It turns out that Tesla employees shared private videos and images of customers in internal chat

Tesla employees share private footage, such as naked customers captured by Tesla cars in garages and on the property, and graphic accident footage of children being hit, among other things, to be looked around and teased. I understand that.

Special Report: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars | Reuters

Tesla employees reportedly passed around personal videos from owners' cars - The Verge

Tesla workers shared images from car cameras, including “scenes of intimacy” | Ars Technica

According to a former employee who provided information to overseas media Reuters, Tesla said that from 2019 to 2022, private images of customers were shared in the internal message system. This was recorded by the camera installed in the Tesla car to realize the automatic driving function.

Documentary footage shared by Tesla employees ranged from scenes of a violent accident in which a child on a bicycle was knocked over by a vehicle traveling in a residential area at high speed, to a video of a naked man approaching a car. wide range of things. One employee also saw scandalous footage, including 'scenes of customers getting intimate, although they weren't naked,' as well as private scenes of everyday life, such as laundry and sexual health equipment. was reporting.

Some employees cut out such footage to create funny Internet memes and posted them in private group chats.

Tesla's privacy policy states , 'Unless the data is received as a result of a safety event (vehicle crash or airbag deployment), camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.' It has been described as. However, according to employees, Tesla's system was able to indicate the location where the video was recorded, so it was also possible to identify the address of the owner of the vehicle.

'We were able to peek into the garages and private properties of Tesla car owners,' one former employee told Reuters, adding that the video was recorded with the car turned off. He testified that there is a possibility that the items that were stolen were also included. According to Reuters, Tesla previously had a policy of receiving recordings from non-driving vehicles with customer consent. However, an investigation by the Dutch data protection authority found that Tesla cars ``often film everyone who approaches the vehicle,'' so Tesla will turn off the vehicle's camera by default by 2023. bottom.

by Steve Jurvetson

For this report, Reuters contacted more than 300 former Tesla employees who worked at Tesla over the past nine years and were involved in the development of the self-driving system, more than a dozen of whom asked to remain anonymous. responded to the interview. The former employees did not keep the videos and images that were shared internally at Tesla, so Reuters was unable to obtain them. In addition, it was not possible to confirm to what extent the sharing of recorded video that some Tesla employees had been doing as of 2022 had spread within the company, and whether it would continue in 2023. Some former employees testified that recordings were shared only for appropriate business purposes, such as seeking advice from colleagues or superiors.

Meanwhile, one former employee told Reuters: 'Frankly, it's an invasion of privacy. We always look at how Tesla treats its customers and joke, 'We wouldn't buy a Tesla car.' I was saying,' he said. Another former employee said, ``People who buy Tesla cars don't know their privacy is not respected. I'm sorry,' he said.

・Continued
Tesla car owner sued Tesla for privacy violation, received report that recording was shared - GIGAZINE