Fears over the state of Tesla owners’ privacy have been stoked, as former employees claim that videos and photos taken by vehicles were shared internally for non-professional purposes, such as making memes, on Tesla’s internal communications service.
Several former employees claimed they saw private footage collected by vehicles that were shared for the purposes of amusing or entertaining other workers, reports Reuters. Some of the images were modified using programs like Photoshop and were turned into memes that spread “like wildfire,” according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” said one former employee. “Let’s say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.”
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Tesla can gain access to data from its vehicles’ cameras if buyers agree to a privacy rights agreement. The footage is supposed to be used for the purposes of improving its advanced driver assistance features, like Autopilot.
Indeed, the footage has been successful in that purpose. The video data was used to help improve Autopilot while backing out of garages. As such, former employees said that they could see into customers’ homes for their normal work duty, but even then the workers were conflicted about the access they had to the vehicle owners’ lives.
“I saw some scandalous stuff sometimes, you know, like I did see scenes of intimacy but not nudity,” said one former employee. “And there was just definitely a lot of stuff that like, I wouldn’t want anybody to see about my life.”
We reached out to Tesla, which does not operate a media relations department, seeking comment on this story. The company has not responded.
Not all of the footage was used to improve Autopilot, though. Some former employees said they saw photos of nude customers, as well as sex toys, shared over the internal messaging service. Others shared images of humorous road signs, videos of bad driving, road rage incidents, and some even found themselves looking at the Lotus Esprit submarine from the James Bond movie franchise that is owned by the company’s own CEO, Elon Musk.
Although Tesla’s Customer Privacy Notice says that recordings gathered from Tesla cameras remain anonymous, Reuters reports that seven former employees claim that the programs they used at work could show the location of a recording, potentially revealing where an owner lived.
“I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don’t think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected,” said a former employee. “We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids.”
Speaking to the outlet, the executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University, David Choffnes, described the practice of sharing data like this as “morally reprehensible.” He also noted that the behavior would violate Tesla’s own privacy policy, and could even lead to intervention by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, though there is no evidence that the government is looking into this matter yet and an FTC spokesperson said that it doesn’t comment on individual companies or their conduct.
