According to explosive report, Tesla employees shared private videos of owners

Employees Tesla shared private videos of brand car owners, according to an explosive report released by Reuters. The findings come from interviews with nine different former employees.

The videos were recorded by the brand’s external and internal cameras, which are automatically uploaded to Tesla’s servers. While owners can disable the feature, the company reminds you that this material is anonymous and is used to help diagnose problems or crashes.

But due to a seemingly serious privacy issue, not only can Tesla employees access these videos, but – at least between 2019 and 2022 – they had the ability to share them in private groups and internal messages.

Among the published videos there is a completely naked man approaching the car. Or a car running over a child on a bicycle. The latter was spread “like wildfire” throughout the San Mateo, California office via private chats.

More everyday videos of dogs, pets, or funny road signs have also been posted, as they explained. Reuters. Some of them have become memes. Tesla guarantees that they take the privacy of their owners very seriously and that the data uploaded to their servers is completely anonymous. In other words, the Tesla account cannot be linked to the entries made.

But one of the former employees interviewed Reuters ensures that the application used by Tesla will show the location of the records, which in turn can reveal the identity of the owner.

“We could look inside the garage and private property”

“We could look inside the garage and into private property,” said one of the former Tesla employees who allegedly had access to video footage from the cars’ cameras. “Let’s say the owner had a very distinctive item in the parking lot that could be posted in private messages.”

In fact, three years ago, an employee came across a video of a vehicle that can be submerged under water. It turned out that lotus spirit what was shown in the movie The Spy Who Loved Mefrom James Bond. This car belongs to Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO bought it at auction for $968,000 in 2013.

It is unknown if Musk is aware of the existence of the video from his garage or that it was shared by his employees at Tesla offices.

While Reuters was unable to obtain any of the images, the report was released after it contacted more than 300 former Tesla employees who work on the fully autonomous driving development team. Of these, twelve people responded, nine of whom were interviewed.