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Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for
- arbitrage 6y agoThe font on that blog is awful.
- bArray 6y ago> DARK Ooooof. This is of course a joke, but it's why you should be careful in naming. My guess is they mean "SHADOW" or "LOW_LIGHT".
- umvi 6y agoCan we stop making of big deal (tm) out of every word that has even the flimsiest connections with race or racism?
- eska 6y agoI couldn't even figure out what he's talking about. People who want to see race will see race.. Facepalm
- tareqak 6y agoNot just people. Institutions, processes, and algorithms. I can easily see an insurance company claiming the driver to be at fault based on retrieved car telemetry, which in turn was erroneous because the machine-learning algorithm was trained on certain faces. There was a flagged HN submission about Twitter consistently centering image previews on whiter faces recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530968 .
- bArray 6y agoThe _joke_ was that it mentions "DARK" as a method of detecting whether somebody is damaging a vehicle: > CEO Elon Musk said that it would be used to prevent people > from vandalizing cars when they are being driven > automatically on Tesla’s upcoming self-driving robotaxi > network. The _joke_ was that if removed from context, somebody could insinuate that they are measuring whether people are black to detect if they are likely to damage a vehicle.
- teddyh 6y agoI don’t think so. All the words which had actual connections have (understandably) fallen out of use.
- bArray 6y agoIt was a joke, not a real call-out. I was just making the point that as programmers we should be careful about naming things in code, because one day they might be taken out of context.
- happytoexplain 6y agoI don't understand what you mean when you say "it" was a joke, but also the point you were making was not a joke. What is "it" if not the point being made by the comment?
- bArray 6y agoI'll quote my other comment here: > The _joke_ was that it mentions "DARK" as a method of > detecting whether somebody is damaging a vehicle: > > CEO Elon Musk said that it would be used to prevent people > > from vandalizing cars when they are being driven > > automatically on Tesla’s upcoming self-driving robotaxi > > network. > The _joke_ was that if removed from context, somebody could > insinuate that they are measuring whether people are black to > detect if they are likely to damage a vehicle. Jokes can have a half-serious point behind them (for example, political jokes). To really break it down: Joke: Clearly Tesla's inclusion of the parameter "DARK" is not in reference to black persons, but somebody taking an unfavorable view of the article could make it. Point: Programmers should be more aware of what they name things to avoid such cases. You might think "well this is a closed source app and should never be leaked, there's no way the public would be reading this" - and yet some years after MS-DOS and Word were written people are reading all sorts of things [1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/26/5549208/microsoft-early-code-contains-hidden-jokes https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/26/5549208/microsoft-early-c...
- happytoexplain 6y agoI think I see what you're saying - but the replies didn't accuse you of thinking it referenced black people. They disagreed that it is an example of something which is likely enough to be misinterpreted that it should have had a different name.
- throwaway12757 6y agoSadly, one of the reasons I will never buy a Tesla. The lack of privacy concerns me.
- Someone1234 6y agoPer the article: This is opt in. It seems like they're working on an on-board system to detect distracted drivers.
- gamblor956 6y agoPer history: Tesla releases driver data whenever it suits them. See: every autopilot crash.
- addflip 6y agoYep. You're right. This is why I put a piece black electrical tape over the rear-facing camera in my Model Y.
- dkonofalski 6y agoThey do not. They release their analysis of the data in question.
- falcolas 6y agoLike how they blamed the "gore" death on the driver for not having his hands on the wheel? The data showed that the "hands on the wheel" alert preceded the crash by 8 minutes. Tesla will absolutely use any data you send them to attack you, especially if you have the bad taste to die in their car with autopilot active.
- motohagiography 6y agoHah, if the main barrier to autopilot for cars is liability and insurance, passive biometric monitoring of the driver is certainly one way to shift liability around. The real feature should just be a button that shifts insurance liability to Tesla for the period of the autopilot engagement and charges you a floating premium for it based on traffic conditions per mile/km while the autopilot is on. The real problem is "free" auto pilot means people will use it often enough to make a catastrophe an actuarial inevitability, whereas if they have to pay to text while driving on autopilot, they're going to do it less, and live long enough to be killed by something else.
- lm28469 6y ago> The real feature should just be a button that shifts insurance liability to Tesla for the period of the autopilot engagement and charges you a floating premium for it based on traffic conditions per mile/km while the autopilot is on. No amount of money makes up for human lives. You can pay a premium of $1mil per mile, if the car end up smashing into a family car at 80mph because the system was fooled by a shadow or a reflection it's still a net negative
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> No amount of money makes up for human lives Sure, but no human life is worth spending infinite resources to protect.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lm28469 6y agoThere is no need to spend infinite resources. Look at the driver facing camera when the accident occurs. Either the driver was paying attention or he was doing something else. It's a legal issue, not a technical issue.
- thedrbrian 6y agoYou obviously aren’t a part of the government coronavirus response
- ubu7737 6y agoHEAD_TRUNC? Is this to detect when Autopilot has driven through a freight trailer and severed the driver's head?
- pupdogg 6y agoComments on the site itself are pure gold as some are pointing out the various (mostly humorous) events that are not being actively tracked with their driver-facing camera. I will try to compile this list below: - DRIVER_ON_PASSENGER_SIDE - DRIVER_MISSING - DRIVER_PICKING_BOOGERS - DRIVER_SEAT_FULLY_RECLINED - DRIVER_SNORING - DRIVER_SHAVING - DRIVER_VAPING - DRIVER_LIVESTREAMING - DRIVER_ADJUSTING_MAKEUP - DRIVER_APPLYING_LIPSTICK - PASSENGER_ON_DRIVER - PASSENGER_UNDER_DRIVER
- GordonS 6y ago> - DRIVER_SHAVING > - DRIVER_ADJUSTING_MAKEUP > - DRIVER_APPLYING_LIPSTICK I've actually seen drivers doing all 3 of these. The shaving (with an electric razor, obviously) I only saw once, but I frequently see women applying makeup and lipstick.
- kelvin0 6y agoIf someone comes up with a autonomous mobile hair salon/manicure/pedicure/waxing/make up vehicle, there is certainly a huge opportunity.
- snapetom 6y agoA couple of friends of mine prototyped a site dedicated to distracted drivers on I-5 in Seattle ala the Highway 17 Hall of Shame. It was just too easy. My favorite, though, and I still have the pic, was a guy, who I presume to be a solider, driving a military truck with a big ol' binder open on his lap.
- colanderman 6y agoBest I've seen was a woman with a laptop open, between her and her steering wheel. (Morning commute on I-90 in MA.) I honked at her enough to shame her into putting it away at least while I was near her.
- athenot 6y agoRelevant Mr Bean episode where all these dangerous things are done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuQctvKNLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuQctvKNLg
- awinter-py 6y ago'graybox' AI products (mostly automatic but periodically return emergency control to pesky human) are going to need to model driver alertness the car certainly should warn you at lower danger threshold if it thinks you'll need more time to return to full attention (even in a zero-shame case, like for example you're checking your mirror but the car thinks there's a hazard in front) separate question of 4th / 5th amendment consequences of using this for crash liability
- marcosdumay 6y agoThe human attentiveness model is very easy: `is_attentive _ = False`. Those grayboxes probably already take more lives than they save on airplanes, and will be orders of magnitude worse on cars.
- nickik 6y ago> Those grayboxes probably already take more lives than they save on airplanes, and will be orders of magnitude worse on cars. All evidence so far point in the opposite direction. Airplanes are different, you have a highly trained pilot that has strict requirements for flight. Outperforming your avg human is far easier. What your evidence that these system cause more harm then good?
- marcosdumay 6y ago> What your evidence that these system cause more harm then good? I have stopped following the accident investigations a few years ago, but that was the (very evident) trend. Most accidents tend to happen at the hand-over from the machine to the pilots when some problem appears. Among those it's very common that the both the machines and the manual procedures deal correctly with the problem, but the pilots have no chance of selecting the correct procedures. (The MAX-8 may have changed that picture all by itself, as I said, I stopped following them.) And, yes, airplanes are different. You have pilots that are trained on getting hand-over in a bad situation, and usually have minutes to decide what to do. Car problems must be solved in a second or two, and the drivers never see a bad situation before it happens on real life.
- ChrisClark 6y agoThis will be very useful. I'm always watching the road anyway, it would be nice not to have to put the right tension on the wheel the whole time. This is what I envied about other lane keeping cars, I think Cruise uses eye tracking, or maybe it was something else.
- chrismeller 6y agoI realize that this is still supposedly a “help us improve”/“data gathering” step, but I’m having trouble deciding how I feel about it. Yes, of course, safer drivers (whether automatic or fleshy) is a great thing, but this still hits that deep-seeded paranoia level for me. I mean, what if FaceID had been proven out the same way? The number of times I unlock my phone every day and the number of times I’m doing it somewhere that the government/my employer/my significant other/a random hacker would find objectionable or lucrative to exploit... That’s with just me there (or an ex, or a former employee or prospective employer, or someone I met at a bar who turns out to be on some list...). Turn this back around to the car I’m driving and it’s honestly slightly terrifying for me. It could be the next evolution of those devices insurance companies want you to plug into your OBD port so they can monitor how quickly you accelerate, take turns, etc. Except now Tesla (and whomever they decide to sell it to) know that when that innocent-seeming accident happened you seemed to be looking down, so now you’re completely liable for damages. With the good comes the bad, but I’m terrified of the bad and the good doesn’t seem that much better than the current.
- hellisothers 6y agoYea a friend only drives older cars without ODB to avoid tracking anything (he’s pretty paranoid). But I’ll resist buying a car with a driver facing camera as long as I can, I don’t care how much they discount insurance premiums if you get one, it’s not worth it.
- xeromal 6y agoI mean you can just tape up the camera.
- hellisothers 6y agoI’d imagine that disables a lot of things, not to mention is “suspicious”
- xeromal 6y ago
- cma 6y agoSince it isn't an IR camera with illumination, it won't be useable at night, right?
- ggreer 6y agoIt's not pitch black inside of the vehicle. The giant LCD puts out some light. There are reflections from your headlights (bouncing off what's in front of you). There are street lights. There are other vehicle headlights. Your eyes have to see stuff for you to drive, so there must be photons hitting your face, and some of those get reflected. The external cameras have excellent low light sensitivity. If the internal camera is anything like those, I think it'll work fine at night.
- cma 6y agoWhy do other people use illuminated IR cameras then? Aren't they looking for decent gaze direction detection, etc.? Isn't it unsafe to drive with a ton of light from the giant LCD, etc.? I would have though they would dim that and/or have a night mode with inverted UI colors.
- ggreer 6y agoHave you looked at footage from Tesla cameras at night? They have higher dynamic range than the human eye and they're very sensitive. They can see stars. The LCD changes its brightness automatically. It also changes from light to dark mode (inverted UI colors) based on the time of day. Still an LCD showing black will leak some light, and as I said those cameras are pretty damn sensitive.
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- jaywalk 6y agoOne of the events it detects is DARK so, yeah.
- mypalmike 6y agoClickbait title.
- moscovium 6y agoNot at all
- mypalmike 6y agoIt generates a curiosity gap rather than a summary. The essence of clickbait.
- qassssddfff 6y agoWiwiiwwi
- qassssddfff 6y agoWieiwi
- qassssddfff 6y agoSiiw
- fudged71 6y agoTesla has a history of using remote diagnostics to snitch on drivers instead of allowing investigators to do their job. It’s a valid concern that your car manufacturer will use the interior cameras to blame a crime on you. These automatic tagging features also bring to question the bias in algorithms. What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? Is it possible that a safe driver with ADHD or Turrets etc might be flagged as inattentive during an autopilot crash and therefore at fault?
- yardie 6y agoIf a driver was inattentive and had a crash wouldn't they be at fault regardless of ADHD or Tourets?
- notyourwork 6y agoFalsely flagged is the keyword your statement ignores.
- SkyBelow 6y agoI think the question was asked with the implied addition 'What Tesla says won't matter in court.' I don't agree with that though, for two reasons. First, it will be harder for them to fight, meaning it will still be a source of bias even if the court isn't biased at all. Even if they can show it was a false flag, that is time and money others wouldn't have to spend. Potentially time and money of someone who was in a life altering crash. Second, it would not be surprised that the court ends up being biased towards the manufacture and would give undue weight to them because they have the fancy algorithms and all the well payed lawyers.
- R0b0t1 6y agoThe OP is suggesting neuroatypical people might be flagged as being inattentive despite being attentive due to being underrepresented in the training set.
- jlarocco 6y ago> These automatic tagging features also bring to question the bias in algorithms. What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? Is it possible that a safe driver with ADHD or Turrets etc might be flagged as inattentive during an autopilot crash and therefore at fault? I'm not understanding your point here, and you seem to contradict yourself a little bit. A driver with a disability that makes them inattentive can't be a "safe driver." Having a disability that makes them inattentive, appearing inattentive, and getting into a crash (autopilot or not), seems to be a "three strikes and you're out" situation, IMO. You'll have a very hard time convincing me the person wasn't at fault in that situation. Certain disabilities prevent people from driving cars safely. It's unfortunate, but it's just the way it is.
- ogre_codes 6y agoOne of the reasons I would love to have autopilot is because I have a history of dozing off at the wheel. Never so much where I've had an accident, but bad enough where I've scared myself badly. I don't want autopilot so I can actually sleep at the wheel, I want it in case I do. I'd vastly prefer if the car noticed I was inattentive that it notified me. My feeling is for long drives this would be a safety feature, but I'm concerned that the way it's built it will my worst driving behaviors instead of helping compensate for them.
- alanbernstein 6y agoAren't autopilot and sleep detection totally independent features?
- gene91 6y agoAuto manufacturers are approaching Adaptive Cruise Control in a manner that intermingles the two: GM "Super Cruise", Ford's upcoming "CoPilot 360 Active", etc. In my opinion, these two features are very related. In order to have a reasonably low false positive, the sleep detection must be reasonably lenient. In turn, this means the vehicle must be able to (most of the time) tolerate a few seconds of inattentive driving.
- cptskippy 6y ago> I have a history of dozing off at the wheel. Have you tried to address this issue? This seems like a huge safety concern and you're actively choosing to put others in harms way by continuing to drive.
- nexuist 6y agoI agree. If this is something like e.g. narcolepsy, you should see a doctor. There are a few low-risk prescriptions worth looking into. When I used to pull 18 hour days, I would also notice myself getting tired behind the wheel, but never fully falling asleep. My low-tech solution to this was to set an alarm for 10 minutes after I started driving and setting the alarm volume to max. Then, the alarm would go off in the middle of my drive, usually surprising me and jolting me awake since I'm obviously not paying attention to the time. Then, snoozing the alarm would make it go away for another 10 minutes, and so on until I made it home. This is probably not the perfect solution but it worked for me. Obviously the better long term solution is to a) not do 18 hour days and b) address what is making you so sleepy and stop it from happening.
- whalesalad 6y agoI love that the car is capturing this data. I would imagine Tesla engineers on the analysis side of this data are thinking "holy shit, look how much time our drivers are spending not paying attention at all, we need to do something about this." They need this data for regulatory reasons, anyway. At some point they need confidence to say how people are really (ab)using their self-driving tech.
- uniqueid 6y ago"holy shit, look how much time our drivers are spending not paying attention at all, we need to do something about this." "Quick, man, contact PR straight away to write a belligerent, categorical denial! There's no time to lose!"
- uniqueid 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697610 Well, that was a poorly-timed quip.
- faitswulff 6y agoAnyone else get the impression that this is to head off litigious drivers?
- jedberg 6y agoI wonder if they car will stop working if you put a piece of tape over the camera.
- judge2020 6y agoNo https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07S5BFN6M https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07S5BFN6M
- octoberfranklin 6y ago> No ... for now
- hartator 6y ago> better driver monitoring because it’s currently one of the biggest weaknesses of Tesla’s Autopilot Isn’t the biggest weakest all the edge cases that the AI has troubles making decisions on?
- FriedPickles 6y agoDriver monitoring is most important at night, when the camera Tesla included can't see anything in the cabin. I bet Tesla is kicking themselves for not putting an IR camera + LED in, like the front facing camera on Comma.ai.
- noelsusman 6y agoOn a related note, I often wonder how many Tesla owners are aware that their cars take images/video from the external cameras and send them back to Tesla. This happens remotely at any time and you have no idea when or if it has happened.
- ericlewis 6y agoIt’s opt in as the article outlines.
- jccooper 6y agoFor context, a camera monitoring the driver for attention isn't anything new or specific to Tesla. Many cars from other makes are already doing this, and they tout it as a feature of their driver assist systems.
- Waterluvian 6y agoThe high end trim Forester already has this. I assume a lot of cars do. Is there anything particularly special Tesla offers other than also taking your data for themselves?
- muffa 6y agoSo having worked in the space of driving facing cameras here are my 2 cents. - Why use it? If you have the car driving autonomous and you want the driver to take over, you need to know if they are able to take over or not (sleeping) - Placement The placement of the camera needs to be well below the head, otherwise you will not be able to fully see the eyes and also not be able to tell if a person has it's eyes open or not. This is more true for Asian people. The placement of this camera shows a lot of the inside of the car compared with other OEMs. This is an interesting feat and could for example be used if you see the temp in the car incrase during parking you might want to turn on the AC if a child or animal is left in the car.
- SEJeff 6y agoThe "hacker" is greentheonly and has a fun twitter feed if you're into the guts of Tesla. He reverse engineers just about every Tesla firmware: https://twitter.com/greentheonly https://twitter.com/greentheonly
- nickik 6y agoThis should have been done much earlier. Its a great thing for safety. I do have concerns with privacy, but not much you I can do about that. Elon was to bullish on self-driving and believed this 'transition' technology was not necessary. I hope they role this out soon. And its not just safety, it just makes sense to not having to torque the wheel.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoThis is creepy. I don't want more electronics keeping eyes on me. In fact I don't want to be driving at all. Bring on the full-on self-driving car. I don't have a car though as I live in a city where I don't really need one (or could even park it if I wanted to). But in some countries you can't do without one sadly.
- mlindner 6y agoCaddilac has had this for years for their driver assistance system. It cuts out if you look away from the road. > https://www.autoevolution.com/news/how-cadillac-super-cruise-hands-free-driving-system-works-134397.html https://www.autoevolution.com/news/how-cadillac-super-cruise... > It also keeps track of whether the driver is paying attention to the road. Unique to Super Cruise is that it does this not by requiring the driver to keep his hands or touch the steering wheel, but by tracking the driver’s eyes and head position. > Despite being capable of handling the car on its own, Super Cruise will not work unless it detects the driver is paying attention to the road. In Cadillac’s case, that doesn’t mean necessarily having the hands on the steering wheel, but keeping the eyes looking forward.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoThat others are doing it too doesn't make it less creepy :) But you can't even buy Cadillac here in Europe.
- mlindner 6y agoOh I agree. I hate the idea. When I eventually get such a vehicle a piece of tape is going over the camera.
- JJMcJ 6y ago> Tesla’s upcoming self-driving robotaxi network Heh.
- alex_young 6y agoSpoiler: they use the driver-facing camera to watch the driver. Edit: why downvote? This is a pretty clickbait story. Feel free to comment if you have another perspective.
- redis_mlc 6y agoWhy's the tool driving the car wearing a mask as the sole occupant of the car? Is that the new political correctness?
- whatever1 6y agoSo wait they have this capability and they still don’t disengage their “autopilot” when they identify a distracted driver?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoEh, it is yet another reason for me not to own a Tesla. There seriously needs to be a bigger outcry against this. There is no benefit to the user. Your ( supposedly ) car actively works against you and your interests ( even if that interest is to be a stupid person who applies make up during driving ). Seriously, why is there a need to be cameras everywhere? And why do they need to watch me blink?