On April 6th, several US media outlets reported that based on interviews with nine former Tesla employees, the company’s staff had been sharing videos recorded by cameras in customer cars via internal messaging channels between 2019 and last year.
According to these accounts, the shared videos included footage of a naked man approaching a vehicle, a Tesla car hitting a child riding a bicycle at high speed, and other intrusive clips. Additionally, the employees claimed that recording continued even when the car’s engine was off.
Foreign media speculate that Tesla’s widespread data collection through cameras may have influenced such behavior. To develop autonomous driving technology, AI systems require an abundance of video data, leading the company to hire numerous staff members to collect and classify the footage.
Employees were reportedly assigned to label objects, such as pedestrians, road signs, and garages, in thousands of videos and images captured by customers’ car cameras.
Tesla’s privacy policy states that customers who agree to share their data can allow their vehicle’s collected data to be shared with the company. However, the policy also assures that the data will not be associated with their personal account or vehicle identification number.
Nevertheless, former employees claimed that the computer program used at Tesla was capable of locating the recording location, potentially revealing the car owner’s residence.
Foreign media expressed doubts about whether such practices of reviewing customers’ car videos continue at Tesla. They also reported that it is unknown whether Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, is aware of these practices, and he has not responded to requests for comments.
David Choffnes, a cybersecurity and privacy researcher at Northeastern University’s Secure Systems Lab, warned that distributing sensitive and personal content could be considered a violation of Tesla’s own privacy policy and trigger intervention by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which enforces federal laws related to consumer privacy.