Tesla workers reportedly found to be sharing sensitive images recorded by customer cars

Tesla has some explaining to do after reports of employees from the company privately sharing invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras.

The discovery was made through interviews conducted by Reuters with nine former Tesla employees.

The content in question was shared between 2019 and 2022 and ranged from bizarre and mundane to inappropriate and morbid. One such incident saw a Tesla customer approach a vehicle completely naked.

In a more extreme case, videos of crashes and incidents of road rage were shared. A video from 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed striking a child in a residential area. An ex-employee from the company stated that the video spread “like wildfire” through one-on-one chats in a Tesla office in San Mateo, California.

If that wasn’t bad enough, some videos were not just shared but also turned into memes, with employees adding their own commentary or captions before sharing. Several ex-employees say that although some posts were only shared between two people, others were seen by many more.

Tesla’s online “Customer Privacy Notice” states that “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” This is not the case according to former employees, who told Reuters the computer program they used could show the location of recordings.

This even opens the possibility of revealing the home addresses of Tesla owners.

Shockingly, one former employee said that some recordings appeared to have been made when vehicles were parked and turned off.

“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” one ex-employee said. “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 did not respond to detailed questions about the report, says Reuters.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Source: Reuters