Employees of the electric car manufacturer Tesla are said to have shared videos and images from the built-in security cameras in internal chats. Among other things, you can see: Accident videos and intimate situations.
“Safety” is the word used over and over once more on the Tesla website when describing Autopilot functionality. To ensure this, “every new Tesla vehicle is equipped with eight external cameras and powerful image processing.” In addition, the manufacturer of electric cars assures its millions of customers that their privacy is “enormously important to the company and always will be”. The cameras that Tesla puts in vehicles to aid driving are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.”
But now a possible scandal is shaking confidence in the billionaire Elon Musk Companies established: Between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees are said to have shared private videos and images captured by several customers’ dash cams via an internal messaging system. This emerges from interviews by the Archyde.com news agency with nine former employees.
A video of the accident spread “like wildfire”.
As a result, some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. A former employee described video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked. According to the report, there were also recordings of traffic accidents, garages and private properties in the internal chats.
In the interviews, a former employee describes the distribution of an accident video from 2021 as “like wildfire”. according to the British newspaper The Guardianto see a Tesla enter a residential area at high speed and hit a child on a bicycle, according to another former employee. According to him, the video spread in a Tesla office in San Mateo, California.
“We might see them washing clothes”
“It was a violation of them privacy, to be honest. And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla following seeing how they treated some of these people,” said a former employee. And another explained, “It bothers me because the people who own the car buy, not knowing that their privacy is not being respected. We might see them doing laundry and other really intimate things. We might see their children.”
The distribution of such personal content might be considered a violation of Tesla’s own privacy policies and potentially subject to Federal Trade Commission intervention.
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The use of cameras for Tesla’s driver assistance and safety systems has recently caused controversy. A German consumer association sued the company last July, alleging that the company failed to inform its owners that they must comply with European data protection rules when recording activities around their vehicles. The consumer advocacy group said this month that Tesla will now inform customers that surveillance mode may violate privacy laws.
As the Bloomberg news agency reported back in March 2021, Tesla vehicles were also banned from Chinese military complexes over concerns that the vehicle’s cameras might collect sensitive information. During a virtual appearance at a conference in China this month, Elon Musk said the company does not use its vehicles for espionage purposes.
