Tesla Fleet Telemetry (opens in new tab)

The current situation for third party apps (which do exist, plenty of them) is you either give them your Tesla account username/password (super bad) or an access token that you get by signing into your Tesla account, which is less bad but still gives the app the same access as your full Tesla account.

So yes, by building a framework to allow users to authorize third party apps to receive limited telemetry data without handing over their full Tesla account keys this may allow for an improvement in privacy for those who want to use such apps.

>At Tesla we believe that security and privacy are core tenets of any modern technology.

Seeing this after the whistleblower/leak regarding Tesla employees having unfettered access to onboard camera footage (and that embarrassing/compromising footage of customers was actively shared internally) is... rich.

Our Teslas sends an insane amount of data home, even down to event calls for rolling down the window or opening the car door. But you kind of know that going into it - ok not everyone does but anyone who is reasonable technical and most likely to care about privacy and understand the issues is aware. And it's technically in the small print which of course everyone reads fully when they buy the car. /s

They also record the road and the way you drive it using cameras in the vehicle you own and paid for, upload it using your home internet connection and improve their self driving model which will no doubt represents $billion's, maybe $ trillions of enterprise value over time.

A Tesla is not a normal 'dumb' car, and you accept that going into it. Allowing consumers to have fair access to that data in a safe manner that doesn't involve sharing usernames and passwords is actually the right and responsible action on Tesla's part.

> “there ain’t nothing you can do about sharing your private data with us”

FWIW there are settings in the car to disable certain things. Not sure how much it _actually_ disables though.

>“there ain’t nothing you can do about sharing your private data with us”

You can turn off lots of data sharing and monitoring settings in the standard UI in the car, last I looked it wasn't even hidden behind any dark patterns.

Privacy isn't "no one can know anything about me, ever, even if it is my choice to tell them". By this logic you are violating your own privacy when you introduce yourself to someone with your name.

The actual concept of privacy is entirely in line with their idea that you "should be able to decide what data [you] share with third parties, how [you] share it, and when it can be shared"

Same as apple. "privacy is a fundamental human right"

...can't activate a phone without connecting to apple

...privacy policy is hundreds of pages

...can't block apple

"others"

I.e. my own home server.

> Also, un-stated “there ain’t nothing you can do about sharing your private data with us”

Are predditors now coming to this site to spread their "spaceship man bad" propaganda? There are obvious switches that toggle data sharing. A quick googling would have revealed that: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/05/tesla...

Privacy advocates should reconcile themselves with the idea that sometimes people want to share their data. If I owned a Tesla, I’d enjoy using this framework to put data about my driving into a google sheet.

Private information means the user controls their data. They will often do things privacy advocates don’t like or think are dumb. That’s the privacy advocate’s problem, not the user’s.

It's in reference to a company owning a fleet of Teslas, not Tesla owning the fleet.[1] The point of this reference implementation is to make it easier for companies that own a bunch of Teslas to collect data about their cars.

1. https://www.tesla.com/fleet

"Operated as a unit" is not an inaccurate description of Tesla's footprint. Every one of their cars, assuming factory-ish conditions, is sending live, realtime data back to Tesla-owned servers. That data is analyzed, and the output of that analysis impacts the driving behavior of the vehicles in the future (training their AI models). Commands are sent from Tesla's servers to change the operational state of the car every single day (most of the time, I hope, at the behest of the owner, e.g. "turn on the AC").

That's a fleet. You may not like it, but that's what Tesla owners knowingly opt-in to.

"fleet" is also just used as a collective noun for cars, ships or aircraft.

This is referencing your own fleet of Tesla vehicles though, like company cars or rental fleet. Not a reference to the Tesla company's fleet.

Terms can change. To me it brings to mind that all the vehicles are sharing training data as a network to improve self driving capabilities.

They can still control them remotely, so there's that.

Dropped my Model Y off for a warranty repair a few weeks ago. Asked the service desk if they needed the key, they said no. Apparently they can access the car whenever they like.

this is standard industry parlance

The problem with data is that they can often reveal information you need, but didn't even know you need.

The way I understand Tesla's meaning of "data they need" is the data that you know exists, know is useful, and has a predefined purpose. However, blind data mining can often bring insight that may give you an edge over competition, so the unethical data collectors have an advantage.

On the other hand, collecting all available data makes you biased by the particular nature of data collected - not everthing that is measurable is important, and not everything that's important is measurable. Even 100% accurate data can lead you astray if it gives you an incomplete picture. That's how we got algorithms that optimize outrage, because outrage and stress create massive engagement.

The Kubernetes implementation is on the server side, not the car. The only way to control the car is through Tesla's API,[1] and that doesn't let you do dangerous stuff like turn the wheel while someone is driving.

Even if you could overwrite the software on the car, you'd still have to contend with the physical controls available to the driver. The steering wheel is physically connected to a typical rack and pinion setup. The brake pedal is physically connected to hydraulic lines just like every other car on the road. And like most cars, the brakes are more powerful than the motor.

1. There's no official documentation but a big chunk of it has been reverse engineered: https://tesla-api.timdorr.com/vehicle/commands

F-16s have kubernetes on them now[0].

[0] https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...

https://github.com/adriankumpf/teslamate ?

That was the first thing I thought of when I saw this post and read the code a bit.

Also fuck the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for telling auto makers to ignore a very well intentioned state law.

Like that other Elon Musk company!

I've used many brands of adaptive cruise control with lane centering and none of them are absolutely trustworthy. I don't see why anyone would expect Tesla's adaptive cruise control with lane centering to be any different. Especially considering they called it "autopilot", a term which can refer to the performing of rote tasks without self-awareness.[0]

[0] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/american/on-a...

I had the same question. There doesn't seem to be any information regarding next steps once the server is running.

The github.io site that they include the link to is the actual repository that can be read by Helm, in particular by it polling the known "index.yaml" file at https://teslamotors.github.io/helm-charts/index.yaml. Something _could_ be done using Github's "/raw" endpoint, but generally speaking Github pages works better for this sort of purpose and also is built to be a CDN, meaning it has additional caching layers in front of it that make it more performant.