A man approaching his car naked, a child being knocked off their bike and someone being dragged into a car seemingly against their will are among the videos recorded by Tesla vehicles that employees have allegedly shared on the company’s internal messaging system.
In an investigation by Reuters, nine former employees revealed that the practice of posting private and sometimes highly invasive videos occurred at the company between 2019 and 2022.
The video involving a collision with a child on their bike showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area. An ex-employee said the recording spread around a Tesla office in California ‘like wildfire’ through private one-on-one chats.
Another video shows a unique submersible from the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me in the garage of its owner – Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Tesla assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy ‘is and will always be enormously important to us’, but the investigation has revealed what both employees and experts deem gross invasions of privacy.
‘We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,’ said one former employee. ‘Let’s say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.’
‘It was a breach of privacy, to be honest,’ said another. ‘And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people.’
To develop its self-driving system, Tesla has collected data from its cars for many years. In its customer privacy notice, the company explains that if a customer agrees to share data, ‘your vehicle may collect the data and make it available to Tesla for analysis. This analysis helps Tesla improve its products, features, and diagnose problems quicker.’
It also states that the data may include ‘short video clips or images’, but isn’t linked to a customer’s account or vehicle identification number, so ‘does not identify you personally’.
However, Carlo Piltz, a data privacy lawyer in Germany, told Reuters it would be difficult to find a legal justification under European law for vehicle recordings to be circulated internally when it has ‘nothing to do with the provision of a safe or secure car or the functionality’ of Tesla’s self-driving system.
In addition, the videos shared are often not gathered while the car is being driven, but when parked.
One former employee said: ‘I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don’t think they know that their privacy is not respected… We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids.’
Another said: ‘I saw some scandalous stuff sometimes, you know, like I did see scenes of intimacy but not nudity. And there was just definitely a lot of stuff that like, I wouldn’t want anybody to see about my life.’
The former employee recalled seeing ‘embarrassing objects’, such as ‘certain pieces of laundry, certain sexual wellness items… and just private scenes of life that we really were privy to because the car was charging.’
Another former employee said they saw nothing wrong with sharing images, but described a function that allowed data labellers to view the location of recordings on Google Maps as a ‘massive invasion of privacy’.
David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, called sharing of sensitive videos and images by Tesla employees ‘morally reprehensible’.
‘Any normal human being would be appalled by this,’ he said.
A key part of developing Tesla’s self-driving system is identifying objects in images and videos to teach the car how to respond to them in real life. Having originally outsourced the work, in 2019 Tesla brought it in house, hiring a 1,000-strong data labelling team.
According to several ex-employees, some labellers shared screenshots, sometimes marked up in Photoshop, in private group chats on Mattermost, the company messaging system. There they would attract responses from other staff – including managers – who would add their own marked-up images, jokes or emojis to keep the conversation going. Some of the emojis were custom-created to reference office inside jokes, several ex-employees said.
One former labeller described sharing images as a way to ‘break the monotony’. Another described how sharing posts on Mattermost won admiration from peers.
‘If you saw something cool that would get a reaction, you post it, right, and then later, on break, people would come up to you and say, “Oh, I saw what you posted. That was funny”,’ they said. ‘People who got promoted to lead positions shared a lot of these funny items and gained notoriety for being funny.’
Some of the content resembled internet memes – dogs, interesting cars, and clips of people tripping and falling. There was also disturbing content, such as someone being dragged into a car seemingly against their will, said one ex-employee.
Video clips of crashes involving Teslas were also sometimes shared in private chats on Mattermost, several former employees said. Those included examples of people driving badly or collisions involving people struck while riding bikes – such as the one with the child – or a motorcycle. Some data labellers would rewind such clips and play them in slow motion.
The former employees said that, at times, Tesla managers would crack down on inappropriate sharing of images on public Mattermost channels since they claimed the practice violated company policy. However, screenshots and memes based on them continued to circulate through private chats on the platform. Workers shared them one-on-one or in small groups as recently as the middle of last year.
Tesla did not respond to detailed questions sent to the company for Reuters’ investigation.
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