A new report is raising serious concerns about Tesla Motors and the privacy of its vehicles.
Reuters released a shocking story about the electric vehicle giant on Thursday, claiming Tesla employees shared private, and often “highly invasive,” car camera footage between people at the company from 2019 to 2022.
A group of ex-employees claim Tesla workers regularly exchanged sensitive videos and images via internal messaging systems. The private recordings reportedly ranged from embarrassing owner moments to disturbing road incidents.
Ex-employees say one widely seen video depicted a naked man approaching a vehicle. Elsewhere in the company, photos of dogs and funny road signs were sent around and made into memes.
Other instances included highly sensitive and sometimes graphic video captured by car cameras. A former Tesla employee recalled one video of a vehicle hitting a child on a bike a high speeds. The clip reportedly tore through the company’s San Mateo, California, office “like wildfire” via internal chats.
Not even Tesla CEO Elon Musk was safe from the snooping. Ex-employees claim that in 2020, workers happened upon video of a submersible Lotus Esprit in a Tesla driver’s garage. The luxury car, which appeared in the 1977 James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me,” was bought by Musk for $968,000 at a 2013 auction.
HuffPost reached out to Tesla for comment.
The report also calls into question Tesla’s ability to protect car owner’s locations and other personal information. Though Tesla’s “Customer Privacy Notice” notes that “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle,” former employees who spoke to Reuters said the computer program they used to view footage included the location where it was shot, making it possible to find out where an owner lived.
“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” a former employee told Reuters. “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 has previously assured customers that their privacy “is and will always be enormously important to us.” As their website notes, the electric vehicles are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.”
