Months ago Elon Musk tried to corrupt Apple to turn over iPhone user private data to Tesla, just to help avoid accountability for his “self driving” car crashes. The corruption plan didn’t work and Tesla had to pay a huge settlement to a grieving family.
Apple clammed up really fast after Tesla tried to surprise the court (with evidence it had been paying Apple engineers under the table to spy and rat on users).
Tesla obtained a sworn statement from an Apple engineering manager, James Harding, who analyzed unencrypted telemetry data on Huang’s phone and said it “suggests possible user interaction, which might be a screen touch or button press.”
The Huang family’s lawyers have countered in a court filing that Tesla purposefully hid its questioning of Harding from them until after pretrial fact-finding deadlines. They are now trying to force Apple to provide more information, and the iPhone maker is pushing back, saying that it shouldn’t have to hand over confidential material.
Submitting an Apple engineer’s personal testimony as a declaration, instead of a deposition, was said to “circumvent the discovery process”. When the family shifted to proper discovery, Apple went silent.
I’m not a lawyer but this reads to me like once things got real and Tesla revealed sinister plans, Apple officially was not playing.
Apple said in an application to quash the subpoena that it was “not a party to this case, has never appeared, and has not received any notice of entry of order relating to the dispute.”
Tesla then abruptly settled the case with the family. The company that had repeatedly said for years it would never back down in court, that it was hiring “hardcore street fighter” lawyers so “there will be blood” because it would never settle… and yet one day before trial:
The settlement was made as the trial was about to start over the high-profile accident involving Tesla’s driver assistant technology, ending a five-year legal battle over the case. […]
The settlement may have provided a blueprint for others suing over Autopilot. Tesla faces a flurry of lawsuits over crashes related to its alleged use, putting the automaker at risk of large monetary judgments.
“It is striking to me that Tesla decided to go this far publicly and then settle,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina with expertise in autonomous vehicle law.
After five years of costly fights with the victim’s family, Tesla extremely suddenly switched to a hush money approach, to prevent this court from exposing “self driving” as fraud.
Elon Musk allegedly became so personally enraged after money funneled to an Apple engineer had failed to destroy a Tesla victim’s family, he started a childish social media tantrum full of petty disinformation about Apple privacy.
Elon Musk was fact-checked on his own social media platform, X [Twitter], on Tuesday after unleashing a firestorm of criticism and threats against Apple over the company’s plans to incorporate OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT into its devices, going as far as to threaten to ban the devices at his companies over alleged security fears.
“His” companies? He literally said “my” companies despite them being owned by the public.
He’s mad.
He’s jealous.
He’s mad and jealous… about Apple refusing to violate user privacy to help Tesla avoid exposure for fraud, and for Apple partnering on AI with someone other than him.
What he really means when he tries to warn people that Apple could give user data to partners, is that Apple refused to give data to him.
Thus his shallow clownish debunked rants about Apple are exactly backwards, and have absolutely no basis in safety or reality.
If anything, Apple privacy was in serious danger from Tesla. Allegedly the settlement, sealed by Tesla under threat of litigation, was somewhere in tens of millions. So how much did they spend, how hard did they try, to crack Apple engineers before settling the case?
He’s just mad and jealous.
