Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, has been accused of violating its customers’ privacy by nine former employees who spoke to Reuters. The employees claimed that between 2019 and 2022, Tesla employees privately shared invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras via an internal messaging system, some of which caught Tesla customers in embarrassing or compromising situations. According to one ex-employee, a video showed a naked man approaching a vehicle, while another video showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike. The child flew in one direction, and the bike went in another direction. The videos were shared among Tesla employees through private one-on-one chats, and some postings were only shared between two employees, while others could be seen by scores of them. Tesla assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy “is and will always be enormously important to us” and that the cameras built into vehicles to assist driving are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.”
Tesla’s online “Customer Privacy Notice” states that its “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” However, seven former employees told Reuters that the computer program they used at work could show the location of recordings, which could potentially reveal where a Tesla owner lived. One ex-employee also said that some recordings appeared to have been made when cars were parked and turned off. 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.
Tesla collects a vast trove of data from its global fleet of several million vehicles to develop self-driving car technology. The company requires car owners to grant permission on the cars’ touchscreens before Tesla collects their vehicles’ data. In its Customer Privacy Notice, Tesla 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 and does not identify the customer personally.
The sharing of sensitive videos by Tesla employees illustrates one of the less-noted features of artificial intelligence systems, as they often require armies of human beings to help train machines to learn automated tasks such as driving. Since about 2016, Tesla has employed hundreds of people to 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. To accomplish this, data labelers were given access to thousands of videos or images recorded by car cameras that they would view and identify objects. Tesla increasingly has been automating the process, but it continues to employ hundreds of data labelers in Buffalo, New York.
Some former employees contacted said the only sharing they observed was for legitimate work purposes, such as seeking assistance from colleagues or supervisors. Two ex-employees said they weren’t bothered by the sharing of images, saying that customers had given their consent or that people long ago had given up any reasonable expectation of keeping personal data private. However, three others said they were troubled by it. One former employee said, “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.” Another said, “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.”
