An unnerving report by Reuters says that multiple Tesla employees regularly shared videos and images captured by Tesla owners’ cars for purposes not related to work. That’s according to nine former Tesla employees who spoke to the news organization. The videos and images were captured by the multiple cameras built into Tesla vehicles that are designed to help assist in driving.
Among the videos and images allegedly shared by Tesla employees—reportedly across an internal message system between 2019 and 2022—were a clip of a naked man approaching a Tesla vehicle and a video of a Tesla car hitting a child riding a bike. Another video included people being intimate in a garage where a Tesla was parked. Additional videos and images shared included those featuring pets or those capturing distinctive items in the car or an owner’s garage. Many of the shared images had text added to them by Tesla employees, turning them into memes.
Fast Company has reached out to Tesla for comment on the report. We’ll update this post if we hear back.
Most Tesla owners are aware that their cars have cameras, and the footage the cameras record is ostensibly only used to help Tesla improve its technologies. Yet the Reuters report reveals that such footage has been shared widely among Tesla employees for entertainment purposes. Worse, Tesla tells its drivers that any recording sent to Tesla will “remain anonymous,” but former employees told Reuters that Tesla employees could view the location of the recording on Google Maps, which means if the Tesla owner had parked the car in their garage, it would be possible to identify the owner by their address.
According to Reuters, Tesla didn’t respond to detailed requests for comment about its report and neither did CEO Elon Musk. As for the former Tesla employees, one said, “It was a breach of privacy, to be honest. And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people.”
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