Tesla Owner’s Personal Videos Reportedly Being Shared Around In Internal Messaging

Tesla Employees have been passing around private videos recorded by the Tesla vehicle cameras within Tesla’s internal messaging systems.

Tesla Sentry Videos Shared

Back in 2019, Tesla launched Sentry Mode which was a way of utilising onboard cameras to record suspicious activity around the cars and also to store footage of any incidents drivers may encounter though following a report from Reuters it seems the footage from these cameras is being shared on internal channels. In an investigation conducted by Reuters, which interviewed nine former employees, it was found that between 2019 and 2022 private videos acquired from customers’ cars were being shared in private messages. Some of the videos included crashes, road-rage incidents and even a video of a naked man approaching a customer’s vehicle.

Privacy Concerns

In the “Customer Privacy Notice” Tesla states that “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” But former employees claimed that they could see the location of recordings and some recordings were even inside customer garages and properties when the vehicles were off. The fact that these videos which are supposed to be private to the owner were being shared around by Tesla employees is a huge privacy concern, especially with videos from inside garages. Further in the privacy notice, it is stated that “your vehicle may collect the data and make it available to Tesla for analysis.” which from my point of view doesn’t seem to cover sharing videos internally for a laugh. Carlo Piltz, a German privacy lawyer who was spoken to by Reuters, said it would be difficult to find a legal justification under the European data protection and privacy laws for this.

Currently, there is nothing to say that this has continued to happen in 2023 but I’d assume so and I’m curious to see how this will affect Tesla in the future.

What do you think of this invasion of privacy? Let us know in the comments.