People are more comfortable with data collection when they understand what the data will be used for and agree that the use is valuable to society. If the use is unclear or doesn't seem important, then people worry that the real reason is something creepy that's been left unsaid.

In this case, people mostly agree that R&D in self-driving cars is important, and can clearly see how this data helps with that. Whereas identifying traffic in Google Maps/Apple Maps feels less important, and the connection between location tracking and detecting traffic takes a little more work to understand.

If Facebook or another company with goals that may not be clearly noble did it people may question their motives more. I also believe these is a natural higher level of trust in people like Elon Musk who have more praise worthy missions set for their companies than let's say someone like Mark Zuckerberg, ie. Elon wants humans to have a backup plant and is taking actions to save this planet, he seems to have dedicated his life to that mission, Mark maybe not so much.

Musk also isn't on record as calling his customers "dumb fucks," the way Zuckerberg is.

What are you on the record saying when you were 19 ?

Musk doesn't have to call anyone a dumb fuck, he just points to some graphs. The log data clearly shows that the driver was an idiot.

It's been a fracas with Google too. Take this discussion (the first substantial one I dug up on the topic): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6873032

There's someone making the same consent argument (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6873947 ) and lots of people expressing ambivalence and more about sharing the data with Google.

As far as how people are responding to Tesla doing it, you did reply to a comment questioning their practices without evening being exposed to them.

Perceived value is greater. Everyone wants self driving cars to be easily accessible and without human intervention. I'd give up my data personally for that goal. Its certainly more valuable than having Google direct me to a route which is 2 minutes faster.

Exchanging privacy for direct physical safety is a little easier to swallow I'd imagine.

Assuming of course that new Starbucks don't start showing up on routes preferred by Tesla drivers.

I would assume that this is because it is already kinda-sorta common behavior for software to track this kind of data, while this is an entirely new thing for cars.

It's easier to see that Tesla are going to do something exciting and positive with the data.

This is no different than how people viewed the idea of using your real name online pre- and post-Facebook.

Privacy erodes naturally. It is inventible. The benefits outweigh the costs almost always. The need of the many outweighs the needs of the few.

The future is one in which humans are recognized, at least by the machines, as being more like a single organism than a group of individuals.

I would argue the opposite is true: the perfectly anonymous population can have policy and management at only the broadest granularities of abstraction.

Data collection is all about machines being able to treat you as an individual.