Tesla employees caught sharing sensitive footage recorded on customers car cameras
Recent interviews with former Tesla workers found that it was common practice in some Tesla offices to share sensitive and embarrassing video clips of customers taken by their own cars, without their knowledge.
Smile, you’re on Tesla’s candid camera.
At least that’s what nine former Tesla employees recently divulged to Reuters news agency.
The employees said hundreds, if not thousands, of private video clips from customers Tesla’s cars were regularly viewed by staff from 2019 through the middle of 2022, and maybe longer.
“We could see inside people's garages and their private properties,” said one former Tesla employee.
Although some of the video clips were benign – for example, dogs or funny road signs – others were said to reveal Tesla owners and their family members in embarrassing, compromising, and even dangerous situations.
The juicier the content, the more the videos were shared, according to the workers interviewed.
Ex-Tesla employees described videos of naked car owners, people tripping and falling, people driving badly, crashes, collisions, road rage incidents, and even someone being dragged into a car seemingly against their will.
One video showed a child on a bike being hit by a car, the child flying one way, the bike the other, reported Reuters.
The so-called entertainment videos were commonly made into screenshots and memes, marked up with added annotations, recreated in slow-motion, and would continuously circulate through Tesla’s in-house messaging platform by way of private chats, emails or in small groups.
“If you saw something cool that would get a reaction, you post it, right, and then later, on break, people would come up to you and say, ‘Oh, I saw what you posted. That was funny,’” one ex-employee from Tesla’s San Mateo, California office told Reuters.
“People who got promoted to lead positions shared a lot of these funny items and gained notoriety for being funny,” the worker said.
The workers also claimed that Tesla managers would intermittently crack down on the sharing, citing company privacy policies, but more often than not would look the other way.
Tesla employees who are granted access to this kind of footage are known “labelers.”
For instance, a labelers job would be to identify different objects in pictures and videos to help teach the cars AI how to respond in different driving situations.
That information is then provided to the engineers to improve Tesla’s automated self-driving systems.
Examples of these objects range from street lane lines to emergency vehicles. In some cases, workers said, they were required to view and identify items inside people's garages to help the cars learn how to back out safely when in Tesla's Autopilot feature.
“I saw some scandalous stuff sometimes, embarrassing objects, certain pieces of laundry, certain sexual wellness items … there was just definitely a lot of stuff that like, I wouldn't want anybody to see about my life,” one former employee said.
In 2021, One Tesla senior director said the company employed an in-house team of about 1000 labelers.
According to specs, all Tesla models are all equipped with multiple cameras located around the automobile - eight outside and one on the inside.
The cameras provide views up to 273 yards in any direction, say car enthusiasts, almost the length of three NFL football fields.
In 2021, Tesla added a live view feature called “Sentry Mode,” that allowed owners to connect their car cameras up to a mobile phone app to view surroundings at any time.
According to Reuters in February, the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) concluded an investigation of Tesla over possible privacy violations.
“People who walked by these vehicles were filmed without knowing it. And the owners of the Teslas could go back and look at these images,” DPA officials said about the Sentry feature.
“If a person parked one of these vehicles in front of someone’s window, they could spy inside and see everything the other person was doing. That is a serious violation of privacy,” DPA said.
Tesla states on its website that recordings made by vehicle cameras “remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.”
The automakers customer privacy notice states, “your vehicle may collect the data and make it available to Tesla for analysis. This analysis helps Tesla improve its products, features, and diagnose problems quicker.”
The data listed in the notice include “short video clips or images.” So far Tesla has not responded to the Reuters report.
