Privacy concerns at Tesla: Employees shared private, embarrassing videos recorded by customers' car cameras

Over the years, Elon Musk's electric car major Tesla has given its car owners assurances that their privacy is of utmost importance to the company. According to the company, they have built cameras into their vehicles to help drivers, and they were designed to protect their privacy. However, between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system videos and images recorded by customers' car cameras, which sometimes revealed sensitive and invasive recordings, according to Reuters' interviews with nine former employees.

In some instances, as reported by Reuters, the videos showed embarrassing situations, such as a man approaching a vehicle naked. The images shared also included crashes and road-rage incidents. The ex-employee mentioned a video showing a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike. This led to Tesla's image spreading around a San Mateo, California, office via private one-on-one chats.

Although some recordings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several former employees who Reuters spoke to. While Tesla says its camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to the owner or the car, the employees used a computer program that could reveal the location of the recordings, which could have revealed where the Tesla owner lived. An ex-employee also stated that some recordings were made when cars were parked and turned off.

There were recordings that captured embarrassing moments of Tesla customers, including a video described by a former employee of a naked man approaching a vehicle.

According to some former employees, Tesla CEO Elon Musk's car, a white Lotus Esprit sub featured in the 1977 James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me,” was also recorded and shared in a private group chat. The vehicle was nicknamed "Wet Nellie," and Musk bought it for $968,000 at an auction in 2013. It is unclear whether Musk knew about the video or that it had been shared.

Since 2016, Tesla has employed hundreds of people to label images in the United States and Africa to assist in training machines to learn automated tasks, including driving. To accomplish this, data labellers were given access to thousands of videos or images recorded by car cameras so that they would view and identify objects.

Two ex-employees were not concerned about the sharing of images, as customers had given their consent or had already given up any reasonable expectation of keeping personal data private. Three others were concerned, stating that it was a breach of privacy and that customers did not know their privacy was not being respected. Some former employees saw no issue with sharing images but found the function that allowed data labellers to view the location of recordings on Google Maps as a “massive invasion of privacy.”

According to David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, the sharing of sensitive videos and images by Tesla employees is “morally reprehensible.” He further stated that “Any normal human being would be appalled by this.”

(With inputs from Reuters)

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