“After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear, a popular automotive show, where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives,” said Elon Musk, chairman, product architect and CEO of Tesla Motors. These logs clearly contradict Broder’s review. For example, says Musk, “Cruise control was never set to 54 mph as claimed in the article, nor did he limp along at 45 mph. Broder in fact drove at speeds from 65 mph to 81 mph for a majority of the trip and at an average cabin temperature setting of 72 F.”
On February 18, NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote a very mild acceptance of some of Musk’s criticisms. “Did he [John Broder] use good judgment along the way? Not especially... Mr. Broder left himself open to valid criticism by taking what seem to be casual and imprecise notes along the journey, unaware that his every move was being monitored.” The article in question shows the car being loaded onto a breakdown truck, having run out of power. Musk’s contention, supported by his data logs, is that Broder engineered the premature loss of power.
But it isn’t the review, nor the car itself, nor even the row that worries privacy activists – it is the sheer volume of data captured by the Tesla logs. Bruce Schneier comments, “The implication is that Tesla Motors only does this for media test drives, but it gives you an idea of the sort of things that will be collected once automobile black boxes become the norm. We're used to airplane black boxes, which only collected a small amount of data from the minutes just before an incident. But that was back when data was expensive. Now that it's cheap, expect black boxes to collect everything all the time. And once it's collected, it'll be used. By auto manufacturers, by insurance companies, by car rental companies, by marketers. The list will be long.”
Black boxes are already making their way into European cars. eCall is a European initiative for an onboard black box to automatically call the nearest emergency center following an accident. Feature creep will inevitably expand the use of such a black box. In July 2012 the BBC reported, “Although the eCall service will be provided free of charge, the Commission expects the technology to be used for commercial purposes in future, such as tracking stolen vehicles or charging road tolls electronically.” It is a small leap of technology from the Ecall black box to the total logging used by Tesla.
But Schneier warns that the Tesla incident provides a much wider warning for the future. “Even intense electronic surveillance of the actions of a person in an enclosed space did not succeed in providing an unambiguous record of what happened... This will increasingly be a problem as we are judged by our data.” The worry is that even intense recording will come down to value judgements by the recorder – which could as easily be law enforcement as insurance companies and marketers.