Tesla workers shared videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.
The images and videos, several of which were “highly invasive”, were shared via an internal messaging system. One former employee described a video of a man approaching a Tesla completely naked. Another showed a Tesla travelling at high speed in a residential area and hitting a child riding a bike.
Other images were “more mundane”, but Tesla employees turned them into memes by adding captions or commentary.
Tesla equips its vehicles with cameras to assist driving, but states that they are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.”
One of the unnamed ex-employees told Reuters: “We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties. Let’s say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.”
Tesla states in its Customer Privacy Notice that its “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle,” but seven former employees said it was possible to identify the location of the recordings. This could reveal where the Tesla owner lived.
The notice goes on to say that if a customer agrees to share data, “your vehicle may collect the data and make it available to Tesla for analysis,” and may include “short video clips or images.”
Three years ago, some employees stumbled across and shared a video of the white Lotus Esprit that featured in the 1977 film, The Spy Who Loved Me. The car, nicknamed ‘Wet Nellie’, was parked in a garage; Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought the car at auction in 2013, but there’s no suggestion that he was aware of the recording.
Neither Tesla nor Elon Musk responded to Reuters’ request for comment.
Source: Reuters