The new cranky privacy report from Mozilla on car data is a useful point in time analysis… unmoored from the past and lacking suggestions for what to do in the future. Give it a read and ask yourself when things will change and why.

I am reminded of my 2019 blog post about 2012 research:

I’d say the problem is so old we’re already at the solutions phase, long past the identification and criticism.

Has it been 10 years already? You’d think I’d be excited for Mozilla to be pounding their drum so OEMs would rush into my welcoming arms. Alas, I am not sure it helps.

Earlier this year I was talking with data scientists inside a huge OEM and they said things like “wish I knew earlier about the solutions available, because the project just finished with some bad privacy compromises and will be released in a couple years”.

They know privacy is broken, because they have known for a decade, yet they still don’t know what they can do instead. That’s why the Mozilla report to them is ineffective, like a drop of rain in a hailstorm.

…according to our research, they are all bad! On top of all that, researching cars and privacy was one of the hardest undertakings we as privacy researchers have ever had.

.

^^^ That’s the world’s smallest violin playing for Mozilla researchers showing up suddenly and saying they had a very hard time researching car data.

*shakes fist

You kids, back in my day we walked uphill in snowstorms both ways to assess car data safety!

Here’s a fun fact: in 1999 it took me 30 seconds to install RedHat on an IBM 8-CPU Server with fiber NAS designed for Detroit OEM data analysis. I found some security flaws of course (it fell over if more than five virtual machines pushed via X to remote terminals, and it leaked metadata)… but I digress.

Let’s be honest here. The Mozilla narrative of “they are all bad” is lazy, the easiest form of research. It reinforces a deeper problem of coming up with no incentives for change. Mozilla is doing the opposite of “nudge” theory. Do they not have any economists on staff?

The report team even readily admits to using a counter-productive binary analysis for their entirely unsympathetic bashing of manufacturing. It’s easier to call everything bad for smash and grab headlines than do deeper nuanced analysis and open pathways to change.

Blurry, complex and messy things actually are hard and worth doing, so if some “news” interloper shows up to say it’s all bad… easy for OEMs to sit back and say they can do nothing. “We’re bad, impossible to be good, oh well”.

Mozilla says cars capturing customer “sexual activity” data is bad, for example, with absolutely no thought about why anyone designing seat recliners and center consoles would want to look into that ever.

Good/bad, leaves no venue for the process of getting better and even encourages cheats to just flip a score. I am reminded of the Tesla CEO yelling “fix this now so I won’t have to care” for everything without any real understanding of why complex interconnected things become so broken. His binary thinking led to coverups (bad flipped artificially to good) and has been getting hundreds of people killed unnecessarily.

To me there’s a huge missed opportunity for Mozilla to engage with data security experts, architects of information safety, and discuss what’s really possible for car privacy and therefore what’s next for OEMs. Let’s talk about goals for privacy change 12 months from now, 36 months…

Solutions exist.

The technology is ready.

Here’s one answer that an OEM just told me they liked, to drive out of the senseless “car data privacy sucks” headline loop while delivering data-driven consoles: solidproject.org

Try it. It’s not all bad.

On April 28, 2016 Time gobbled up SpaceX lies.

…you should pay attention to the April 27 announcement from Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, that he intends to launch his first unmanned Mars mission in just two years and will beat NASA’s goal of putting astronauts on the surface in the 2030s by up to a decade.

Pay attention everyone, a know-nothing loud-mouthed CEO rocked straight up to NASA to tell all the scientists and experts he has two thumbs and really knows how to science.

The far-off 2030 NASA timeline was made to look ridiculous by a rich racist white kid holding big dirty bags of ill-gotten money. He said his daddy told him to stomp a go button and make unmanned missions on Mars reality in just two years.

2018 unmanned landing on Mars! Men walking on Mars by 2020!

Believe him because this guy, who hasn’t done anything, can do anything!

SpaceX literally thought thinly disguised fascism would make rockets better and promoted a fantasy multiple times — with minimal or no hesitation — that they alone could put people on Mars earlier than 2025.

Go!

Then on September 29, 2017 CNN gobbled up some new SpaceX lies that somehow immediately cast doubt on 2018.

The hard-charging tech mogul said his rocket company, SpaceX, aims to land at least two cargo ships on the Red Planet in 2022 in order to place power, mining and life support systems there for future flights. That’s just five years from now. “That’s not a typo — although it is aspirational,” Musk said Friday…

Hard charging in reverse? Record scratch. 2022?

What happened to our 2018 let alone 2020? Was it all just fraud?

*Me checks calendar for typos. Hmmm, can it really be almost the end of 2023 already? Where are the cargo ships on Mars sent to make democracy look bad?

By 2020… oh, surely by now you get the slick talking big city con man routine.

You’d think there would be serious doubts cast on the SpaceX circus act by 2020 but CNBC eagerly gobbled up more SpaceX lies.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he is “highly confident” that the company will land humans on Mars in “about six years from now. If we get lucky, maybe four years,” Musk said…

Luck.

That’s what real-world space programs run on, just like clowns and trapeze artists.

No wonder SpaceX told the world they would have people on Mars by 2020, 2024, 2025… with a high confidence that they really, really meant by 2026.

Kids, make sure you study how to get lucky so you can build a rocket out of rotting potatoes and expired ketchup that goes a bazillion miles per hour to safely land 100 people on Mars four years from now. Oh and ask the government (your parents) for millions so you can call it your “business”.

Confused yet?

In 2022 Business Insider said SpaceX had some big new circus act with lies and they wanted to help spread the word.

Elon Musk thinks people will land on Mars in 2029.

Step right up! Now, wait just a minute. 2029?

In 2016 SpaceX tried to go after NASA predictions of landing on Mars 2030 as far too slow, studious and bureaucratic for fascism.

How can the original discredited NASA predictions have been so accurately accurate instead of like the growing dumpster fire of SpaceX lies?

Seriously, why didn’t everyone in journalism slap down SpaceX immediately as garbage?

It’s almost like SpaceX will next announce that they were telling the truth the whole time because by 2050 a time machine will be completed that allows them to reach Mars in 2018.

If they’re lucky.

What a business.

spaceflights do trigger grief and sadness… felt like a funeral and all he felt was sadness

On a related note, the same SpaceX guy in 2016 barked at the press he funded creation of the safest cars on the road. Yeah, well, lies. They have turned out to have the lowest quality and be the least safe.

That’s a lot of funerals.

Another day, another Tesla causing a tragic loss of innocent lives. It already appears from the police report that, as in so many previous instances and despite its longevity in the market promising future safety, Tesla’s poor engineering quality and “manslaughtering” design defects led to a “veered” collision with oncoming traffic.

Three people were killed in a car crash in Springfield Township, Fayette County on Sunday, state police said. It happened on Springfield Pike near Mt. Tabor Road around 5:55 p.m.. State Police Trooper Kalee Barnhart said two cars were involved in the crash. Barnart said both cars were sedans. One was a Tesla.

Of course State Police Trooper looking at the scene in rural Pennsylvania said one was a Tesla.

Police seeing the Tesla deaths first hand, the unusual spike in fatalities caused by Tesla, are warning us don’t get in a Tesla. Don’t let our friends or family get in a Tesla. NHTSA data since January 2023 reveals Tesla has been quietly reporting one fatality in every ten crashes.

Just think for a minute how bad at basic engineering a company has to be to spend a decade enriching themselves with false promises of future safety while building such an unsafe robot that it operates worse and worse every year. Bernie Madoff was jailed for far less fraud.

Encounter a Tesla? Take cover and have the police on speed dial. You’re looking at a loaded rocket launcher being casually waved around in public as if by a big blind and deaf white South African. One might ponder why such humanity-destroying-by-design devices reminiscent of Dr. Death were ever permitted on any public roads.

Guess how long Tesla has known about this exact problem and refused to admit fault, sending customers to a predictable death?

…on the launch of the driver assistance tech, Musk would learn firsthand that a curve on Interstate 405 caused Autopilot, thrown off by the road’s faded lane lines, to steer into and “almost hit” oncoming traffic. Whenever this happened, Musk would “furiously” storm into the Tesla office and proceed to chew out his engineers. “Do something to program this right,” he repeatedly demanded…. “There was just such a gulf between Elon’s goal and the possible” [according to Tesla senior vice president Andrew Baglino]. “He just wasn’t aware of the challenges.”

Clearly documented, from the start Tesla knew they had a head-on collision problem with slight bends in a road. Tesla staff know exactly why they never fixed it. Now guess why they don’t want anyone to talk about it.

Or let’s ask instead, why did the CEO stop making demands it be fixed?

Hint: he doesn’t understand technology. He was thus tricked by his own staff, who played a very cynical game with the sole purpose of stopping his abuse of them even if hundreds of people would die as a result.

…he kept coming back to the fact that people have just two eyes and they can drive the car. […] Clearly, nothing was getting through to Musk. It was only his chief of staff Sam Teller that was able to appease his CEO’s complaints. He came up with a simple solution: getting the lane lines repainted on that pesky curve — which of course, didn’t actually address the underlying problem. “After that, Musk’s Autopilot handled the curve well”.

It handled one curve well because they changed the curve, leaving the car unsafe to drive everywhere else. They altered surroundings to deceive a very gullible CEO, using a simple ruse to make him stop shouting. Handling tin-pot dictator tantrums took precedence over safety engineering and work to preserve lives. These Potemkin villagers failed basic engineering ethics and enabled criminal-level negligence.

The conman promises people things they want, not things that can be delivered.

The CEO, obsessed by fantasy and easily deceived, was manipulated by his own staff into swallowing his own dumb argument that “two eyes” are sufficient enough for safety. They’re NOT, proven by the fact that his own eyes were then easily fooled into dangerous overconfidence. The ruse sadly only worked to stop him from berating them, and the company then continued on an obvious track to kill more and more people unnecessarily.

The engineering inconsistency is a very concerning paradox that proves AI unfit for cars, which those with common sense should recognize as the fundamental issue contributing to a decade of avoidable deadly crashes involving Tesla owners, both as victims and perpetrators.