"Safety" is the word that is used again and again on the Tesla website when it comes to describing Autopilot functionality. To ensure this, "every new Tesla vehicle is equipped with eight external cameras and powerful image processing." In addition, the electric car manufacturer assures its millions of customers that their privacy is "enormously important to the company and always will be". The cameras that Tesla builds into vehicles to assist driving are "designed from the ground up to protect your privacy."
But now a possible scandal is shaking confidence in the company founded by billionaire Elon Musk: Between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees are said to have shared private videos and images taken by the car cameras of several customers via an internal messaging system. This emerges from interviews with nine former employees by the news agency Reuters.
"Like wildfire" spread an accident video
Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. A former employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked. In addition, according to the report, the internal chats also contained recordings of traffic accidents, garages and private property.
"Like wildfire," a former employee describes in the interviews the distribution of an accident video from 2021. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, it shows a Tesla driving at high speed into a residential area and hitting a child on a bicycle, another former employee reported. According to him, the video spread in a Tesla office in San Mateo, California.
"We could see them washing laundry"
"It was an invasion of privacy, to be honest. And I've always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people," said a former employee. And another explained: "It bothers me because the people who buy the car don't know that their privacy is not respected. We could see them washing laundry and doing other really intimate things. We could see their children."
Dissemination of such personal content could be considered a violation of Tesla's own privacy policies and potentially lead to intervention by the Federal Trade Commission.
The use of cameras for Tesla's driver assistance and safety systems had recently repeatedly caused controversy. A German consumer association sued the company last July, claiming the company failed to inform its owners that they must comply with European data protection regulations when recording activity around their vehicle. The consumer advocacy organization said this month that Tesla will now inform its customers that the monitoring mode may violate privacy laws.
As the news agency Bloomberg reported in March 2021, Tesla vehicles were also banned from Chinese military complexes due to concerns that the vehicle cameras could 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.