Is there a risk of leakage? Tesla's latest response comes with data | China | Risk

In response to recent media reports that Tesla is prohibited from entering Yueyang Airport due to Tesla's Sentinel mode, there is a risk of leakage. Tesla China responded through its official WeChat account on the evening of August 14th, providing further explanation for its Sentinel mode and stating that the company has established a data center in China to achieve localized data storage. All data generated by the sales of vehicles in the Chinese Mainland market will be stored in China.

Meanwhile, Tesla revealed to reporters that its data center is located within the Shanghai Lingang Super Factory. The company also stated that the previous "No Tesla Entry" sign at Yueyang Airport has been removed and vehicles can enter. However, this statement has not been confirmed by the local public security organs.

And this incident also caused A-share data security related concept stocks to rise early on the 15th. Among them, the competition reached a limit up at one point, with Nanling Technology rising more than 9% at its highest and Hengwei Technology rising nearly 7% at its highest.

Official WeChat post response

Recently, some media reported that Tesla is prohibited from entering Yueyang Airport because Tesla has a sentinel mode, and car owners will record the surrounding environment of the vehicle after leaving, which poses a risk of leakage. The news sparked a lot of discussions among netizens about Tesla Sentinel mode and vehicle data security.

Tesla responded to doubts in an article on its official WeChat account on the evening of the 14th. The company stated that Sentinel mode is currently a standard intelligent safety configuration for mainstream smart cars and is not unique to Tesla. When Tesla vehicles leave the factory, this feature is turned off by default and needs to be manually activated by the owner before it can be used.

Tesla stated in its response that when the vehicle is manually activated in Sentinel mode and locked and parked, if a threat such as damage or theft is detected nearby, the system will sound an alarm to the owner and record suspicious activities around the vehicle. The video clip will be saved on an installed USB device to provide users with safe driving.

The company emphasizes that unlike some brands that can remotely view the surrounding environment of vehicles through Sentinel mode, the data of Tesla vehicles is currently only stored offline on USB devices inside the vehicle, and neither the owner nor Tesla can remotely view it online.

In addition, Tesla also stated that it has established data centers in China to achieve localization of data storage. All data generated by the sales of vehicles in the Chinese Mainland market will be stored in China.

The reporter subsequently contacted Tesla, who revealed that as early as 2021, the company's data center had been built and located in the Shanghai Lingang Super Factory. Moreover, the company revealed that last year the Shanghai Communications Administration reviewed the annual data security reports submitted by various automotive data processing companies, and Tesla passed the regulatory review in one go.

Regarding the incident where Tesla was prohibited from entering Yueyang Airport, Tesla stated that after communication, the local authorities have removed the notice board. However, the reporter has repeatedly contacted the public security organs of Yueyang Sanhe Airport but has not been able to confirm this claim.

Established Shanghai Data Center

On Tesla's official website, regarding Sentinel mode, Tesla stated that Sentinel mode recordings will not be transmitted to Tesla. For models produced in 2018 and later, the recording will be saved to the in car memory and can be viewed directly through the vehicle's touch screen.

In fact, not only Tesla, but also Ideal and NIO have Sentinel or Guard modes, which are used as selling points for vehicles. According to the plan, the sentry mode can guard vehicles during parking, effectively ensuring the safety of vehicles and property. In the event of being scratched, it can also protect the legitimate rights and interests of car owners. On the other hand, the Sentinel mode will deter vandals who intentionally damage vehicles, preventing potential harm.

However, previously, there were concerns from the outside world that the Chinese data collected by Tesla would flow overseas, posing a challenge to national security.

As early as April 7, 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Guidelines for the Access Management of Intelligent Connected Vehicle Production Enterprises and Products", which clearly stated that intelligent connected vehicle production enterprises should collect, use, and protect personal information in accordance with the law, implement data classification and grading management, develop important data catalogs, and not disclose sensitive information related to national security.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also pointed out that personal information and important data collected and generated during operations within the territory of the People's Republic of China should be stored within the territory in accordance with relevant regulations. If it is necessary to provide overseas services due to business needs, it should be reported to the industry regulatory department.

Subsequently, Tesla China immediately responded, announcing in May of the same year that it had established a data center in China to achieve data storage localization, and would gradually add more local data centers to ensure that all data generated from the sales of vehicles in the Chinese Mainland market would be stored in China.

In October of that year, Tesla China announced that its Shanghai R&D Innovation Center and Shanghai Super Factory Data Center had been completed. Moreover, after multiple departments jointly released the "Several Regulations on Automotive Data Security Management" in October 2021, Tesla, as one of the first pilot enterprises, participated in the compliance pilot work organized by the competent department.

How to solve the problem of desensitization?

In fact, intelligent vehicles have a large amount of data and a wide range of applications. Compared to traditional fuel vehicles, intelligent connected vehicles can collect large-scale and wide-ranging vehicle data by deploying multiple sensors such as cameras, millimeter wave radar, and LiDAR outside the vehicle, as well as using the DMS driver monitoring system and intelligent cockpit APP applications inside the vehicle.

Huang Peng, Deputy Chief Engineer of the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, previously stated that an intelligent connected vehicle collects at least 10TB of multidimensional data every day, which includes not only facial expressions, movements, gaze, and sound data of drivers and passengers, but also vehicle geographic location, in car and out of car environmental data, and vehicle networking usage data.

However, limitations on data have also raised concerns in the market about the evolution of intelligent driving. In fact, as a branch of artificial intelligence technology, autonomous driving mainly relies on machine learning based autonomous driving models. The autonomous driving model makes action strategies based on the data collected during driving, in order to control the normal movement of the vehicle.

In this context, model training requires a massive amount of data, especially for complex artificial intelligence such as autonomous driving, which requires a large amount of road condition data and raw image data, so that the model can more accurately identify obstacle routes, traffic signals, etc. There are concerns in the industry that if a large amount of data is filtered out, it will affect the quality of data used for training.

"The policy has never stipulated that in car cameras are not allowed to be used or used for image acquisition. The policy only adds a desensitization prerequisite during the acquisition process," a new energy vehicle company official told reporters in China. The person stated that the information collected by the external camera of the host factory can be subjected to image desensitization processing. From a technical perspective, image desensitization processing can be completed through computing power support and OTA online upgrades.