Tesla workers and contractor employees shared sensitive images and video recorded by the company’s vehicles on internal message systems, according to a Reuters Special Report published Thursday.
Former employees told Reuters that Tesla cameras captured images of highway accidents, personal possessions (including a miniature sub possibly owned by Elon Musk,) children and one owner walking around in the nude.
The next day, Tesla was hit with a class action suit.
Tesla has not responded to Reuters requests for comment on the Special Report and the class action suit.
Tesla, and all the other automakers that are installing cameras and software to record and analyze images, will be lucky if one lawsuit is all that happens in response to these revelations.
Tesla – like other automakers – tells customers that while data is collected from vehicles, that data is not linked to a specific person, and that information is “kept private and secure.”
As the Reuters reporters found, a lot of people had access to images generated by Tesla vehicles as part of the company’s efforts to improve its automated driving systems.
Concerns about the security of images and location data generated from vehicle sensors are growing.
Within the past few weeks, regulators in Germany and the Netherlands have ordered restrictions on Tesla’s “Sentry Mode,” which uses cameras to record people approaching the parked vehicle. The EU is working on data privacy standards – though the work is moving slowly.
Chinese officials have banned Tesla vehicles from military and government sites, and the locations around a recent top leadership meeting.
In the United States, consumer groups have sounded alarms about how automakers want to mine data from drivers, particularly location data.
California and four other states adopted new regulations this year aimed at giving consumers more control over what data they share. At the federal level, the Federal Trade Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have been collaborating to assess the privacy issues raised by connected vehicles.
Automakers dream of using customer data – properly handled! – to power new sources of revenue – just like the giants of Big Tech. Those dreams will depend on the response consumers, regulators and lawmakers have to the reports about what went on behind the curtain at Tesla.
