Tesla equips its electric vehicles with an impressive array of cameras. Those cameras can be helpful in a number of ways, such as proving who was at fault in an accident and helping with features such as Autopilot and Autopark.
But they can also capture moments that are private or potentially embarrassing, and Tesla employees have internally shared such incidents amongst themselves, according to Reuters.
Based on interviews with nine former Tesla employees, the news agency reports that between 2019 and last year, some of the carmaker’s workers privately shared sensitive images recorded by vehicle cameras.
“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” one ex-employee told Reuters. One video apparently captured a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.
Coins2Day reached out to Tesla for comment but didn’t receive an immediate reply.
Elon Musk’s carmaker states on its customer privacy notice: “Your privacy is and will always be enormously important to us…camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.”
But a computer program used by Tesla employees could show the location of recordings, potentially revealing where a Tesla owner lived, ex-employees told Reuters.
Tesla cameras have raised privacy concerns in other nations. In February, the carmaker agreed to change camera settings on vehicles sold in the European Union after a Dutch privacy regulator stated the previous settings allowed privacy violations.
“If a person parked one of these vehicles in front of someone’s window, they could spy inside and see everything the other person was doing,” Katja Mur, a Dutch regulator board member, said in a statement. Now, in the EU, cameras no longer continuously record around a car. They remain disabled by default, unless a user turns on recording.
In China, Tesla vehicles have been prohibited from military bases and areas hosting certain government activities, such as a summer retreat for officials or a visit to Chengdu by President Xi Jinping. The carmaker has agreed to have all the data its vehicles generate stored on servers kept inside China.
In the U.S., Tesla employees sharing sensitive videos could be deemed to have violated the company’s privacy policy and trigger intervention by the privacy regulator Federal Trade Commission, David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, told Reuters.
“Any normal human being,” he added, “would be appalled by this.”