News agency Reuters has been in contact with former employees of Tesla who claim that video clips and images filmed by Tesla car’s built-in cameras have been shared among a group of employees.
According to those who Reuters has been in contact with, the sharing of the images took place between 2019-2022. Some images have been of an intimate nature, and one of the former employees told Reuters:
I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don’t think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected … We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids.
After it became known that images from Tesla cars were being shared among some employees, it didn’t take long before an owner of a Tesla Model Y in the US sued the company. The lawsuit states, among other things:
Tesla captures recordings of people vulnerable on their own property, in their own garages, and even in their own homes, including at least one instance where Tesla cameras captured video of a man naked in his home. Tesla also captured and disseminated videos and images of customers’ pets and even their children—a group that society has long recognized as vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation. Indeed, parents’ interest in their children’s privacy is one of the most fundamental liberty interests society recognizes.
According to Tesla, the images and video clips recorded by their cars cannot be linked to the person who owns the car. According to the lawsuit, this is not true as the images are geotagged so that anyone looking at the images could easily figure out where the car owner lives.
Tesla has not yet commented on either the fact that images from their customers have been shared among their employees or that they are being sued for this.
