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The data was key evidence in the death of a pedestrian in 2019:
At the beginning of the month, Tesla was found partly liable in a wrongful death lawsuit involving the death of a pedestrian in Florida in 2019. The automaker—which could have settled the case for far less—claimed that it did not have the fatal crash's data. That's until a hacker was able to recover it from the crashed car, according to a report in The Washington Post.
In the past, Tesla has been famously quick to offer up customer data stored on its servers to rebut claims made against the company. But in this case, the company said it had nothing. Specifically, the lawyers for the family wanted what's known as the "collision snapshot," data captured by the car's cameras and other sensors in the seconds leading up to and after the crash.
According to the trial, moments after the collision snapshot was uploaded to Tesla's servers, the local copy on the car was marked for deletion. Then, "someone at Tesla probably took 'affirmative action to delete' the copy of the data on the company's central database," according to the Post.
Tesla only acknowledged that it had received the data once the police took the Tesla's damaged infotainment system and autopilot control unit to a Tesla technician to diagnose, but at that time the local collision snapshot was considered unrecoverable.
That's where the hacker, only identified as @greentheonly, his username on X, came in. Greentheonly told The Washington Post that, "for any reasonable person, it was obvious the data was there."
During the trial, Tesla told the court that it hadn't hidden the data, but lost it. The company's lawyer told the Post that Tesla's data handling practices were "clumsy" and that another search turned up the data, after acknowledging that @greentheonly had retrieved the snapshot locally from the car.
"We didn't think we had it, and we found out we did... And, thankfully, we did because this is an amazingly helpful piece of information," said Tesla's lawyer, Joel Smith.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Tuesday September 02, @12:13AM
This sort of situation is why attorneys are allowed to get sanctions such as being able to draw inferences that it must have been bad for the other side when evidence goes missing. The fact that the system detected a likely crash should have led to the copy on the car being marked for preservation as well as the copy going to the servers. And there should have been something in place to prevent it from being deleted for whatever period of time the law requires. The reason being, that data not related to any real or suspected crashes is of little value beyond possible training use and can probably be deleted, but if there is a real or suspected crash related to the data, somebody may well subpoena that, and it's some of the most valuable data in terms of figuring out how to train the system.