Employees of Tesla Shared Sensitive Images Taken by Customers' Cars

As Tesla states on its website, its cameras built into vehicles that assist driving are all designed to protect your privacy, which is why it makes it clear that their use is unaffected by our privacy policies. Tesla also emphasizes that their vehicles are built entirely to protect your privacy.

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Tesla employees may have privately shared highly invasive videos and images recorded by their customers' cars' cameras between 2019 and 2022 through a private messaging system, according to interviews conducted by Trade Algo with nine former Tesla employees during the period.

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Tesla's customers have been caught on video in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee has described in a recent article a video of a woman approaching a vehicle completely naked, as one of the recorded events.

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Among the other things shared were crashes, road-rage incidents, and a crash video. According to another ex-employee, a Tesla had driven at high speed in a residential area and hit a child on a bike, which sent the child flying in one direction, and the bike flew in another. The video spread rapidly through private one-on-one discussions at a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, a former Tesla employee told me.

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It has been reported that some employees embellished images of dogs and funny road signs into memes, which they then posted to private group chats by adding amusing captions or commentary. Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs. In some cases, the posting was shared by just two employees, but in others, several employees had the opportunity to view it, according to several former employees.

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The Tesla Customer Privacy Notice outlined in its online version states that "camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle." A number of former Tesla employees claimed their computer program could reveal the location of recordings they performed at work - which could potentially show the residence of Tesla owners.

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There have also been allegations made by an ex-employee that some recordings may have been made while cars were parked and turned off. Before, Tesla would receive video recordings from its vehicles even when they were turned off, if they had been consented to. While this has been stopped since the company stopped doing so several years ago, the practice persists.

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One former employee said, "We could have seen inside people's garages and their private properties, even if they weren't on our site. For example, let's say that a Tesla customer had something in his garage that was unique. People would be posting these kinds of things online."

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Despite being contacted to provide detailed information for this report, Tesla did not respond in any way to the questions.

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There was a video a few years ago that some employees discovered and shared of a unique submersible vehicle that was parked in the garage. The video was seen by two people at the time. It was nicknamed "Wet Nellie" because it appeared in the 1977 James Bond film, "The Spy Who Loved Me," in which Bond played the white Lotus Esprit sub.

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A video popped up that showed Tesla's chief executive Elon Musk buying a vehicle for around $968,000 at an auction in 2013 in an effort to raise funds. It is not clear whether Musk knew the video was shared or even if he knew it existed.

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A request for comment was not responded to by Musk.

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It was the first time Trade Algo has spoken to former Tesla employees who, over the past nine years, had carried out a variety of work for the company and were involved in developing its self-driving system. Fourteen of these employees agreed to speak with Trade Algo on the condition that their anonymity was maintained.

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Ex-employees claimed that they had not kept any of the videos or images that were shared with them, and so Trade Algo was unable to obtain any of them. Moreover, the news agency was not able to determine whether or not the practice of sharing recordings within Tesla continues today, based on information from some parts of the company as recently as last year. In some former employees' cases, they were able to observe that only legitimate work purposes were shared, such as asking colleagues for assistance or seeking advice.

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Signage and pedestrian crossings should be marked with labels

Among the less-noticed features of artificial intelligence systems is the requirement for arms of humans to be trained in order for the machines to learn how to do a variety of tasks automatically, such as driving, and one of those tasks is sharing sensitive videos.

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Thousands of people have been employed by Tesla in Africa, as well as the United States, for the purpose of labeling images to enable its cars to recognize pedestrians, street signs, construction vehicles, garage doors, and other items encountered when driving or in customers' homes since about 2016. In order to accomplish this, data labelers were given access to thousands of video and image files recorded by car cameras that they could then look at and identify objects within.

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A data-labeling hub in San Mateo, California was shut down last year as Tesla increasingly automated the process. Tesla has continued, however, to employ hundreds of data labelers in Buffalo, New York. It has said that the number of employees has increased 54% over the past six months, to 675, since February 2016.

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A pair of former employees said that the sharing of images did not bother them, as they asserted that the consent of customers had been given, or that people long ago had surrendered their reasonable expectation to keep their personal information private. Three others, however, said that this did bother them.

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A former Tesla employee told Business Insider, "I think it was a breach of privacy as it involved some of these employees. And I have always joked that if I had to buy another Tesla after seeing how they treated some of them, I would never consider it."

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There is also another person who said that she was bothered by the fact that the people who buy the car do not seem to be aware that their privacy is violated. They could easily see them doing laundry and most of their intimate activities. We could even see their kids.

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Former employees were not opposed to sharing images as long as they were not allowed to watch recordings on Google Maps, but one of them argued that not allowing data labelers to view recordings on Google Maps was a "massive invasion of privacy.".

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It is a matter of moral reprehensibility for Tesla employees to share sensitive videos and images through their social media feeds, according to David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston.

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This would be appalling to any normal person,” he said. As he explained, the dissemination of sensitive and personal content could be seen by the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces federal laws relating to consumer privacy, as a violation of Tesla's own privacy policy, resulting in the potential intervention of the government.

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An FTC spokesperson has stated that the agency does not comment on the conduct of individual companies.

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Several million Tesla vehicles are used to develop self-driving car technology by the company, which collects an extensive amount of data about them. According to Tesla's website, the company requires its customers to grant permission on their touchscreens before it can collect their vehicle's data. Tesla states on its website, "Your Data Belongs to You."

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If a customer agrees to share information with Tesla, Tesla will be able to analyze the data collected by your vehicle. Tesla says in their Customer Privacy Notice that if a customer agrees to share data, Tesla may collect the data. According to Tesla's website, this data may include video clips or images. However, it does not relate to a customer's account number, nor does it identify you personally. Tesla uses this analysis to improve its products, features, and diagnose problems more quickly.

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A German data privacy lawyer, Carlo Piltz, told Trade Algo that it would not be feasible to find a legal justification for the internal distribution of vehicle recordings under Europe's data protection and privacy law if it was not connected with Tesla’s self-driving system, as it has nothing to do with the safety or security of Tesla’s car or its functionality.

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As a result of Tesla's car-camera system, which has received a lot of controversy in recent years, some government compounds and residential neighborhoods in China are banning Tesla cars due to concerns about the cameras inside them. Tesla responded by stating, in 2021, at a Chinese forum that Tesla would be shut down if it used its cars for spying, anywhere.

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Other regulators have also scrutinised Tesla’s EV system over potential privacy violations, however these cases tend not to focusing on the rights of Tesla owners, but rather on those of passers-by who may not be aware that their actions are being recorded by parked Tesla cars.

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There was an announcement in February from the Dutch Data Protection Authority, or DPA, that it had concluded an investigation into Tesla in connection with possible privacy violations regarding the feature known as "Sentry Mode," which is expected to warn owners when they see suspicious activity in their parked car.

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Several people walking by these Teslas were filmed without their knowledge, and the Tesla owners can look up these images in the future,” Katja Mur, DPA board member, said in her statement. This type of vehicle allows a person to spy on someone inside their window and watch everything that they do, which is a serious violation of privacy. If parked in front of someone's window, one could spy on them and see everything they did.

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A watchdog determined that Tesla was not legally responsible for the recordings that occurred in the vehicles, but rather their owners. In its decision not to fine Tesla, the court stated that the company had made several changes to its Sentry Mode, including the ability to pulse the headlights of a vehicle in order to warn people that they may be being recorded.