Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

> However, it has exemptions for health and religious reasons.

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 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.

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.

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.

Obviously many other manufacturers will also sell consumer cars that can completely drive themselves.

Even a person who lives in Tok, Alaska will just be able to buy one and then sleep in the car as it drives down the Alaska Highway*

* Trust me, once you've driven it a handful of times it's a chore.

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.

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.

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.

Look at things like DMCA reporting on youtube and how it can be abused.

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".

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.

I do not need a license to walk outside.

perhaps you’re thinking of “freedom of movement”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...

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.

I assume other states are similar

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.

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.

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.

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.

You aren’t a superior being, Derek.

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.

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 are railing against an example which doesn't exist.

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

At the same time, the better they do their job the less of it there will be to do as word spreads that you won't get away with it.

It could be arguably be much more efficient to take in user video, voluntarily offered, and prosecute all easily provable crimes and violations.

> 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.

-- Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

The other difference is that in the states, you largely don’t have a right to privacy in public or anywhere visible from public.

Is that what's referred to as a "wen"?

(Onomatopoetic term, that. Think of how you'd talk with a golfball in your mouth)

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.

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.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national...

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).

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>Drones, country where owning a gun is right.

Shooting down someone else's drones/cameras however, isn't.