Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash, then a hacker found it

> Immediately after the wreck at 9:14 p.m. on April 25, 2019, the crucial data detailing how it unfolded was automatically uploaded to the company’s servers and stored in a vast central database, according to court documents. Tesla’s headquarters soon sent an automated message back to the car confirming that it had received the collision snapshot.

> Moments later, court records show, the data was just as automatically “unlinked” from the 2019 Tesla Model S at the scene, meaning the local copy was marked for deletion, a standard practice for Teslas in such incidents, according to court testimony.

Wow...just wow.

I am trying to imagine a scenario under which that is defensible and does not raise various questions including compliance, legal, retention. Not to mention, who were the people who put that code into production knowing it would do that.

edit: My point is that it was not one lone actor, who would have made that change.

Assuming no malice, I'd guess it's for space saving on the car's internal memory. If the data was uploaded off of the car, there’s no point keeping it in the car.

Sounds like a pretty standard telemetry upload. You transmit it, keep your copy until you get acknowledgement that it was received so you can retry if it went wrong, then delete it when it succeeds.

It’s just worded to make this sound sketchy. I bet ten bucks “unlinked” just refers to the standard POSIX call for deleting a file.

It is a car. A vehicule which can be involved in a fatal accident. It is not a website. There is no "oversight", nor is it "pretty standard" to do it like that: when you don't think about what your system is actually doing (and that is the most charitable explanation), YOU ARE STILL RESPONSIBLE AS IF YOU HAD DONE IT ON PURPOSE.

One of Tesla’s things is that their software is built by software people rather than by car people. This has advantages and disadvantages.

Maybe this is not appropriate for a car, but that doesn’t excuse the ridiculous breathless tone in the quoted text. It’s the worst purple prose making a boring system sound exciting and nefarious. They could have made your point without trying to make the unlink() call sound suspicious.