“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties.”
“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.”
“It was a breach of privacy, to be honest. And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people.”
These quotes from former Tesla employees appear in a disturbing new report from Reuters. The report claims that Tesla employees passed around videos and images captured from Tesla cars — ranging from inside customers’ garages to road incidents — as a form of entertainment.
“Between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras,” Reuters reports.
Some Tesla Vehicles Film When Parked
Some Tesla cars have a function known as Sentry Mode. Supposedly a security measure, Sentry Mode uses the car’s array of outward-facing cameras to film and photograph activity near the car. In a 2019 blog post, the company explains, “While no alarm system can prevent against all vehicle thefts, break-ins and threats, we hope that with Sentry Mode and our other security features, your Tesla will be even more secure.”
Reuters reports, “Several years ago, Tesla would receive video recordings from its vehicles even when they were off, if owners gave consent. It has since stopped doing so.”
Reuters says it contacted more than 300 former employees about the practice, and “more than a dozen” agreed to speak anonymously.
They allege that workers and managers regularly shared private images on an internal messaging system to “break the monotony.” They included images taken inside owners’ garages, from mundane shots of owners doing laundry to more intimate moments, including “customers in embarrassing situations.”
Employees even reportedly shared images from inside Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s garage.
Musk bought the submersible Lotus sports car from the 1977 James Bond movie “The Spy Who Loved Me.” Employees passed around photos of it taken by a Tesla parked beside it.
Tesla tells customers in a privacy notice that “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” But employees say geographical location data stored with the images could let them identify an owner.
Some Tesla Vehicles Film While Driving
Other Tesla models use their external cameras to film their surroundings while driving. These are used to help train the company’s automated driver assistance systems, like the controversial “Full-Self Driving Capability.”
The company employs hundreds of people to watch those films and “label images to help its cars learn how to recognize pedestrians, street signs, construction vehicles, garage doors and other objects encountered on the road or at customers’ houses,” Reuters says.
Employees, however, shared images of “crashes and road-rage incidents” to entertain each other.
Tesla no longer operates a public relations department to field reporters’ questions, so we can’t contact the company to ask for comment.
