone is trying to make trouble for you.
It might not even be legally possible anyway. Insurance companies have a lot of regulation.
> it would substantially disincentivize driving like a complete maniac.
You are presuming that the manics are otherwise legally entitled to drive and have valid insurance. It should be no surprise to learn that they, very largely, do not.
They already don't care about your incentive system.
Which is why a privacy amendment must be passed and enforced with ruthless abandon if we don't want to pave the way for – and eventually become – an Orwellian panopticon in the service of authoritarians.
Where I live, speeding and red light cameras can only issue fines to the plate holder and don't affect the demerit points of the driver because they don't have evidence of who was driving the vehicle. I imagine it would go the same way with insurance. Unless a cop pulls the person over and gets their ID, tough luck.
The comment you’re responding to is postulating enforcement via higher insurance costs. If insurance gets ~20 reports of someone running a red light, maybe they’ll double the cost to insure that person.
Nor does it actually confirm that the plate _matches_ the car.
Otherwise i'd spend some time 3d printing something that looks a LOT like my neighbors license plate and wait until 1 AM and just blow the same red light over and over and over.
For insurance underwriting, would it need to? "People whose household receive X anonymous tips" is a cohort that either does or does not have more insurable risk, and if it does correlate then you can make an attempt to adjust premiums accordingly.
>If even a small subset of users did this, and insurers did something with this information, it would substantially disincentivize driving like a complete maniac.
People who drive like complete maniacs aren't doing so rationally. It's called "road rage" not "road reason."
Disagree. While "maniacs" could include road rage behavior (eg. brakechecking someone), it also arguably encompasses other risky behavior that's not obviously associated with "road rage", like speeding or aggressive weaving/lane changes.
Road rage is but one example. No one brake checking someone else is doing it rationally. If someone was being rational, they would drive reasonably. They would forgive and forget, and they wouldn't do dangerous things. If drivers were worried about their rates going up, they would not do the very activities that put them in that risk in the first place.
> If drivers were worried about their rates going up, they would not do the very activities that put them in that risk in the first place.
Not if they're underestimating the risk. For instance, if they think speed limits are instituted by clueless bureaucrats, or they think they're better than the average driver and therefore can drive more aggressively.
This is a good point. People that drive recklessly and risk personal injury, death, and imprisonment simply do so because they lack a proper disincentive. They would think twice when they envision themselves having to cut a a larger check to State Farm while lying in spinal traction.
When it comes to punishment, "swift and certain" trumps "harsh but sporadic". Having cars snitch on everyone else implements the former, "lying in spinal traction" implements the latter.
Interesting how none of the risks you cite are an increase into their insurance premiums. In fact, what you point to are completely irrational thoughts that have nothing to do with the risks presented by undertaking those activities. It doesn't matter if speeds are set low or irrationally, the fee for a ticket is the same as is the insurance premium increase. Same with being better than another driver, it doesn't matter if you are or aren't better than another driver when they crash into you. Your premiums will increase the same. I appreciate you making my point for me.
>In fact, what you point to are completely irrational thoughts that have nothing to do with the risks presented by undertaking those activities. It doesn't matter if speeds are set low or irrationally, the fee for a ticket is the same as is the insurance premium increase.
I can't tell whether you wanted an opportunity to rant about unjust speed limits in your area, or are trying to get in a smug "well ackushally \u{1F913}" response. While it's true that speed limits can be arbitrary and driving above it doesn't magically make you a dangerous driver, it's pretty obvious when people say "driving like a complete maniac", that's not the sort of behavior they're referring to. Thinking "speeding" and "driving like a complete maniac" means driving 1 mile over the speed limit in an artificially low speed limit zone is about the least charitable way of interpreting that statement.
>Same with being better than another driver, it doesn't matter if you are or aren't better than another driver when they crash into you.
Again, I can't tell whether you're trying to be snarky. Being a better driver (however it's defined) might not fix your car when it gets into a crash, but I don't think anyone doubts that a professional driver is going to be able to avoid more accidents than the 90 year old granny that only drives every sunday to go to church, when put in the same situations.
>Thinking "speeding" and "driving like a complete maniac" means driving 1 mile over the speed limit in an artificially low speed limit zone is about the least charitable way of interpreting that statement.
I have no idea how you came up with the hypothetical of the speed limits, and then went further to assume I'm making the argument that driving 1MPH over the limit was a good example. That's a ridiculous approach to this conversation.
>Again, I can't tell whether you're trying to be snarky. Being a better driver (however it's defined) might not fix your car when it gets into a crash, but I don't think anyone doubts that a professional driver is going to be able to avoid more accidents than the 90 year old granny that only drives every sunday to go to church, when put in the same situations.
But your example wasn't a professional driver, it was just someone who thinks they are a better driver. You were talking about people who were underestimating risks... how would that apply to a professional driver?
I disagree - people do it because they are angry, and _also_ because they're unlikely to get caught. Far less people commit hit&runs, because there's a much higher chance of getting caught.
As long as we're trading non sequiturs: when you think about why you don't want your phone to behave this way, you'll understand why I don't want my car to.
My superficial understanding of research on deterring criminal behavior (so, I may be bullshitting) is that it's more effective to make the likelihood of getting caught high than making the punishment severe.
So this might be an effective (and cheap, compared to fiery auto crashes and arrests) way to discourage that behavior.
And if someone does not respond to the initial incentive, their insurance rates would continue to climb, so at some point in time they either end up uninsured (in which case, this sousveillance really ought to just inform the cops, but anyway, the opinion in this thread is that cops are useless, so YMMV) or fix their behavior.
Swiss privacy law is absolutely insane to me both for the protection it provides (good) but also for the protection it provides(bad). I guess all tools are weapons in the right hands.
> 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?
I've done it. When i saw a driver run a red light (intentionally, they slowed down, and then gunned it through) and almost killed 3 people legally crossing the street.
It took a while though. Maybe 10 minutes in total to pull the dashcam clip and upload it to YouTube.
Nobody has developed that yet and OP might not have the skills to do so, but if an easy-to-install github repo were available then the lowered barrier to entry might make it possible. Theoretically, Teslas already know how fast every car around them is going and how they are driving, as evidenced by the 3D "FSD visualization", but I am guessing that piping this information out to rat out the reckless drivers is going to be super hard.
Insurers may not be the best recipients given most of those things are criminal matters.
In my country, most police forces accept dashcam evidence from other road users, and will prosecute on it. It’s seen be the police as a great road safety tool.
Informing the insurance company… how? Everything done by a large corp like an insurer has a specific workflow. There is no form to upload a video of someone behaving badly. Emailing some rando at Geico with an mp4 is going to be met with total indifference because the corporate drone answering whatever emails aren’t autoreplied or spamcanned will have no process by which to respond
There's no way insurance companies haven't already done the cost-benefit analysis for implementing a way to take videos from randos and turning it into actionable rate hikes. If it were favorable to their bottom lines there'd already be a link to "submit evidence" on every insurer's home page.
People already police others, there is no need for a complete psycho society where everyone is a potential snitch. Plus, a few minutes of speeding and shouting helps to calm people. Now imagine that people cannot even use their expensive car for speeding... where will people vent their aggression?
> 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?
As much as I think I'd love to be able to write traffic tickets during my commutes, I don't think anyone wants to live in a world where everyone is a cop.
I think you'll find too that a lot of people think laws are for other people. My speeding is totally justified.
They might have been in the past and it's not a bad idea for a data aggregator company to enable crowdsourcing to make the data palatable to insurers but AI video is advanced enough to obscure the plates and change the car model slightly.
In Europe, this would most likely be considered a violation of various privacy rules (specifics depend on country, but could include criminal penalties for the person doing this).
I wonder if folks could wear an emitter mask to prevent identification of their face? (like a hockey mask but covered in bright IR LEDs to confuse cameras)
Just tossing a product link into the discussion without any context isn't overly useful - why are you recommending (or are you) and why should I be clicking on that?
Sure, when the cameras start turning into a source of revenue then the city has an incentive to adjust the timing of the lights to maximize revenue and not minimize harm. This has happened (notably, the city of Chicago reduced the time of yellows and it led to more tickets and more accidents).
The other thing to remember is that governments don't operate red light cameras. They hire contracting businesses to install and operate them, and normally instead of paying a fixed rental/maintenance rate for the cameras those companies typically get paid a fraction of the fines. That means the designer/operator of the camera doesn't have much incentive to make the camera accurate or maximize safety, but to maximize how many cars it can issue tickets to (whether or not they're actually breaking the law or not).
When you take that to the extreme, the red light camera companies will even lobby local politicians to install more of them, and advertise them not as a tool for safety but for revenue. In some cases they've straight up bribed mayors and city officials with kickbacks from the ticket revenue.
All told, red light cameras are pretty shitty at making roads safer. What we really need are narrower roads with fewer lanes and smaller cars, but that's systemic. If we want to make specific intersections safer you can park a traffic enforcement officer at the intersection which will do more than any camera will.
The goal of a red light camera is ostensibly to make an intersection safer, but the fact that the city gets money when people get tickets incentivizes them to actually keep the intersection difficult to navigate correctly. They lose money if they adjust timings to be more appropriate for the situation or if they make the lights more visible or if they replace the light with a roundabout.
It also penalizes driving behaviors that are objectively not very dangerous far more harshly than a human police officer would—a lot of the profit from a red light camera comes from rolling right turns on red, which is very often a perfectly safe behavior that actually helps traffic move more smoothly (for example, when you technically have a red but there's a left turn crossing in the opposite direction providing complete cover for your move).
From what I recall, the real reason was that Lockheed owned and operated the cameras, took a cut of revenue, and was found to be changing the settings to issue more tickets.
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.
you could report anyone you disliked, as long as you could find out what their car looked like, even if they weren't speeding or running reds etc. convincingly editing the traffic light color in a video doesn't even require artificial neural networks. trump voters in progressive communities, for example, or progressive voters in right-wing communities
Back when I used to cross the San Mateo bridge frequently, I'd see the same group of drivers routinely driving dangerously and breaking multiple laws. I had dashcam footage. I once called up CHP and asked if they wanted it. They politely told me where to shove it
The police don't want to enforce the laws that are written. They don't even pull over drivers without license plates.
Problem is there is no punishment to the criminals. Why risk your life/job just to have the criminal released hours later.
I was a big believer of police reform, but realized the whole system was broken and police are just a symptom. And most actors are actually behaving somewhat rationally.
The sad part is criminals are finally realizing this. I have a cousin who hangs with a “crowd” and it’s amazing how prolific and bold some are. And how many people know about the crimes and no one really says anything. And apparently police know about a lot of it too, but apparently a case that prosecutors will take is an exceptionally high bar.
I used to keep my Sentry mode on all the time. Then my car got broken into twice. The police didn’t bother to follow up despite having a video footage of what happened. Now I never turn it on. And now police wants to tow vehicles for the footage.
I was watching a youtube video about the "Kia Boys." A group of young men who made a lifestyle out of stealing Kia vehicles with flawed anti theft systems installed.
What interested me is that they make a habit of connecting their personal phone to the entertainment systems of vehicles they steal. They then use the large list of connected devices in their phone to brag about their stature as criminals.
Which is hilarious because it's not only evidence that connects them to a rash of vehicle thefts, but it also means every stolen vehicle retains evidence of who _precisely_ stole that vehicle.
The police don't seem to have a clue. The criminals surely don't.
wrong angle - most people aren't trying to cover their crime sprres, they know losing privacy is more likely to make you a victim. Could be robbery, but it could also be high hotel prices.
The article mentions that they tried towing a car because they were investigating someone who got shot and stabbed. While it'd be nice if police could investigate every type of crime, I don't see the contradiction between "police didn't follow up about your car being broken into despite footage" and "police towed a car to get footage about someone getting shot and stabbed"
> While it'd be nice if police could investigate every type of crime
That’s literally their job, which they get paid for. But anyway, my comment was more referring to the fact that if they had done their job, I’d be more open to keeping my Sentry mode on.
> > While it'd be nice if police could investigate every type of crime
> That’s literally their job, which they get paid for.
It's literally not.
Their job is to do a variety of things, including investigation, according to the priorities of the higher, within the financial constraints they are given and according to the priorities of the authority placed over them (which in many cases is the top leadership of the police department themselves, because lots of times they are given a broad degree of structural independence from the local government they are associated with.)
What you say may be what you'd like their job to be, but it is not literally what their job is.
> At the same time, the better they do their job the less of it there will be to do
Institutionally, the police have very little interest in there being less perception of a need for police, that would result in them getting less resource, less deference, and more oversight and accountability.
What this conversation is getting at is the police being (percieved to be) selective about what they do and don't care about is gradually corrosive to co-operation.
This is a lengthy quote, but it's relevant and from one of my favorite authors:
> Ah... Keep the peace. That was the thing. People often failed to understand what that meant. You'd go to some life-threatening disturbance like a couple of neighbours scrapping in the street over who owned the hedge between their properties, and they'd both be bursting with aggrieved self-righteousness, both yelling, their wives would either be having a private scrap on the side or would have adjourned to a kitchen for a shared pot of tea and a chat, and they all expected you to sort it out. And they could never understand that it wasn't your job.
> Sorting it out was a job for a good surveyor and a couple of lawyers, maybe. Your job was to quell the impulse to bang their stupid fat heads together, to ignore the affronted speeches of dodgy self-justification, to get them to stop shouting and to get them off the street. Once that had been achieved, your job was over. You weren't some walking god, dispensing finely tuned natural justice. Your job was simply to bring back peace.
> Of course, if your few strict words didn't work and Mr Smith subsequently clambered over the disputed hedge and stabbed Mr Jones to death with a pair of gardening shears, then you had a different job, sorting out the notorious Hedge Argument Murder. But at least it was one you were trained to do. People expected all kinds of things from coppers, but there was one thing that sooner or later they all wanted: make this not be happening.
It saved me a lot more. I was parked on my street and a garbage truck sideswiped the front driver side corner. The truck driver said it wasn't his fault and the car was parked too far from the curb but the videos showed what really happened.
Can you elaborate why? As in, you got hit by an insured driver and so your insurance was able to bill them, whereas you didn't have collision coverage of your own?
> whereas you didn't have collision coverage of your own?
That's the majority of people who don't have a lien on their title. Liability insurance covers what you do, it doesn't cover what someone does to you. So having evidence of who caused the accident is important when everyone just has liability coverage.
In California, though, I really do recommend you have the "Uninsured and Underinsured Counterparty" option on your insurance. It's usually far cheaper than the alternatives and it just covers you with no effort on your part.
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 commercial purposes.
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).
The us doesn’t differentiate between creating media with a handheld camera or creating media by permanently mounting an unattended 360 surveillance cam in the middle of a busy street. It is all seen as protected speech. You don’t have to see or agree with the connection, that distinction is for the US courts, and they have interpreted it VERY broadly.
The other difference is that in the states, you largely don’t have a right to privacy in public or anywhere visible from public.
*asked to stop by the owner. you are within your rights to film or photograph other restaurant patrons even if those being filmed don’t like it. it is up to the owner of the property.
I don't turn it on simply because it drains an absurd amount of battery. I don't even understand why it does so. Is it old tech? My Blink cameras have 2 AA Lithium batteries that take motion-activated video all day on a busy side-walk for at least a couple of months. Yet one shopping trip drains like 2% battery in Sentry mode, wtf? That's a lot.
The blink camera has a PIR sensor that wakes it up so it starts recording video. It doesn’t record video the whole time and running the PIR is not energy intensive.
The Tesla has to run the cameras and run computer vision algorithms to determine if something is happening.
Sentry consumes around 200W on Intel Atom and camera based detection enabled. I'd say it's a total overkill. It even heats up the display pretty good when it's relatively chilly outside.
Even so, you shouldn't be waking all 24 cores, the GPU, etc. just to record video. Let the cameras DMA into their buffers and wake up a single core when the buffers hit a high water line. The core only needs to be awake long enough to queue up the writes to storage and then it can go back to sleep.
The incidental and systemic benefits of the recordings are exciting to people and celebrated with stories. The hazards of this constant "pollution" of data — how it is slowly changing our society, our economy, our humanity — is harder to quantify or build opposition to.
It's a bit like climate change. Slow, invisible poison.
Law simply needs to internalize encryption. Your cameras are your property and only with consent of owner are they available to authorities.
Public cameras should only be decrypted for evidence to support litigation of crimes, not for police to search for violay, because the current gigantic book of laws has an implicit assumption of a difficulty to enforce.
If suddenly police could use AI to fully prosecute all violations of law then we have all the laws necessary for worse than totalitarian existence.
Every mile you drove in a car will be 10 violations of law. Laugh loud? Violation disturbance of peace. Stand looking at your email too long? Loitering. Cross a park? Dozens of environmental violations.
Sure by some interpretations. Unfortunately the current SCOTUS doesn’t see it that way, they think webcams and electronic surveillance should be in the constitution or authorities can do anything. If there isn’t a law or constitutional text to the effect then it doesn’t exist to them. So we have to approach this from actually getting a law passed.
TFA is about camera footage obtained via warrant (thus following due process). Do you think evidence should not be obtainable via warrant?
> Unfortunately the current SCOTUS doesn’t see it that way, they think webcams and electronic surveillance should be in the constitution or authorities can do anything.
I've definitely heard organic stories from people who got favorable insurance/legal outcomes after a traffic accident because they were using a dashcam. Generally, if you're not doing anything wrong, it is a good idea to record whatever you're doing, because it's proof that you're not doing anything wrong (police departments use this to great effect; they love bodycams in 99% of cases, and simply turn them off when they're about to do something that they wouldn't want to have a bodycam for). The negatives are second-order effects that only come about when everyone is doing it.
I’m sure the vast majority of them are. Occam’s razor version: fear sells. If you can appeal to the clutching pearls part of the psyche then you can win over people to the idea of constant surveillance as necessary because of the current “wave of crime”. No matter how much crime is down or how many rights have to be taken away for “public safety”. Most reporters are just trying to put food on the table and outside of freedom of the press they couldn’t care less.
Seems like if it’s technically possible, it will happen, and we can’t stop technological progress. In fact, you and I are probably profiting from that progress. Hard to ask a guy to do something that goes against his paycheck. Even if we vote politically “correct,” whomever that may be, what are you and I voting for with our wallets?
> Seems like if it’s technically possible, it will happen, and we can’t stop technological progress.
‘The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.’
Speak for yourself. My ancestors pre-industrial revolution were half starved tenant farmers making a subsistence living on too small plots of farmland in colonized Ireland, subject to random slaughter when the English changed their plans.
Now, our extended family is prosperous in the US, Australia and Ireland. We’re taller, healthier and mostly in professional or skilled trade jobs.
The past is often seen through a sepia tinted idealized slant. The past was full of suffering and brutality. Even warfare was just as brutal - in ancient times, Caesar slaughtered 1-2% of the global population in Gaul. In the 17th century, marauding armies picked regions cleaned and left thousands to starve.
War, disease, famine were the norm for eras past. For those who lived during those times, I reckon their level of perceived suffering was no more than ours today. Humans are tragically skilled at adapting to new standards and shifting the threshold of struggle. People today get frustrated over a delayed plane departure likely just as much as people in the past were over a storm delaying their caravan by a few days.
As much of a proponent of technology as I am, I often reflect on whether we are truly bending the arc of suffering in a positive direction, or if it has remained far more constant than we’d like to believe.
When the English army or paramilitary militia came to burn the ancestors out of house and home to make room for settlers, I doubt their level of suffering was “adjusted”.
If they were lucky, they starved in the woods, hiding like animals.
Small plots are _still_ a problem for most people . 'We' sort off worked around the small plots problem by having the industrial revolution come along and then made jobs available for those who had only small plots.
Hypothetically, if every human had an equal part of earth, relatively fewer would have been in the pathetic state that you mentioned in the per-industrial era, and even less so in the post-industrialization era.
I don’t know. People have been living without reliable access to food and potable water, not even talking about sore deformations on their faces, for a thousand years. But somehow their lives were fulfilling?
Yeah, I don’t see many of the people criticizing the Industrial Revolution opting into pre-industrial existences. I’m pretty minimalist, and I’ve grown up around the Amish and even they prefer to avail themselves of technology where they can. I think there’s a fair amount of romanticizing about a pre-industrial lifestyle. This obviously isn’t to argue that we should all live maximally consumerist lifestyles; I don’t think that’s true either.
Do you really think life was fulfilling before the Industrial Revolution? Most men toiled, watched their children and wives die, before dying at a young age themselves. Where was the fulfillment, exactly? You’re only able to contemplate that life could possibly be fulfilling because of the Industrial Revolution.
There was no art, poetry, craftsmanship, skill, talent, fame, friendship (or relationships of any kind), flavor, joy, celebration, or creativity before the Industrial Revolution. Gotcha.
Errr - not true. Pre Industrial Revolution you were either a serf or a lord. There were a few in the renaissance times who started getting an education and planting the seed of the Industrial Revolution. By and large your existence pre Industrial Revolution would have been at the mercy of your local lord.
Yes, there are negatives to the Industrial Revolution we have to overcome. But it’s a net positive for everyone.
You’re welcome to fantasize being someone’s slave. I’m not.
If we had to vote everything with our wallets Tesla wouldn't exist in the first place. We would have $5,000 trucks made by Burmese war prisoners that can reach 200mph on full self drive, running on palm oil without a catalytic converter.
I do not want to stop tech progress, but I do want to stop social regress. Give it another 20-30 years and we will have same shit problems with freedoms as China, Russia, insert your fav scapegoat here.
There is no difference to what the USA and UK have done and continue to do to Assange and what China and Russia do to journalists they don’t like.
The idea that the west are the “good guys” hasn’t been true for a long time, if ever. China is just better at technology and large scale coordination than the US, so they are way better at building and deploying and operating large scale surveillance systems. The US will catch up in a few decades.
I believe this is inevitable. There is no meaningful opposition to pervasive surveillance in US government and there is no useful political action that can be undertaken by the public to turn this tide.
Assange was killed with polonium or thrown out of a window? I think you have made your moral condemnation variable of Boolean type, rather than the more realistic float.
I think also it is worth distinguishing between corporate surveillance, where there are very few limits on what they can do with the data, vs government surveillance where we can exert some power over the government by electing people to pass laws that reflect our desire for privacy.
As well, I am surprised HN has not internalized Brin's essay "The Transparent Society." Privacy is going to be deeply reduced by the ability of all
curious 13 year olds to launch insect sized drones. The question is how to handle - let only the overseers have the data or insist on public right to access data. Or something else; like laws forcing personal ownership of your data (although how things like being in the background of your neighbors cameras as you walk down the street should be handled there I am not sure.).
I would also point out that freedom and privacy aren't identical - one may have freedom via privacy or via less intrusive laws. (Ed: deleted incomplete thought).
Early 2000s there was an unveiling of ARGUS-IS and if we have that and commercial companies know when daughters are pregnant before they tell their parents then stuff like the TV series Person of Interest seems all too plausible at least as far as mass surveillance AI exists. I doubt there is a Batman squad doing good on that level of technology out there hidden from society but there may be a military and CIA like op behind it.
There was tech to watch for what things you pick up and put back or dwell on in stores with cameras and heat maps and loyalty card tracking before 2005. it's not far off to get a person some computer thinks should be investigated based on patterns and data out there publicly.
This is a hardone for me. In the family we have - 2016 Tacoma, 2015 Rav4, 2016 Mini, 2019 Sprinter RV. None have driver assist, backup cameras only, etc. I've been thinking about dashcams, but only ones where I know what will be published where (IE, not the cloud), so I have a personal record for instance if the kid has an issue in the Mini.
No plans to upgrade or get new vehicles unless a dire need. For instance if Sprinter or Tacoma die, drive the not-dead one. (Sprinter is technially an RV, but used for business).
Is there any tangible reason that would actually weight enough to justify not actively wanting to provide basically free resources in help of uncovering (and in effect: preventing) a violent crime?
Because, if not, this is about as "creepy" as those nerdy guys sitting in their bedrooms and basements, tinkering with their silly computers all day, meaning: Non-conformist and something you might just not be ready to think about straight.
yes there is a valid reason to be opposed to this. Yes everyone one wants to stop violent crimes and murders and that is not a bad thing. But as history has shown time and time again if the people in power decide to become a tyrant and start to abuse the technology then we have a problem. Imagine if this was around 60 years ago. You go into a bar. Some cars have driven past the bar right as you entered a few weeks past. Now police realize this is actually a secret gay bar. They take all cars whose gps shows they passed the bar and take their footage. You are seen on camera entering a gay bar and now you are on a list and they start to harass you and question you. Seems like an unlikely situation that is far fetched but I like to remind people it was only in 1965 that the last person was arrested in Canada for homosexuality. He was even declared a dangerous sex offender. So no we don't want cameras recording every second of our lives. Things that may be legal today might not be tomorrow so we should have privacy from constant surveillance.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/everett-klippert-lgbt-a...
What you are good at picking up is incidents. That is how we work. How many lives would be saved by using Tesla for surveillance is a lot less tangible, and thus, meaningless in direct comparison. Because there is no comparison, if we don't feel it compares.
Whenever I see people seriously argue against statistics by leaning on stories, it tends to be complicated and sinister. If you are that afraid of your government, if you deem your government to be that irresponsible and also out of your control, that on average you would rather not default support it when fighting crime, then I think you are you confused about what battle you should actually be fighting.
It is not necessarily my government I am fighting for. Coming from the west I feel we sometimes lead the way for human rights and our standards should really be highly debated and analyzed to make sure they are what a society truly believes. If we start to say that mass surveillance is good and sure maybe we have checks and balances but another nation might not stop where we do. So to be opposed to complete surveillance is probably smart for now until we can decide what is the best way to address this. If you think Tesla cameras are so good you should also consider how good it would be if we all had cameras installed in every room in our house and the government could listen in every conversation and decide if we are good or bad or talk about crimes.
Our freedom comes from sources other than technological privacy. It comes from our ability to be in charge of the law and to make the normal fun we want to be legal, legal.
I would be mich more concerned with regulatory capture by the spying corporations or laws passed by a minority seeking to impose a religious based set of laws than car cameras.
As you point out, you can be arrested for being gay without all those cameras, but the possibility of making laws to protect the right to be gay is also doable.
And if you don't think any sort of consumer right to own your data law will be lobbied against by Google and Meta lobbiests, well I think you are wrong.
With proper checks and balances in a civilian government, sure. The problem is when private companies help police departments do a runaround constitutional protections. Users have no sovereignty over their data (so to speak).
What does the 4th Amendment have to say about this? The guiding philosophy at the time 4A was framed is "the public is entitled to every man's evidence".
They're towing cars. You think they bring them back 30 minutes later and leave a friendly note? Unreasonable search and seizure. I'd say the seizure of property worth tens of thousands of dollars as evidence for a crime the owner was not involved in is pretty unreasonable.
They're towing cars pursuant to warrants issued when the owners of those cars can't be identified and the cars contain evidence of homicides. "Reasonable" search and seizure is almost literally "whatever a judge decides".
> The police usually asks for the owner’s permission to access their Tesla’s Sentry Mode backup USB drive which is located in the glove box, and download the desired content. However, if the owners can’t be located, officers obtain search warrants and tow the EVs into evidence.
Why don't the cops get a search warrant for that USB drive and take that rather than confiscating the entire vehicle of innocent people?
Without first hand knowledge, I'll take a guess: if the owner of the vehicle isn't available or cooperating, then getting access to the USB drive requires opening up the vehicle without a key, which could require some time or specialized tools, or cooperation from the manufacturer.
But in general, this isn't really much new. If you have home cameras, and police can obtain a search warrant, then you can be compelled to provide the video, or they can seize any device (such as entire computer, your server closet, etc) that could reasonably contain the video.
> police can obtain a search warrant, then you can be compelled to provide the video, or they can seize any device (such as entire computer, your server closet, etc) that could reasonably contain the video.
Yes but the police can't start occupying my house or deny me access to it because I wasn't home to let them in.
> Yes but the police can't start occupying my house or deny me access to it because I wasn't home to let them in
With a search warrant, they can. You can be kept out of your home until they complete the search and seizing of the items named in the warrant. Depending on what is being searched for (excavating your basement looking for bodies?) that could take quite some time.
So the Tesla situation getting press isn't because the precedent is new, it's because most Americans (many in this thread included) don't understand what the law has already been since long before Teslas ever existed, and are surprised at what they find.
A judge made a decision that past jurisprudence applies to towing cars that happen to have cameras nearby, nobody was doing it until that first warrant got signed.
The difference is that when the police are done, my house is still in the same spot. In this case, my car is gone. The police aren't going to put it back.
> opening up the vehicle without a key, which could require some time or specialized tools, or cooperation from the manufacturer
That would require a search warrant, something the comment you're replying to already mentioned. Search warrants typically specify the means of access.
I would have thought this was the path of least resistance (as well as doing less harm to the car owner) since they're getting a search warrant anyway.
The path of least resistance is skipping the search warrant and asking the owner politely, which the article indicates is what is happening.
But if that doesn't work, then preserving evidence is considered to be very important. For example, it would be a problem if the car owner deleted the video.
While I can see why the police would find it a problem, I don't like the idea that that means they get to potentially have 24/7 access to my property just so they can check.
They have Tesla (the company) unlock the car, then remove the drive. They already have the search warrant, which could compel Tesla to assist. They have a cop babysit the car until the seizure is completed, like they have to do anyway.
Maybe so, but this isn't the way to fix it. Two wrongs don't make a right. The natural conclusion of your line of thought is that the police should be able to enforce against things they personally think are "bad", rather than just enforcing the law. Not the world I want to live in, thanks.
> The natural conclusion of your line of thought is that the police should be able to enforce against things they personally think are "bad", rather than just enforcing the law.
Got some bad news for you about the average cop's knowledge of an understanding of the laws they enforce.
Well, you can do the illegal thing either way. Not getting caught is a different story.
In general, though, I'd rather have privacy even though I'm not doing anything illegal and, though it pains me to say it, I'd rather they don't tow Teslas just for being nearby.
Honestly there are a lot of laws that don't really make sense given modern technology. It's one thing to say people have no expectation of privacy when people only have cameras, or even have to purposefully videotape you. It's another to say you will 100% be recorded in HD at all times in public and that data will be sold to any random third party to do whatever with and store forever
An outdated argument that hasn't kept up with modern technology. Previously surveillance was expensive and hard, now it's cheap and easy.
This argument was invented in modern times to justify stripping the anonymity of the crowd from the general populace and is destroying the freedom from constant surveillance we once took for granted.
How does that work? People take photos and videos whenever they go right? In practice people will get caught in others’ footage all the time. So how can you ban public recording without also banning all photography?
Do people really get permission though? Like what if you’re in some crowded area - for example taking photos of some landmark? You’re not going to be able to conceivably chase down 10+ people and get their permissions. I imagine most people just record whatever they do and upload it to their social media.
So basically in France, but i think this is from EU directives (directives are not laws, just "please we want to have at least this implemented in your country" but any country can ignore them if they want):
- you can't record public places without being present (police is excluded, but private shop owners not, hence you can't have camera filing anything other than the inside of your shop)
- You can't record children in any way without their explicit consent and, if they're younger than YY (i don't remember), their parent consent, if they can be identified. Anyway, you can't publish any record where a child can be recognized without explicit consent (you have to blur them even if you post it on a private group in social media ideally) (not 100% sure about that, i think you have at least 3 laws that intersect here)
- You can record adults in public places. You cannot post your recording without explicit consent (blur them when in doubt).
> I imagine most people just record whatever they do and upload it to their social media.
Perhaps, but at least in countries that have reasonable laws about this, anyone who finds themselves in pictures/video they didn't consent to has some method of recourse.
Basically: “What’s so innocent about having your eyes open?”
If you are somewhere where you might expect that people could see you, don’t pretend that they are supposed to not see you, or to forget what they saw. Thinking ypeopleshould have that kind of control over other people’s memories, even if stored in their stuff, seems dystopian.
There is a sharp line. If I see something, what I see isn't recorded verbatim on some shareable media somewhere, nor is that data stored in a database.
> widespread neuralink
At this time, I don't see any reason to think this is a thing that neuralink or similar will be able to accomplish anytime soon. Massive video surveillance, on the other hand, is a problem that actually exists right now.
Will they though? Crime enforcement in the bay area is a joke - from alameda county into SF. I'm so happy to have moved out and into a state with actual community engagement and accountability.
The stories I hear from family living in the area... basically unless you're actively being assaulted, cops just don't show up. Unheard of in "normal" parts of the country.
My brother once had his vehicle stolen, he traced it, found it, and because the police wasn't motivated to show up, he acted over the phone as if he were about to get into a life/death confrontation with the thief. Then they sent someone.
Connecticut - I've never felt safer walking around at 3 am and I've made more friends in the last 2 months (without trying) than I probably have in the last 6 years of living in the bay area.
Good to hear! Are the comparable areas of similar population density? I'm wondering what incremental steps (non-partisan hopefully) can be brought to the Bay Area to slowly move it towards a similar environment.
I lived in the Bay Area for about 30 years, so here's my (probably biased) opinion. The biggest issue is the lack of community, and in my experience, this is due to the high turnover of residents. From my high school graduating class of 400, fewer than 100 are still in the community; everyone else has moved to Florida, Phoenix, Austin, etc. You can't encourage long-term planning (good public education policies, systematic reductions in the drivers of crime, etc.) if the community changes every two decades. My personal opinion is that the Bay Area won't improve because everyone is out to get 'theirs' and then leave. While I do miss the weather, the lack of humidity, and, honestly, a more educated population, I believe raising children in a strong community is more important. So, I'm more than happy with the trade-offs for a better overall quality of life.
We've seen this type of thing happen with Ring, where the police want video from people's private cameras. Do police have the legal right to access/take people's private property like this? I thought the 4th amendment of the constitution protected against unreasonable searches and seizures?
>Do police have the legal right to access/take people's private property like this? I thought the 4th amendment of the constitution protected against unreasonable searches and seizures?
Search warrants specifically exist to give police the "legal right to access/take people's private property", and are widely accepted to be constitutional.
This might be setting a new precedent though. I'm making assumptions here, but I'd have thought that search warrants were historically used at locations where the suspect lived / worked / frequented. Even at premises not owned by the suspect, the police turning up and requiring all the security footage doesn't deprive the premise owner of anything. Towing away an innocent law-abiding citizen's car for a matter entirely unrelated to them seems like it's massively overstepping the line set by any previous precedent.
I can't think of anything else that could be seized by the police from an entirely innocent non-suspect which would cause a similar level of disruption in their life. What happens when the car owner needs to head to work in the morning and find their car has been taken. I doubt a call to the police is going to quickly reveal that it was the police themselves who took it. Even if it does, if they're holding it for evidence, they might not get it back very quickly. What if the lack of car leads to negative consequences for the owner - maybe they miss an important work meeting, flight, date, whatever - are the police going to compensate them for that? What if the owner is out of the country for a month and they only need a week to act on the court order and get all the video - does the owner then have to pay impound fees? Is it discriminatory that the police assume all Tesla's can be seized this way even if they don't happen to be recording, but they wouldn't consider doing to same to any other make of car even though any car might have a dash-cam that records when locked.
>This might be setting a new precedent though. I'm making assumptions here, but I'd have thought that search warrants were historically used at locations where the suspect lived / worked / frequented.
Search warrants exist to give police access to evidence when there's probable cause. Often times this is "at locations where the suspect lived / worked / frequented", but there's nothing in the jurisprudence that limits it to those areas. The standard is "probable cause" in any case.
>Even at premises not owned by the suspect, the police turning up and requiring all the security footage doesn't deprive the premise owner of anything. Towing away an innocent law-abiding citizen's car for a matter entirely unrelated to them seems like it's massively overstepping the line set by any previous precedent.
They can and do break into premises, even if they're "an innocent law-abiding citizen", if the owner isn't there to allow them access onto the premises. The article specifically mentions that they only tow the car if they can't contact the owner, which seems consistent with that.
That's fair enough to some extent. Not sure about the US, but in the UK they are also responsible for re-securing the access point when they leave, and I believe you can claim compensation for the repair work. Presumably also, if there were any thefts while the property was in this vulnerable state, the insurance company would sue the police to try to reclaim the money paid out to cover the loss.
Taking someone's primary mode of transport, perhaps their only viable option, is a whole order of magnitude worse than breaking into a property to carry out a search warrant. For someone who's not even a suspect, or in any way connected, it's a massive violation of their rights.
> only tow the car if they can't contact the owner, which seems consistent with that
To be honest, it seems unlikely they'd easily be able to contact the owner, unless it happens to be parked outside their own residence. And the flip side of them not being able to contact the owner to ask permission is that the owner has absolutely no idea where their car is, and they only find out it's missing when they need it most. And probably not in an area they'd like to hang around too long in, if there's just been a homicide near there.
You pretend this is some obvious fact, but obtaining a search warrant against a person or property that were uninvolved in the crime but may have only been 'witness' to it is not obvious or clear to me.
The standard for getting a search warrant is probable cause, and that includes just probable cause to believe that there is evidence of a crime at the place to be searched.
Taking the witness analogy, even an actual person who's a mere witness can be compelled to testify with a subpoena.
A lot of places, talking to police is a very bad idea both because of the police and the other people in the neighborhood. You could very easily get shot for doing so.
If it’s my outdoor cameras and it pertains to a crime that happened just outside my home, they can have the footage. A very practical contribution I can make to my neighborhoods safety
So if the camera is in your car you are ok with them towing it away to pull the footage if they can't get in touch with you right away leaving you without a car?
What if while looking at your footage for a crime outside your home (not related to you or your property) they see you doing something that could constitute a charge should they be able to share you for it as well?
If someone saw you out in front of your house on your phone during the time of the crime should the authorities be able to seize your phone under the assumption that you were likely recording the incident?
I think these hypotheticals are starting to blur different concepts and questions, namely the distinction between:
1. Generic request
2. Subpeona
3. Warrant (reasonable)
4. Warrant (stupid/crazy/evil)
____
I suspect OP is mainly thinking of (1) and (2), where they get a phone call or letter and they say: "Sure! Here's a link to the video file."
I would also guess OP might be okay with (3) where an officer came to their door and said "I need watch you copy time-range X-Y of your front door footage onto this USB stick I brought", or even "I need to take your entire SD card for a few months" if the footage seems very important.
In contrast, I don't think OP is supporting the idea that police can get a warrant to rip the camera out of the wall and break down their door and seize all their electronics.
In general, if there's a record of something which was captured in the course of ordinary business which is relevant as evidence in a court matter (such as the recording of your Ring camera), and parties to proceedings have good reason to believe you have this record, then they can generally get a subpoena issued to compel you to produce it for the court. This applies to both the prosecution and the defense (both criminal and civil).
The protection against "unreasonable" search and seizure comes in the form of the fact the requesting party has to convince the court (usually the registry) that there is reasonable grounds before they will issue a subpoena.
As an investigative matter (prior to any charges, court listings, and subpoenas), it is possible to get a search warrant including for evidence held by 3rd parties who aren't suspected of anything. Again, police don't have carte blanche. They need to convince a judicial officer of some sort that there is reasonable grounds before a warrant will be issued.
There are ways to challenge a warrant/subpoena. Sometimes a successful challenge only serves to make the evidence inadmissible but doesn't prevent the search in the first place (aka "you can beat the ticket but you can't beat the ride).
All that said, some judges / courts tend to practically be a rubber stamp for whatever warrant / subpoena the police want. Others actually do their job. It ain't perfect, but if you can think of a better system, I'd love to hear it.
Third-party doctrine is a legal way around the 4A: "The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. A lack of privacy protection allows the United States government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant."[1]
This makes me _not_ want to get a Tesla, just to avoid the inconvenience of getting my car towed because of what it _might_ have inside of it. And the opposite, doing what Ring is doing and simply streaming it to the police directly, might be easier but I still believe a major privacy concern.
>This makes me _not_ want to get a Tesla, just to avoid the inconvenience of getting my car towed because of what it _might_ have inside of it.
From the article:
>Therriault said he and other officers now frequently seek video from bystander Teslas, and usually get the owners’ consent to download it without having to serve a warrant. Still, he said, tows are sometimes necessary, if police can’t locate a Tesla owner and need the video “to pursue all leads.”
Very much this. Towing by the police should only be something done when the car is in violation of something. I did not see anything about the expense of retrieving the car. You took the person's car so there is definite expense of getting there. Did you force the person to miss a flight, a meeting, a date? WTF do these people think they are so above and beyond rational thought is ridiculous.
>Very much this. Towing by the police should only be something done when the car is in violation of something.
If the police has a search warrant for your home and you're not there, they can break in, even if you're not "in violation of something". I don't see how this is any different.
I don't have to make arrangements to go get my home when it is searched. Also, if you're searching my house, more than likely, I'm directly involved in something. They don't break into my house to get my Ring footage, which is much more equivalent in your attempt equating these disparate concepts. You've now made an innocent civilian incur ridiculous fees to get their car out of impound when there was no reason to impound it to begin with.
You could just as easily boot the car and wait for the owner to return. It's not like this was a long term parking spot. There are just so many options other than tow this innocent car.
No, I'm suggesting that there are other ways to get to the footage than just impounding an innocent person's car. Leaving someone stranded when they've done nothing wrong is absolutely a dick move. It's not like they can leave a note in the space where you left the car. There's also no signage with a phone number of a towing company. You don't find out your car wasn't stolen until you call to report your car stolen.
Again, they could quite easily boot your car and have a patrol unit wait for you to return. Or not boot the car, but still have a patrol unit wait. They have the license plate so they can look up the owner. They could try to contact that owner. There are so many other things to do than tow someone's car and leaving them stranded. The fact we are so willingly okay with the cops stealing your car is very strange to me.
> I don't have to make arrangements to go get my home when it is searched
Yeah but you no longer have a front door or window when you get there (the person spoke of them breaking in if you're not home), so you have to make other types of arrangements
>I don't have to make arrangements to go get my home when it is searched
They could however, break your door (if you're not there to let them in), and AFAIK they're not responsible for getting it fixed.
>Also, if you're searching my house, more than likely, I'm directly involved in something.
That's irrelevant. The standard for a search warrant is "probable cause" regardless.
>They don't break into my house to get my Ring footage, which is much more equivalent in your attempt equating these disparate concepts.
...because the ring footage isn't in your house, it's in the cloud. Moreover, if you have an on-premise system and you're on vacation or something, it's plausible that they get a search warrant and break in, especially if they think time is of the essence (eg. your system has limited retention and the footage is going to be wiped).
>You could just as easily boot the car and wait for the owner to return.
If you read the article the police claims that it's only used if they can't locate the owner. It's unclear what that exactly means, but it's not like they're towing every tesla near the crime scene.
"If you read the article" is such a lame comment. In other comments in this thread, I've literally quoted the article. How in the world could I have pulled a quote without reading the article.
It's clear you and I have polar opposite sentiments regarding this. So I'll leave it here as you are quite tiresome
>"If you read the article" is such a lame comment. In other comments in this thread, I've literally quoted the article. How in the world could I have pulled a quote without reading the article.
Unlike some commenters I don't check a commenter's entire comment history before making comments. In fact, I don't even keep good track of what everyone said in a particular thread, so forgive me if I didn't do enough due diligence before making a vague implication that you didn't read the article. That said, you need to chill out. If you can't handle a vague implication that you didn't read the article, maybe online forum commenting isn't for you.
Search warrants have existed forever, and allowed police to compel production of certain evidence. This includes breaking into residences or offices. I don't see how towing a car is any different. Unless you think search warrants themselves are "completely unacceptable", I don't see how towing teslas should be singled out.
Towing cars at all without a very crucial reason should be illegal in general.
Taking someone’s transportation that they assume they have access to, without their knowledge, and without them being able to find out until the very second they need that transportation is dangerous. Emergencies happen.
If you’re taking someone’s car you better have a damn good reason. And “you accidentally parked in the wrong parking spot doesn’t clear that hurdle. That’s what tickets are for. “Really wanting to see the recordings from your car camera” doesn’t clear that hurdle either.
Regarding #2 is that not an OPTION that may or may not get turned on?
Regarding #1 you are correct that DRIVING is a privilege however property ownership is a RIGHT and I'm assuming we aren't talking about a vehicle in motion when we are talking about the police unable to contact an owner.
Imagine trying to go to work and you don’t have your car. Are you going to say “well I guess driving is a privilege and not a right so its fine that the police repossess my vehicle at random times” or are you going to be livid like a normal person?
I think the difference is historically the average person wasn't doing a lot of surveillance where as an office place did.
Many people do not want their cameras in the doors, property, cars, etc being used by the police for cases that do not directly impact them.... they do not want to be involved, same as many "witnesses" will simply say they didn't see or know anything and be uncooperative.
As cameras start becoming more and more built into every day items many people suddenly can find themselves thrust into situations they want nothing to do with, so sure search warrants have existed forever but the chance of it impacting the average non-involved party were pretty slim, that chance is growing and people dislike it.
There is a huge gap between a search warrant (in which you are generally the suspect of the investigation) and "this guy's car might have evidence, let's tow it". The proper analogue to a search warrant here is the police getting a warrant to get the data off Tesla's servers, not towing the car away.
>There is a huge gap between a search warrant (in which you are generally the suspect of the investigation) and "this guy's car might have evidence, let's tow it".
The cops had a warrant. Moreover, search warrants are granted if there's probable cause. Whether someone is a suspect is irrelevant.
>The proper analogue to a search warrant here is the police getting a warrant to get the data off Tesla's servers, not towing the car away.
Is it even on tesla's servers? According to the article it's stored on a USB drive in the car.
Before modern FISA courts, we generally had faith that a search warrant was warranted, based upon other investigation. From what the article said, this sounds more like a "fishing expedition".
They did investigate. A guy was stabbed nearby, and the car was suspected to be recording. On a more practical level, the car was recording a public area (ie. the road) anyways, so it's not like that much privacy was lost by granting access to the video.
So they say in the interview. Irregardless, if I own a car and it is legal for the police to take it so they can hold onto it until they have a warrant of I give in? No thanks.
My car isn’t a Tesla, and the dashcam has a “parking mode” that records everything while parked. So, do that, don’t get a Tesla, and never get towed to access the camera.
If the police sees the dashcam and suspects that there's footage on there, they can apply for a search warrant and seize that footage as well. It's unclear why they needed to tow the tesla in the first place. The article says that the footage is on a USB drive, so presumably they could just pull it out and make a copy. If they're towing it because they couldn't locate the owner and want to open the car non-destructively, then your suggestion of not driving a dashcam and using a tesla probably isn't going to save you either.
To me, it's a bug not a feature that precedent can just expand infinitely as new capabilities in the world grow.
There's a lot of people saying that search warrants have always allowed intrusion & seizure. But the fact that all these devices (cars, cameras, phones) are now potentially interesting data-rich objects to be seized, mined for ever larger total information awareness by the state seems like a massive defect & flaw of the system to me.
I dont want old laws + new technology to automatically result in the state's eye of sauron (palantir) getting to better observe us.
The state’s first goal is to protect the state’s continued existence. Anything that can be seen as interfering with that can be labeled an enemy and relegated to subhuman/other/destroy on contact status. From there, state violence, and from there, nazis.
By far the most critical aspects of the state maintaining itself is to have the faith of the people, as a just and right entity that doesn't deserve to be smashed, whose blood is good for more than renewinf the tree of liberty
This ever expanding invasiveness delegitimizes the state. Physical security is a positive, only when the power itself is used respectably & virtuously. Pursuing enemies at all cost makes you a bad state, that can't be believed in. Some balance is required. Some limit to intrusion is necessary, and to me, this violates the sovereign rights of the citizens, to have so much of our lives repurposeable & cooptable by the state with ever increasing scope and haste.
This seems pretty messed up on a couple levels. Yet another way we're all being surveiled with the addition of getting your property randomly confiscated.
I agree that it shouldn't happen, and it feels like it should be unconstitutional. I'm wondering if it actually is unconstitutional, though. If they got a warrant to seize the vehicle, for example, it seems like it's probably constitutional. I think?
Depends on how truthful they were when filling out the warrant application. Cops often lie and exaggerate on warrant applications and hope for a sympathetic judge to not ask too many questions.
In that example it's unclear why a warrant would even be needed, it was parked in a hotel parking lot and it appears that they made no effect to contact the owner before requesting the warrant. It'd be really interesting to see what their justification was for asking to seize someone's car instead of just walking inside and asking the desk clerk to call them so they could ask for the footage.
There's probably a takings clause argument that the police should be required to reimburse the owner for reasonable expenses from the temporary loss of use of their vehicle.
Edit: cursory Googling turned up an old law journal article about this exact subject that lays out the arguments for and against: https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... (PDF) I don't know how the law has evolved since it was written.
Unconstitutional warrants are issued all the time. The only way to contest them is to fight the very legal system that granted them in the first place. Unless you're 1) rich or 2) find a very sympathetic lawyer good luck.
I was once pitched a business where external-facing cameras would be provided to car owners, distributed through auto insurance companies. The business intended to make money from selling the video data to law enforcement. I'm skipping a lot of details, but one of the main objections is that the police wouldn't pay for the data, they would just take it.
Hopefully Tesla implements encryption for the drive used, just to make it harder for the police department. This is stupid and it punishes the owner for happening to accidentally park their vehicle near a suspected crime.
Free feature idea:
- Tesla needs a public facing website that allows anyone to request a video for a cost — any location at any point in time
- vehicle owners can review video footage and approve request
- vehicle owner gets a cut, Tesla gets a cut, authority or person in fender bender or whatever gets video
It's happening. Cameras everywhere all the time. No more anonymity in public soon. Hopefully this will improve behavior generally, though at possibly great cost.
People will move out of the cities onto land where they can remove/shoot down cameras. The cities and policing are too aggressive with their big brother tactics, thinking FUD about crime is a good enough reason to take away privacy from people. It is actually a minority opinion that the country wants this but no one votes in local elections anymore so the minority wins.
> People will move out of the cities onto land where they can remove/shoot down cameras.
No, this doesn't help in the slightest unless you're moving to an isolated compound with no contact with the outside world. As soon as you get in your car to drive to the grocery store, you'll be subject to all the same surveillance. And if you're going to try to organize in your community to tear down and outlaw all the cameras between your house and the grocery store, you'll have an easier time of organizing in denser areas (not necessarily cities, but at least small towns).
A lot of small towns never installed the surveillance beyond a few old ladies. There are plenty of small towns with tiny populations that would love for people to move in and have no intention of ruining their neighbors lives.
Of course the idea isn’t perfect but the visual imagery people imagine suggests otherwise. People are enjoying their youth dumping data to be resold not because they can’t do anything about it but because there has been no consequences yet. That changes when your data is a direct pipe to law enforcement.
The entire thing is a illogical reaction, surveillance and moving away.
Drones, country where owning a gun is right. I see no post apocalyptic societal leap needed to get to something like this happening.
People interested in fiction as the only match for predictions, are significantly overrepresented on HN. Please reference at me that “life will find a way”.
Where you're certainly correct that "people" will move out to the country because of this, it's your insinuation that their number will be noteworthy that I find suspect.
And, as it turns out, high prevalence of gun ownership and radically inappropriate use of guns is not unique to either the city nor the country.
Yes my prediction remains to be seen if there is a dramatic effect. People can still leave nyc, the city can still grow in population and get terrible for surveillance free life. And people can still leave to avoid that. It doesn’t have to be a substantial event.
It’s like ad blockers, a lot of people don’t use them doesn’t mean there aren’t a significant portion of the population that doesn’t like ads.
And who cares if my circumstances are unique to the US or not. The article is about the US. So in the realm of reaction to increased surveillance, I’m referring to the US. But if we want to be pendantic, Mad Max doesn’t even occur in the US, so it’s not even a relevant comparison I would be making if I were making that comparison.
Mad Max explores the possible consequences of your "I can shoot anything my bullets feel like hitting" brand of libertarianism. You can't invalidate an analogy by taking it quite so literally.
Is my analogy a stretch? Yes, if you keep your bullets within your property line. But fantasizing about moving to the country where you can shoot whatever thing you don't like at this moment is an entire trope that is broadly painted with the Mad Max brush
But your property line is irrelevant. You can't shoot down a high elevation surveillance drone. Drones with moderate elevation, at the property line, can take very high resolution pictures from a wealth of vantage points. Keep the bullets within your property line, and you've lost.
It’s not a fantasy, because a lot of people who move to the city, are from the country. People don’t care about every inch of life being surveillance free. They care about their square being a bastion for themselves.
Have you ever been in a heavy gun owning rural area? The first tell is just about every traffic sign on the major roads is swiss cheesed. People aren’t concerned about the letter of the law.
It was on my property. Spying isn’t legal because you can fly a drone over my fence. My places have a right to defend yourself. How do I know it’s not an attack?
I'm not sure how you got the impression that the discussion was about cameras/drones on your property. The OP talked about "Cameras everywhere all the time. No more anonymity in public soon". It's clear that we're talking about other people's cameras in public spaces, not voyeurs trying to look in your bedroom.
Who cares prove that it wasn’t on the ground when I destroyed it. My story will be: I saw it fall to the ground. When I walked up it looked like a bunch of spinning blades. I thought someone was attacking me so I destroyed the device.
The police department won’t have sophisticated government drones for at least another 20 years, that is if expensive drones prove to be worth the effort and cost to allow civilian level law enforcement to have one.
The point of this conversation isn’t to trump how you can get around my lie. The point is that I can lie to get out of any spurious law enforcement pursuits, and that is freedom. A drone isn’t impossible to take down covertly. I don’t have to answer every technical use case to make a point.
If a member of a small community goes against the federal government that believes government overreach is happening, they can get the community to protect them.
> The point is that I can lie to get out of any spurious law enforcement pursuits, and that is freedom.
You know that police are known for their brutality in both rural and urban environs, right? My dad lied to the cops when he lived out in the boonies and he got the shit kicked out of him and was thrown in jail on bullshit charges. He was released the next day, but his rib wouldn't heal for weeks.
And that applies everywhere in every case? All of this anecdotal evidence has nothing to do with people’s romanticization of the idea that you can isolate yourself pretty well in the remote US.
And you just escalated a drone flying above your house into a full out gun fight with swat teams and what not. It's not like you're going to win that fight.
It’s different depending on the municipality. Your initial statement is not exclusively true of every inch of land in the US. Furthermore any illegality is limited to what any small police department can actually do about it.
I'm pretty sure it's the FAA that dictates that one. It's federally illegal.
And how motivated are they? Well I'm assuming someone will complain that you shot down their drone. And most police are very interested in firearm crimes.
The FAA is also very interested in people who shoot at aircraft of any kind.
It hasn’t been proven that drones aren’t fair game. So go ahead and down vote me for noticing this, but just because the FAA says the airspace is for any aircraft doesn’t mean I can’t shoot down your drone on my property in rural Nebraska and get away with it.
It will be on the feds to pursue a low level crime not worth their time. Until it’s proven you can’t shoot down a spy drone, then you can shoot down a spy drone. How do I know it’s not some Chinese spy drone? I’m just doing my part to protect my country.
The FAA will -absolutely- charge you with a federal crime if the attack on aircraft infrastructure is reported to them.
Now, presumably, someone flying a drone that would actually report such a thing would also be following the relevant FAA regulations regarding being a licensed pilot and operating within the legal framework of drone operations, and they would likely also have video evidence making it easy to prosecute the felon in question.
The FAA takes drone operations with equal seriousness as private aircraft operations, and drones and pilots must be licensed by the FAA unless they weigh under 250 grams.
It was the Wild West. It’s not anymore. FAA inspectors are notoriously bored and will pursue any case they think they can win, especially when it comes to actions against aviation infrastructure.
If you fly a drone illegally you can face federal fines up to $75000. But shooting one down is an actual federal crime punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment and very punitive fines.
Now under 250 grams (and unregistered)? Idk if the FAA would get involved. But the drone owner might take you to small claims court, and assuming they were operating within the law you would very likely lose.
But if it’s got an N-Number and you shoot it down, I would prepare to get my door knocked down. Its like the ATF, It’s not so much a matter of how much they care, it’s more a matter of asserting their jurisdiction and control. It’s an easy win against someone who used a firearm to destroy a federally registered aircraft.
But, IANAL, if you decide to try it out let me know how that goes for you.
>It’s different depending on the municipality. Your initial statement is not exclusively true of every inch of land in the US.
Please enlighten me where in the US you could legally shoot down someone else's drones.
>Furthermore any illegality is limited to what any small police department can actually do about it.
If you're interested in protecting your privacy, why would it ever be a good idea to commit a bunch of felonies, by illegally discharging firearms to take down cameras? Even if you somehow didn't get caught, you're painting a big target on your back by committing all those crimes and putting everyone in the area on edge.
18 U.S. Code § 32 makes it specifically illegal to damage or interfere with the operation of aircraft.
The FAA takes this quite seriously, as not taking it seriously compromises their position of being able to regulate drones per se. Lax enforcement of protection of drones as aircraft is a potential legal argument that efforts to regulate drone activity outside of the scope of interference with manned aircraft are similarly deprecated in importance and legitimacy.
So you agree, I can shoot down a drone over my property and make an argument to get away with it and there isn’t enough legal reason or capital to pursue. There may come a day where I would get in trouble but I think right now spies are smart enough not to mass surveil with drones.
If this happens enough/gets enough coverage you’ll have Tesla owners themselves asking to have their rights violated automatically without the need for towing!
Here in California (and generally in the US, as well as other places where the cost of enforcing laws seems to be growing too costly/unpalatable), we seem increasingly interested in documenting and retroactively following up the aftermath of crimes. Rather than preventing them when / before they're happening. I'm surprised the police even care to watch video afterwards.
(aside from the serious crime stuff like in the article)
I wonder if you're fairly compensated by the police department for your time without your vehicle, just because you told the police you don't want to give them access to your Tesla.
Plus the time to go down to the station to pick your car up, because you know they're not going to courier it back to you.
Plus any accidental damage done to the vehicle because an officer/towing company/whoever damages your vehicle during the tow/seizure of your property.
I doubt it.
Tesla should respond by making it harder/impossible for law enforcement to retrieve the data off the drive - maybe encryption at rest only unlockable with your tesla keyfob or phone connection, etc. etc.
What would you deem fair compensation? If I come home to find my car was stolen by the police, and I had plans, the compensation for that isn’t so straight forward.
What if someone misses work and is fired? They had to leave for a trip and missed their flight? Missed a wedding? We’re a surgeon and the delay getting to the hospital led to a death? Had to pick up kids, and had no way to get them? Medication they need was in the car and without it they get extremely ill or die?
If the owner actually committed the crime, I wouldn’t have much sympathy. However, when the driver’s only crime is owning a car with camera and parking it somewhere, that’s not good.
Considering that people whose doors are broken down during a no-knock search that turns out to be the wrong address have to fix the damage out of their own pocket, I doubt it.
> I wonder if you're fairly compensated by the police department for your time without your vehicle, just because you told the police you don't want to give them access to your Tesla.
Hah. No. Police have kicked in the wrong door (wrong house, number didn't match the warrant, wasn't the correct house), set off flash bangs, shot dogs, destroyed property...
... and when the owner (who was uninvolved in whatever the warrant was about, and it wasn't even meant to be his house searched) has requested reparations or repair work from the Police Department, they've laughed...
... and when the owner has subsequently sued the Police Department, the courts have ruled that they have no obligation to pay for any damage done, including by negligence.
Freedom requires both Liberty and Privacy. An all-seeing state will destroy Liberal society.
Reform requires reform of both the government and industry. Industry will happily gather the data and the state will then buy it from industry as a means to circumvent the 4th amendment.
Freedom does not require Liberty because Freedom does not require the state. Liberties are granted, not natural, Freedoms. Freedom sounds great and people love to hype it, but doesn’t exist in a meaningful way in most advanced societies.
If we’re going to use proper nouns, we need to use them properly.
I advocate for no such thing but you want to have a discussion about things, you learn the vocabulary. It’s hard to talk about political theory when you use the words wrong just the same as someone calling the UI for Wordpress “the back end” makes it hard to have an engineering discussion.
Liberties are fine, but don’t act like Freedom exists in modern society (or maybe any society) for the exact reason your flippant dismissal implies: the needs of other people. A poor invocation of Franklin indeed.
They aren’t getting warrants to tow the vehicles. They have no right to seize private property, especially the private property of someone not even involved with the crime in question. And what if the Tesla owner, as is their right or at least should be, refuses to release the video footage? How long do the police keep the illegally seized vehicle while the owner sorts out the seizure before the courts and at what personal cost? And what is prevents the police from obtaining the video through extrajudicial means? Does Tesla itself have access to the video? Can they sell/give it to the police? Are there legal safeguards against this or is it an open market as the linked Reason article shows? All of the above applies to any aftermarket camera security system as well. Also, if the police get access to the car data by some means, can they use any of the data to file separate charges against an uncooperative owner as retribution if they desire? There are many questions along these lines when dealing with an intrusive police state.
> They aren't getting warrants to tow the vehicles.
Um, FTA:
> “Based on this information,” Godchaux wrote, “I respectfully request that a warrant is authorized to seize this vehicle from the La Quinta Inn parking lot so this vehicle’s surveillance footage may be searched via an additional search warrant at a secure location.”
Definitely bad for the individual but if this is reserved for homicides, which are fairly rare, and helps solve the crimes, I’d say this is overall a good thing. There’s the potential for a slippery slope here but nothing about this seems alarming to me.
There are already plenty of cameras out there. It would not be very difficult to identify criminals. The problem is there is not sufficient motivation to do so and nobody knows what to do once the criminals are identified. My city just practices catch and release policing so laws only apply to those that will pay fines
LMFAO. My Tesla has been broken into multiple times in the Bay Area, with footage of the perpetrators and their license plate numbers, and the police have refused to investigate and were often unwilling to even accept the footage. And this isn't just me: literally everyone I know with a Tesla in the Bay Area has had a similar experience. The cops do not care, at all.
Towing someone's car on the off chance it had video surveillance of a crime the police bother working on is insane overreach when they won't even investigate crimes to that owner's car in the first place.
> A man was found on the back seat of his girlfriend’s Tesla, with a gunshot wound to the head, ending up in critical condition in the hospital. The police towed the vehicle for evidence, although no arrests have been made.
This anecdote does squat all for main point in the clickbait article. It is not even remotely an example of an uninvolved Tesla being towed just for its incidental surveillance data.
> The [Canadian tourist] permitted officers to download the footage without taking away the car, sparing him a visit to the police station.
Not an example of an uninvolved car being towed for data.
> The police obtained a search warrant to tow three vehicles – including a Tesla Model X – and gathered CCTV footage from a nearby market. The evidence led to two arrests for murder and other felonies – although it’s not clear if any of it came from the Tesla.
Ditto.
Not a single example of a confirmed tow of a Tesla for its data.
I don't own a Tesla, and frankly, don't want to own anything associated with Musk. However, I do have dash cams in both my vehicles that will start recording when the car is not running.
If I was driving in my car near a crime scene and discovered my dash cam recorded something that could be used as evidence, personally, I would call the local police and ask them if they were interested. However, to have the police discover my vehicle was in close proximity to the crime, and me not realizing my dash cam had recorded anything of value, and then the police try to impound my vehicle in a parking lot without my knowledge is outrageous!
The above situation is the result of two major realities: once again technology has emerged without adequate laws to deal with the consequences.(I realize this is usually the norm, law makers MUST speed up the process to protect citizens.) Second, police reform has to bring local law enforcement up to date with current reality. (The seizing of a vehicle based on possible crime info isn't protecting citizens, it's theft. Contacting the vehicle owner and requesting the info is serving the citizens, if they're not willing there is a court system.)
Unless they're parking in an area with a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as a locker room, it's perfectly legal to record in the United States.
It’s hard to take your argument serious when you choose a pretty absurd example. You walk around the street with a pair of eyes on your face, but that doesn’t mean you can just bend over and look up people’s clothing.
The law clearly establishes a difference between capturing “normal” content in public and invading privacy.
I'm sorry, but what happened to the 4th Amendment? Your car was parked in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even though you followed all rules, we're taking it.
The Model Y is the number 1 selling car in the world. I would hardly class that as a "Rich Person" in this day and age. Would you feel compelled to turn over your phone in the same circumstances? It could be assumed your phone "MAY" contain data relevant to criminal acts that have transpired is an easy way for them to grab all your data.
Someone driving a model y in oakland i would consider rich in the context of oakland yes. This is coming from someone that has spent over 6 years living in the oakland area and over 20 years living in the bay area.
A large group of people will look at these stories of technology being used to get the worst people off the street and say "This is creepy stuff," and a lot of that same group will listen to politicians telling them "the solution to gun violence is for everyone to have guns" and nod thoughtfully in agreement.
Sure? But some people also don’t care about either and others people think too much focus is on preventing effects (crime) and not on addressing cause (material conditions) and plenty of pro-fascists quote 1984 to support policy that would have made Orwell want to shoot them in the head.
A person who believes they'll be caught and face consequences for committing crimes is strongly affected by knowing there is heavy surveillance of their criminal activities. They're less likely to be deterred just knowing that a lot of other people will randomly have guns, in fact that makes them more likely to also have a gun and to shoot first (e.g.: that actor who was gunned down confronting someone who was stealing a catalytic converter).
I have perhaps unpopular additional suggestion. If you break any traffic laws your tesla should automatically report u to the police. Shouldn’t a car w AI capabilities be committed to responsible, ethical, safe, law abiding behavior ? I’m tired of bay area Teslas not signaling, cutting me off, and near killing me while I’m walking or on my bike.
If I or somebody else was the victim of a crime I would 100% support using every available source of information to solve that crime. I think we need adequate controls sure, but mostly we need to increase trust in government and police forces so we know we can trust the relevant people with our data.
There is epic fear in the US about the government. That is the actual problem. Now the US gov is a shady piece of shit, so a lot of that is well founded, but that is the root of the problem. Solve that problem and actually trust the people who are supposed to be responsible and in charge to do the right thing and this data problem stops becoming as much of an issue. And no, building some kind of philosophical zero trust system is not going to solve anything, it is a prison you'll end up living in.
Encourage transparency in Police forces and Government with strong legislation and strong support for whistleblowers and punishment of infractions and you have yourself a system that people can begin to trust.
It's not just the police. How could such a corrupt police exist without corrupt superiors higher up in the government? Fear of governments is justified, they're the most powerful entity in our world. They can get away with murder.
The US is not Iceland, a simple fix that would just make people trust the police is impossible. Also as an aside, the police isn't your only problem. Tesla, Google & co are paving the way normalizing these mobile surveillance units. We'll have millions of them driving around everywhere with HD cameras, microphones, in some cases even LiDAR and radar. Recording constantly. Of course there's a bit of an issue if you are not a fan of mass surveillance. Even if corporations are the only ones in charge of that data. I know for example that the Tesla video feed can be accessed online, because owners can remotely view it with their app. And if they can do this, so can others in theory. All you need is a bug or Tesla servers getting hacked.
Well actually that brings up an interesting piece about how the US is structured. I think the reason your police can be more corrupt is because of the federated nature of policing.
Cops are usually only answerable to the mayor of the city (and sometimes the electorate) rather than higher ups in the government. So there is a lack of authority and control there. If they were answerable to politicians and politicians were actually responsible for their actions you could take very firm political actions against those politicians - but in the states nobody in the Cabinet or Government is responsible for law enforcement.
And I understand why this federated system was originally put in place, but this isn't the 1700s. In communication terms the US might as well be Iceland - you can communicate from one end of the land mass to the other instantly, so we don't need to have localized and federated decision making.
