Employees of Elon Musk's electric car company Tesla, privately shared highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers' car cameras, according to former workers. 

The revelation follows a Reuters investigation into how the privacy of owners of Tesla cars was breached between 2019 and 2022, and comes at a time of heightened concern over how personal data is being used by overseas companies.

Some of the recordings taken from the owners of Tesla cars, former employees revealed, caught customers in embarrassing situations. For example, one video shared between Tesla staff on an internal messaging system showed a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.

Other images showed road-rage incidents and traumatic car crashes. 

One video from 2021 captured a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to one ex-employee. The video was sent via private chats around a Tesla office in San Mateo in the U.S., reportedly spreading "like wildfire."

 

 

Tesla's privacy pledge

Tesla has so far declined to comment on the findings, but says that the cameras it builds into its vehicles to help develop its self-driving systems are "designed from the ground up to protect your privacy." 

The U.S. company also says in its "Customer Privacy Notice" that the "camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle."

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But former employees said the program they used could show the location of recordings, allowing them to potentially pinpoint where a Tesla owner resided, raising concerns over how the images could be used. 

One unexpected example was about three years ago, when some employees said they came across and shared a video from a garage that contained the white Lotus Esprit subversive vehicle featured in the 1977 James Bond film, "The Spy Who Loved Me."

The vehicle's owner turned out to be Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk. It was unclear whether Musk was aware of the video or knew that his employees had been sharing it.

Some recordings, according to one ex-employee, were also made when the Tesla cars were parked and turned off. Tesla admitted several years ago it would receive videos from its vehicles even when they were off, if owners consented, but said that it had since stopped doing so.

"We could see inside people's garages and their private properties," said another 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."

 

'A breach of privacy'

The sharing of sensitive videos highlights a relatively unknown aspect of artificial intelligence systems: the fact that human beings often have to train machines like Tesla's autopilot system to learn automated tasks.

Musk's company has employed hundreds of people in Africa and later the U.S. since 2016 to help its cars recognize things like pedestrians, street signs, and garage doors among other objects on the road or at Tesla owners' houses. To do so, data labelers were given access to thousands of videos or images recorded by car cameras.

Tesla requires car owners to grant permission on the cars' touchscreens before it collects their vehicles' data, explaining in its privacy notice that if a customer agrees to share data, "your vehicle may collect the data and make it available to Tesla for analysis." It adds that the data may include "short video clips or images."

Some ex-employees said they didn't see the problem with the internal sharing of images, saying that customers had given their consent, while others said the only sharing they saw was for legitimate work purposes. But others said they were concerned by the level of access. 

"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," said one former employee.

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."

"I sometimes wondered if these people know that we're seeing that," said one employee.

 

Concerns abroad

The U.S. has recently been targeting non-domestic tech companies over privacy concerns, especially China's TikTok, with U.S. Congress calling on the company's CEO Shou Zi Chew to testify over whether China could use the app to spy on Americans.

But other countries have also started to show concern about U.S companies and their use of data from over-seas customers including Tesla. Musk's company, which recently received $7.5 billion in U.S. government subsidies, has come under particular scrutiny for its car-camera system, particularly in China.

Since 2020, Tesla has sold over 1 million of its electric cars on the Chinese market, with its total revenue there growing 51 percent year-on-year to $81.46 billion last year. In general the company and China share good relations.

However, some Chinese government compounds and residential neighborhoods have banned cars made by the company because of concerns over spying. 

Tesla has attempted to address the concerns, promising to keep any data it collects from locally sold cars within China's borders. Musk said in a virtual talk at a Chinese forum in 2021: "If Tesla used cars to spy in China or anywhere, we will get shut down."

Regulators have also scrutinized the Tesla system over potential privacy violations in other countries, including the Netherlands. However, the privacy cases have usually focused more on the rights of passers-by unaware that they might be being recorded by parked Tesla vehicles, not the vehicles owners.