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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: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Tuesday September 02 2025, @05:31AM (2 children)
If unions are so bad, then why are all the "arm-pit" "s-hole" states the ones that have right to work laws on the books that kneecap unions? If unions were as bad as you claim, then it should be the other way around with the terrible states being the ones with high union penetration in the labor market.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2025, @07:25AM (1 child)
Unions are very bad for the capitalists and bosses, especially when they first start. They enforce safety rules, negotiate for higher wages and better conditions. Like all organisations they eventually get some corrupt members. This isn't really a problem, any more than the occasional crooked cop, bought politician, or tax-cheating businessman. Society can handle that and roll right over it.
The real problems start when the bosses and capitalists side starts using corruption and force. The unions either fight back in kind or are crushed. Either results in a shit-hole state where corruption, bribery, and force are normalised.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday September 03 2025, @12:25AM
That is true, but it's a lot harder for that sort of stuff to be an issue if there's more unions covering a wider range of jobs. There definitely are problem unions like the Teamsters, but from what I've seen the more common issue is just generally a lack of union power due to the various industries consolidating. It's hard for unions to have much bargaining power when a few companies own an industry and can just take the jobs to other states where there aren't any worker protections in place.