Tesla employees shared footage from car cameras

Tesla’s vehicles are equipped with video cameras that constantly record the vehicles’ surroundings. Now it has become known that employees of the company used access to the recordings for private purposes.

Shared in internal messaging system

The News agency Reuters reports that Tesla employees used an internal messaging system to share footage from vehicle cameras. Some of the pictures and videos showed intimate scenes. The material was shared for purely private reasons: Tesla employees added comments and turned them into memes. In addition to the company’s customers and other people, the photos also included street signs, traffic accidents, animals or other things.

Reuters further reports that employees of the company had unrestricted access to the material. Not only were they able to access it indefinitely and without control, but they were also able to forward it without any control mechanisms. This, in turn, contrasts with Tesla’s own privacy policies.

Data privacy at Tesla

In its privacy policy, Tesla states that recordings are made but remain anonymous and cannot be attributed to any individual. Furthermore, the collection of the corresponding data is only permitted for a specific purpose, at least in the EU. Seven former employees of the company have stated to Reuters that not only did the sharing of the footage occur, but also that the promise of anonymity was not kept. In Tesla’s internal computer program, for example, it was possible to retrieve the exact location of the recording. This may have made it possible to assign the images to individual customers.

Tesla has not yet commented on the incidents to Reuters, despite an inquiry from the news agency. It is unclear whether the company has taken countermeasures or whether the practice described still exists at Tesla.

Tesla had already hit the headlines in the past due to the camera technology installed in its vehicles. For example, the Berlin police have basically banned parking in front of their offices Teslas due to precisely this. The risk of espionage posed by the vehicles is too great.