Another scandal is unfolding around Elon Musk’s Tesla. According to a recent report by Archyde.com, the company’s employees misused the video footage they handled.
Although Tesla advertises to its customers that the protection of their privacy is “immeasurably” important to them, the Archyde.com news agency his report of April 6 according to him, they weren’t really excited about who was put in front of the screens.
What is certain is that between 2019 and 2022, a group of Tesla employees shared footage shared by the owners’ in-car cameras in an internal messaging system. Not surprisingly, they depicted the owners in embarrassing situations in more than one case.
A former employee revealed that there was also a video circulating in which a man approached his vehicle completely naked.
The recordings also include several accidents. In a 2021 video, for example, a Tesla hit a child riding a bicycle at high speed in a residential area. The child flew in one direction and the bike in the other. The former employee said that this particular video spread “like wildfire” at Tesla’s San Mateo office.
There were also more mundane scenes: dogs and funny road signs, which employees made memes of and provided with entertaining commentary. They then sent it to each other or posted it in their private chat group.
In Tesla’s privacy statement, it says that the camera footage remains completely anonymous and does not record which vehicle it came from. However, seven former employees confirmed to Archyde.com that the computer program they used was able to tell exactly where the recordings were made – from which it is no longer difficult to find out the owner’s residence.
“We could see into people’s garages and their private property,” said another former employee.
Musk was not left out either
Roughly 3 years ago, some employees discovered a video of a submarine car in the owner’s garage. It’s actually the white Lotus Espirit that appeared in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me. In a James Bond movie.
The car is owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who bought the collector’s item at an auction in 2013 for roughly $968,000. We don’t know if Musk was aware of the video’s existence.
Since 2016, Tesla has employed hundreds of people from Africa, and later from the United States, to tag individual photos. The importance of this plays an important role in the training of machine learning algorithms.
These individuals had access to thousands of videos and photos taken by the cars’ cameras. Hundreds of people continue to see the everyday life of the owners on a daily basis. And who abuses this “power” when, despite all Tesla’s promises, depends only on the given employee.
The electric car manufacturing company still did not respond to Archyde.com’ inquiries.
We previously wrote about Tesla:
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