Teslas monitor everything – including you [video] from WIRED
118 comments
·February 27, 2025squarefoot
ides_dev
Why even bother with one of those crusty old 3-letter agencies, when you can go straight to the top via your very own 4-letter (1 better!) agency: D.O.G.E.
shaunpud
Wasn't this the same with Ring doorbells?
potato3732842
Worse, not just the feds but the far more capricious state and local agencies.
akimbostrawman
Nobody should be suprised by this. This applies to all proprietary blackboxes with unrestricted network access. Maybe now that people are comically angry at musk they at least act like they care.
benterix
Except the "comically" part (what does even mean? I'd call it "sad" if anything) I agree with you. You had (1) strong marketing and (2) lack of choice on one side, and a few tech folks that were expressing their concerns on this for years, except that the public at large didn't care - or didn't have much choice (e.g. when you buy a vacuum cleaner).
I hope this whole row will make people just a bit more aware. But it's hard to say how much it will help. An average person is powerless when seeing "Connect to Wi-Fi to complete setup" on their screen - whether it's their new TV set or a new laptop.
whoitwas
I would like to understand your position. Why do you think people being really mad is funny? To me, this reaction seems to be why Trump and Musk are able to troll and bully. It's because people think it's funny, but why? Are you a child? I mean literally.
akimbostrawman
Calling someone a child because you (think you) disagree with them is very mature. Thanks for the entertaining example.
whoitwas
I did not call them a child. I asked a question. I recall when I was in school, children were very cruel and would bully one another. It's why I asked.
fsflover
It's funny (and sad, too!) that people are so surprised, because lots of activists and NGOs have been warning against proprietary software for decades, starting with Richard Stallman [0] and https://fsf.org and continuing with Cory Doctorow [1] and https://eff.org. If your hardware obeys somebody else, it will betray you sooner or later, one way or another to extract more money for the benefit of the actual owner.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
whoitwas
OP suggests it's funny that people are mad at Elon Musk. This implies they find the actions of Elon funny, or they're laughing at the people who are harmed. I'm trying to understand why people act like this.
lnsru
Ok, my old model Y has a camera inside to monitor me. 1€ AliExpress camera cover gave my privacy back. The new model y has a radar. So it will monitor not only my presence, but also my vital parameters as well as vital parameters of all passengers. No radar cover invented for that yet… it’s a bit too much. And since it’s already there it will be abused. That’s the path with all the technology.
genewitch
Aluminum foil ought work
lnsru
Probably not. Proper grounding and good shielding is needed. Eventually you can use conductive glue and attach the foil to the pcb (my guess is that Tesla uses low cost printed circuit board antenna, haven’t seen it yet) antenna directly messing its geometry and transmission characteristics.
amelius
But what if the car refuses to start without vital parameters?
Ylpertnodi
A captcha on the driver window.
mg
I wonder if this is an argument for more public transport.
Electric buses make rides pretty cheap and comfortable. And shifting traffic from personal cars to buses would make mobility much more efficient. Because in a bus, 30 people can cross a crossing so much faster than in a line of 30 individual cars.
Would privacy also be better? Because the government is more trustworthy regarding the collection of movement data than private companies?
kvakerok
In your car you have an expectation of privacy. Public transport is by definition a public space and thus has no expectation of privacy. Whole different ruleset applies. Anyone can monitor you on a bus. Without your consent too.
Fricken
A couple days after that United Health CEO was assasinated they has video of the suspect from a deluge of sources and none of them were from busses or cars.
Nearly every business has cameras. More and more residential homes have porch cameras pointed at the street. Even if your vehicle isn't monitoring you, it has a license plate hanging off the back so it can be easily identified. We're all being tracked by our phones, and everybody else's phone will be used against you should you be caught acting weird in pubic. There are records of me in more databases than what's even knowable, the plot is so lost. We're back to being naked all the time, except now without the privilege of knowing who is looking at you.
I felt like people rallying against surveillance and tracking were beating a dead horse 20 years ago and I feel even more that way today.
csunbird
Good thing is it is illegal to have video footage of public land where I live. You can only monitor exactly the entrance or your private land.
QuadmasterXLII
in practice, in a car your motions are tracked and stored forever (you, today, already inplemented) by both automated license plate readers, the car’s phone home gps, and typically the phone in your pocket. In a bus, if you pay with a card its tracked where you got on, and they can run facial recognition after the fact, but its at least not greppable
enriquto
> In your car
There you said it! But, if you cannot control the software, then it's not your hardware.
RoryH
Possibly the point is that an individual can not be as easily tracked by first identifying the bus, however most cars are registered to their owners. Nowadays most buses and public transport are full of CCTV though so same problem really.
null
IsTom
> In your car you have an expectation of privacy.
Less than some people assume. I've seen people eat boogers while waiting for a green light.
8bitsrule
Privacy in public transport systems is poorer than it has to be, and can be enhanced. The following describes a privacy-preserving ticketing system.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-20810-7_...
No doubt many people are aware that card passes are potential trackers, and that may be why a third or so of the ridership pays no fare.
Ylpertnodi
>In your car you have an expectation of privacy.
Though, I can freely film you from a public area.
raxxorraxor
We had electric busses in our city. They were awesome. The were far less noisy and didn't stink. But they were scrapped again. Reason: Diesel busses had a maintenance time of 2%, electric busses of 5%, meaning they spend 5% of their running time in maintenance. That was all, so we now have loud and stinky busses again.
That said, I don't think you can ever replace individual traffic. It is only possible in the most dense cities. Otherwise bus travel is too slow and unreliable for people working 40h+.
shafyy
They were doing something wrong. In many European cities I have lived and visited, electric buses are all over the place.
mg
Which city is that?
bus travel is too slow
and unreliable
people working 40h+
rsynnott
> but I would expect buses that carry 20 passengers each
FWIW, that's a _tiny_ bus. Typical city buses take 80-100 people, articulated buses about 150. At peak time on important routes they'll generally be mostly full.
The major capacity limit on buses is stopping. On busy systems at peak times, you'll tend to get clumping at stops, as similar routes line up one after another.
threeseed
> Otherwise bus travel is too slow and unreliable for people working 40h+
This feels like a very US mindset.
In many other places buses are very reliable and cities are built around them e.g. dedicated bus lanes and so they are often much faster than driving.
forgetfreeman
Given a bunch of us live in the US a US mindset shouldn't be shocking. Whereas in other places other ground truths apply, in the US exactly zero major metropolitan areas are built around mass transit making it wildly impractical for the bulk of human traffic.
anal_reactor
Buses are fantastic for the use case "we need to transport 100 people from suburbs to the office every day at 8AM", but they completely suck at use case "this one guy wants to come back home from a concert at 2AM". This means you need some personal vehicle anyway. And if you already have a car, why not use it for work commute.
Living in a bike-oriented city, I think e-bikes are the future. Almost as versatile as cars, with none of the downsides.
llampx
Does the maintenance time include regular servicing or is it only the time spent out of service in a day, for example charging?
I think electric vehicles are such a clear win for pollution (air and sound pollution) in cities that rolling back to ICEs should be clearly justified.
I_
How can electric buses have more maintenance downtime than diesel?
bzzzt
Here in the Netherlands the bus companies are required to buy by tender which has led to the purchase of lots of cheap Byd busses. While they are fast enough and silent they are not that great: there are software problems, heaters don't work, doors won't close and the seats are so bad the (already scarce) drivers are getting back problems.
rsynnott
As a general rule, in transport fleets, unless the old thing is actually basically at the point where it needs to be scrapped right now, the new thing always has more downtime than the old thing, because the old thing has had its kinks ironed out, and the maintainers are used to maintaining it.
Of course, the trouble is, sometimes the new thing is just bad. A commuter/metro train system in my city operates mostly on 40 year old rolling stock. In 2000, some new trainsets were introduced, from two different manufacturers. One model never really worked properly, and was scrapped in 2008; the other survived. The whole thing is now due to be replaced with shiny new trains, starting this year... hopefully these ones work.
jasode
>And shifting traffic from personal cars to buses would make mobility much more efficient. Because in a bus, 30 people can cross a crossing so much faster than in a line of 30 individual cars. [...] I would expect travel to speed up when we move from cars to buses. Look at what cars do most of the time. Waiting at crossings, slowing down for crossings, accelerating after passing a crossing. I have not measured it yet, but I would expect buses that carry 20 passengers each to accelerate that by a factor of 10 or so.
Your math is leaving out a lot of other waiting periods which makes it seem like buses save time over cars. Your focus on crossing intersections is distorting the calculations.
Yes, 1 bus can move 30 passengers through a traffic light is faster than 30 individual cars but you have to offset that savings with extra wait times in other places:
+ add additional time to travel to the bus stop
+ add additional time to wait at the bus stop because buses don't come on demand but at spaced intervals. Maybe once an hour or half hour.
+ add additional time for bus to stop at other bus stops that are not relevant to the passenger, or changing buses,
+ add additional time to account for the bus taking a longer convoluted route that deviates from the shortest path between points A and B because they have to accommodate for the bus stops and also optimize the # of buses in the fleet vs passenger counts.
+ add time to travel from the final bus stop dropoff point to travel to the final destination without the bus. Each mile of walking takes about ~20 minutes. If the bus stop is too far away from the destination office or house, then I guess the passenger can take an Uber ride? Not only does that add more time, it negates a lot of benefits of using the bus. People could use the Uber for the entire trip -- or just use their personal car.
There are scenarios where the bus is undeniably faster. Inside dense cities where they have special lanes that can bypass some gridlock. The tour buses with stops that have frequent pickup intervals that do continuous loops around cities for tourists is another example that's faster than cars.
mg
My perspective is from living in a big city. Hamburg in Germany. Here it is like this:
add additional time to travel to the bus stop
add additional time to wait at the bus stop
additional time for bus to stop at other bus stops
additional time to account for the bus taking a route
that deviates from shortest path
roflmaostc
In most cities going by bike is even faster. Ofc, it needs some effort to overcome weather, sweat.
But at the end it pays off. Full privacy, free workouts, faster commute, being outside (getting sun, maybe fresh air).
Invest in a good bike (maybe even eletric bike) and commute faster :)!
mg
I don't expect bikes to take market share from cars.
Bikes have been around for a long time and are expected to technically stay the same in the foreseeable future.
Electric buses are so much better than gasoline buses. Fewer vibrations, less noise. Makes it much more suitable to relax or do some work on your phone. Plus, the cost (manufacturing+maintenance+fuel) of electric buses is 25% lower than the cost of gasoline buses. At the moment, only 10% or so of buses are electric. So the effect of these two improvements are mostly still to hit the market.
And in a few years, buses will start to become autonomous. Which reduces the costs of a bus operation by 70%.
Imagine we get autonomous electric buses with nice seats and tables. Then you can do your work in a bus while getting from A to B super cheap. Mobility would be so different.
seszett
> Bikes have been around for a long time and are expected to technically stay the same in the foreseeable future.
You might have missed the electric bike revolution that started a few years ago? Probably half the bikes I see here (in Flanders) are electric. It has enabled many people who would never have considered it before to start biking.
And bikes are absolutely taking market share from cars here. Honestly I don't even understand why enough people still use their cars through my city instead of biking. It easily takes 2x or 3x the time to get anywhere.
seer
It is not about the bikes themselves, but building the city to promote one transport mode against another.
If your city has nice green public spaces linked by bike lanes, and has a good “human” level of density where most of the stuff you actually want to go to are reachable in less than an hour of cycling, people will naturally gravitate towards that, since biking in green spaces is usually enjoyable in and of itself.
Paradoxically this makes driving nicer as well, since it frees up traffic for car enthusiasts.
When I was living in Sofia (Bulgaria) I used to bike a lot, just because it is nice. And I did own a car and used it frequently. But my commute / grocery run / recreation was usually done by cycle.
xalava
Bikes have already taken market shares from cars in large European cities such as Amsterdam [0] or Paris [1]. They may be a superior technology for most urban commutes: faster, requiring less space on roads and for parking, and more enjoyable [2].
Buses are subsidized. In cities with subways, they are used primarily to accommodate people with limited mobility or to cover rare routes. Between cities, they remain the cheapest option. Therefore, I'm not sure that cost is an important factor.
[0] https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in... [1] https://www.paris.fr/en/pages/bicycles-outperform-cars-in-pa... [2] https://english.kimnet.nl/publications/publications/2018/04/...
rsynnott
> Bikes have been around for a long time and are expected to technically stay the same in the foreseeable future.
Probably half the urban bikes I see now are (mostly cheap) electric ones. There's also a question of infrastructure; many cities have made great improvements in bike lanes over the last few decades.
> Electric buses are so much better than gasoline buses. Fewer vibrations, less noise.
Also faster takeoff, which is quite important (urban bus routes are typically very stop-start-y).
> And in a few years, buses will start to become autonomous.
I have doubts.
(Buses are very big and heavy, and other road users tend to behave badly around them; they're a near-worst-case for automation. You might get away with it on a mostly-segregated BRT line, but not a conventional bus route.)
Gasp0de
I have an ebike and a trailer, and it absolutely removed my need for a car. My neighbors are a family of 6, and an electric cargo bike allows them to live without a second car.
sebazzz
> I don't expect bikes to take market share from cars.
Not in a society that is car-centric. But in countries that optimize for different types of transport, it is quite busy with bikes. Every commuter bike would have been a car otherwise - so also taking much more space.
llampx
I love bikes but I value my health so I keep my exercise to places where I won't be crushed to death by rogue road users.
agumonkey
It's really a strange realization. If your health is fine.. and you don't live in smog.. biking is immensely beneficial. There's often multiple path to the same destination, shorter than main arteries, no traffic jam, no stress. I take my car twice a month and everytime I'm surprised by the effect of having to deal with all interruption and safety because we all drive 500-1000kg metallic buckets. It's quickly annoying.. that's a feeling you never have on bike. And no gas cost, near no insurance.. cheap repairs.
So true, weather is an issue (but in a way it's fun to now look at the sky to see where the clouds are going), clothing too a bit. My only problem is that weak health quickly cut your ability to move far.
dudefeliciano
Only argument I have is the no stress part. I find myself stressed out more often than should be when riding a bike in the city due to careless car drivers.
harvey9
In general? no - Teslas spying on you is orthogonal to mode of transport. And specifically no where I live because all the buses have CCTV.
euroderf
> all the buses have CCTV.
IF the default handling of any recordings is total erasure after some specified (and not unreasonable) period, then it's not an unleavened evil is it ?
bbarnett
Not entirely helpful, if the video has already been scanned, face rec employed, groupings of people recorded (eg, who you hang out with), and perhaps phone identifiers.
The recordings may be gone, but is all metadata? And when they answer yes, does that also mean "partners" too?
Anyhow, public transport will always be less private than a car, just due to fewer people traveling with you. That's not the point though.
The point is, car companies spying on you. And they all do it too. Ford does it. It needs to be stopped.
vaylian
> Would privacy also be better? Because the government is more trustworthy regarding the collection of movement data than private companies?
It must be possible to buy a ticket that has at least one of the following properties:
1. It is not linked to the times when you use it (flat-rate/monthly ticket). Payment may be linked to your name.
2. It is not linked to your identity (pseudonymous numeric ID). Payment must not be linked to your name.
Otherwise it's easy to track when you travel which route.
And obviously, facial recognition must be forbidden.
szszrk
Plenty of places, including my current city, have time-based tickets only. So even for the shortest ones you have to validate only once, while you can have a much longer trip.
Daily/weekend/weekly are even better, and monthly/quarterly even while they tied to your name, don't have to be validated in any particular place at all. You can do it far from any vehicles.
presentation
If the reason we decide to invest in public transit is privacy, we’re hopeless.
TinkersW
No, but it is an argument for making it illegal for car manufacturers to monitor you.
vinni2
It’s a pity original link was not picked up.
justforfunhere
A ridiculous amount of tech wizardry goes into building software that watches over users. Most software engineers won’t blink twice before jumping on such a project—especially if the paycheck is juicy. But rest assured, they’ll still rush to HN to roll their eyes when someone else does it.
mnewme
black mirror vibes.
amelius
SmartTV vibes
akimbostrawman
no, reality of the car industry for over a decade.
blackeyeblitzar
Many cars monitor the driver now, often with facial recognition enabled cameras. Mazda, infinity, Hyundai/genesis, others. It feels a bit like every brand will end up with invasive tech, ads, and subscriptions.
palata
> It feels a bit like every brand will end up with invasive tech, ads, and subscriptions.
It's bad enough as it is, and consumers should try and fight against that by not buying those cars.
Especially now that we see that the CEO can turn fascist and feel entitled to do whatever he pleases with the data. How long before federal employees get fired because their Tesla showed that they arrived late to work?
At the very least, don't buy Teslas. At this point that's probably one of the riskiest choices.
DanielHB
Remember when all we worried about was when government was tracking/spying on you? With illegal phone wiretaps and hidden microphones. Good times...
Now we have to worry about the government AND the big tech companies AND their crazy CEOs as the lines get blurred between the three.
bbarnett
Unless someone is 60, you don't know a time when companies haven't been spying on you.
People were worried about Google in the early 2000s, after they bought doubleclick. There's nothing new here, except a continuous walk along the same path.
Data collection was a big trend of the 80s. Credit bureaus and points cards were the big start.
If you go into a forum about cars, you can see people asking about 5 or 6 years ago, to turn off telemetry in their cars. They are mocked relentlessly.
Then the insurance issue came to light, where car companies were caught selling data without consent. Suddenly, everyone cared.
Point is, the average person hasn't the time, or the inclination to understand, or even care... until it hurts them.
Of course, by the time the hurting happens, it's too late...
So give them pennies (point cards) and they'll be happy to be tracked.
From what I've noticed in my life, many people are incapable of being aware of dangers, without perspective. Thus, to survive mentally, they must dismiss dangers they cannot control. They deride concerns, to protect themselves menrally.
I'd say at least 50% of the population is like this.
pavlov
Americans liked to laugh at Europe's data regulations, but they sure are effective at preventing this specific problem of "CEO can turn fascist and feel entitled to do whatever he pleases with the data."
Which surely has some connection to why Musk (like many other Silicon Valley billionaires) hates the EU so much.
NetOpWibby
America adheres to the FAFO principle; fuck around and find out.
Things tend to get demonstrably worse before it gets better. SIGH
GJim
> Americans liked to laugh at Europe's data regulations
They aren't laughing.
On the contrary, the surveillance capitalists (many of which frequent this site) are vocal because they are spreading FUD. After all, sensible data protection laws affect their business models.
_kb
Ford already has a patent for that [1] and Jeep has already started doing it [2] “by accident”.
[1]: https://au.pcmag.com/cars-auto/107185/ford-patents-in-car-ad...
[2]: https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/jeep-in-car-ads-popup-stellan...
oneeyedpigeon
How many is many? Are we talking 1% of all cars on the road? 0.1%?
hsuduebc2
Even if it would be one percent, eg. every hundreth car that can store IDs and car color of cars passing by then you'r movement could be tracked easily just by being spotted by teslas. Musk has shown he's not a man to be trusted.
null
bbarnett
Musk has shown he's not a man to be trusted.
This cracks me up. You're only saying that because he's vocal, and you're aware of him daily.
After all, I don't see people commenting on the other 1M CEO, nor aware of what they're doing right now, which do not post on X.
dambi0
Given this is about new technologies or more accurately the potential misuse of new technology, I think we can infer we are talking newer models of cars rather than cars already on the road.
mdhb
This isn’t normal. Hand waving it away as nothing like you seem to be doing here comes across as extremely weird I have to be honest.
fc417fc802
A deadly piece of equipment monitoring a safety critical part of the control system (ie the driver) is totally normal and expected. That same piece of equipment surreptitiously phoning home to the manufacturer with the data is the part that isn't acceptable.
I want my car to monitor both me and the surroundings. I also want to be able to do things like speak in natural language to my phone, use my phone camera to OCR and translate documents from a foreign language, and all sorts of other 90s sci-fi stuff.
Unfortunately the future we were graced with is a dystopian reality where all of this is built on proprietary black boxes that spy on you 24/7. And somehow the government takes no issue with this state of affairs, instead constructing their own data feeds.
appointment
Driver attention monitoring is very normal and required for any car with significant Assisted Driving technology, which is likely to be all new cars soon. I expect safety scoring schemes like Euro NCAP continue to give AD systems higher and higher weights in their scores over time.
pasquinelli
i don't read it that way. i take it more they're saying the problem is broader than just tesla.
fastball
These are not fully autonomous systems and we live in a very litigious society.
How do you propose these driverless / driver assist systems work?
postmeta
it does help having video of virtuous people vandalizing your car to show the police
gambiting
Sure, but it has the same energy as saying it's worth having a camera in your living room recording 24/7(to the cloud) because any potential recording of burglars entering your house is worth having.
Mashimo
You say that, but people actually do that.
I, for one, find it weird.
eknkc
I have some cameras at home. Bought them to monitor the cats when we are away and they.. just stuck.
I use Apple’s homekit secure video thing and the cameras are only set to record when nobody is home. Otherwise they are basically powered on 24/7.
I guess it is weird but I kind of forget that they are there.
lawn
It's one thing if it's only recorded and stored locally on your machine and another if it's some private company with dubious history that records everything.
SideburnsOfDoom
It's only worth powering those cameras up when you're going to be out of the house for a long period of time. Power them down on return.
null
And, following recent events, now every parked Tesla is also a potential surveillance device for the surrounding area, with direct connection to the US government, possibly through famous 3 letter agencies.