“The protection of your personal data is and will always be one of our priorities”: on paper, so says the electric vehicle brand Tesla. However, between 2019 and 2022, groups of employees exchanged highly intrusive videos recorded by their customers’ car cameras, Reuters revealed after collecting testimonials from nine employees.
Among the videos shared, Reuters mentions a man approaching a car completely naked, a person being dragged into a car apparently against their will, and even car accidents. One involved a child who was hit by a bicycle.
stolen moments
Some of these recordings came from parked vehicles, including at clients’ private homes. (Today, Tesla no longer collects video of vehicles turned off.)
“It was a breach of confidentiality, to be honest,” confessed a former employee interviewed by the news agency. “And he always joked that he would never buy a Tesla after seeing how some of these people’s data was handled.”
Some screenshots of these videos had become “memes” at Tesla’s San Mateo, California offices, commented on, liked and shared by employees, including managers, in private chat groups on the Mattermost messaging system. A former employee goes so far as to state, “People who were promoted to high positions shared a lot of this funny stuff and gained notoriety for being funny.”
autonomous driving
The company claims to use data from its fleet to train its artificial intelligence models for autonomous driving, for example. People are in charge of manually identifying elements such as pedestrians, road markings, traffic signs and the position of traffic lights.
Each client must consent to the sharing of their data for these purposes. But, says the brand, “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not associated with you or your vehicle, unless we receive the data after a safety-related event (crash or airbag deployment).” However, some employees describe a feature that allowed video taggers at Tesla to geotag them on Google Maps.
Others have accomplished this by identifying recognizable objects within private homes. Three years ago, some would have even seen a very distinctive submersible vehicle, dubbed the “Wet Nellie,” which made its appearance in a 1977 James Bond, and is owned by none other than famed Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
To date, Tesla had not responded to these disclosures.
Source: BFM TV
