Technology

not really. you don't want to keep frames without movement, faces or license plates. then you can throw away most frames from a 60 FPS recording. 2 frames per second is better than nothing for running a portable surveillance station. then you can encode them in some efficient format with acceptable compression, and it's not that much anymore. massive 5G rollout was explicitly happening for IoT devices, to be able to handle the load.

Let's do some order of magnitude math... Let's say each car on average "sees" 100 things a day (which is very conservative since there's multiple cameras and with basic object recognition you're going to have a lot of false duplicates). Let's say each picture is cropped to a megabyte with compression, which would be pretty low res to grab identifying information from

You can't do much in the way of video compression, because this isn't a video - we're cropping pictures, too much will change frame to frame

So 100MB a day per car, that's nothing... For one car. How many cars are doing this? 10 million? 50 million?

(Oh, and btw 5G is basically just 4G or 3G outside of Metro areas in the US)

debatable. google picasa had pretty good on-device facial recognition more than a decade ago, on average desktop computer hardware. ente.io runs something similar in their smartphone app today, fully locally. detects faces very well even in memes. tech that can go into a smartphone can go into any smart car too, and likely does.

It detects faces well, that's easy enough, and it can generally label the people because you only have so many in the pool of subjects. If you want to identify people in a population? You're not doing that on a phone. Even the best systems have a big problem with false matches

that's a wrong question. the correct question is what percent of the time is a car outside of the garage. lots of cars are parked on the street all the time while not driving.

Parking lots are not usually good vantage points... That's where most cars live

And as for disparate data points... Unless ever auto company is using the same system, it's going to take non negligible amounts of work to integrate different systems. Palantir is probably going after the lower hanging and more juicy fruit, like Ring doorbells and commercial security systems. Or, you know, phones

That's what it comes down to. All this for what? I'm not saying they wouldn't do it, or it couldn't be done, I'm saying there's better options that they are already using for surveillance

If they were to do it, you'd pick Tesla - they have the cameras and sell monitoring as a feature. They're reasonably widespread, so you'll get almost the same coverage as if all automakers were on board - remember, this is about tracking people and vehicles, if we're recording them we're in a whole different ballpark

Or, you know, set up 100k cameras at key intersections and get a more comprehensive system with a lot less moving pieces

to add to the image processing, first gen ryzen desktop CPUs can handle basic object classification on live camera feed. not effortlessly, but they handle it, and performance has only ever improved with time.