7:15 am, April 7, 2023
Tesla employees have shared videos and images that were recorded by cameras in customers’ cars and supposed to be private, it’s been revealed.
The cameras are there to aid driving, but Tesla workers shared recorded material – some of it said to be ‘highly invasive’ – in private chat rooms and an internal message system between 2019 and 2022, according to a special report by Reuters.
The news agency interviewed nine ex-Tesla employees, who said the images and recordings included:
- A Tesla hitting a child who was riding a bike
- A video showing a naked man approaching a vehicle
- Road-rage incidents
- Crashes
The bike-crash video showed the Tesla was being driven at high speed in a residential area and, according to a former worker, ‘the child flew in one direction, the bike in another’.
The video was said to have spread ‘like wildfire’ via private chats round a San Mateo Tesla office.
Tesla says ‘camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle’.
However, Reuters said seven ex-Tesla workers told it that a work computer program could identify the recordings’ locations – potentially revealing the address of a Tesla owner.
Other pictures were said to be more mundane, such as images of funny road signs and dogs.
Employees are said to have embellished them with captions or commentary and turned them into memes then posted them in private group chats.
Although some of the postings were only shared between two workers, others were seen by scores of people said a number of former employees.
Another ex-employee also claimed that some recordings looked like they were made when cars had been parked and turned off.
Tesla used to receive video recordings from owners’ cars with their consent even when the cars were off but has since stopped doing that.
Reuters also reported that according to two people who viewed it, some employees chanced upon and shared a video some three years ago of a submersible vehicle in a garage that had been used in a James Bond film and was now owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The white Lotus Esprit sub was nicknamed ‘Wet Nellie’ and featured in the 1977 Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me.
Musk bought it at an auction in September 2013 for some $968,000 (circa £777,000). It isn’t clear if he knew about the video or that the video had been shared. Reuters said he didn’t reply to a request for comment.
The Lotus Esprit submarine car used in The Spy Who Loved Me at RM Auctions in London in September 2013, where it was bought by Elon Musk. Picture: Sean Dempsey/PA Archive/PA Images
Tesla managers would sometimes crack down on what was deemed inappropriate image-sharing on public Mattermost channels as it violated company policy.
However, screenshots and memes based on them still circulated via private chats on Mattermost, according to several former workers, with them being shared in small groups and even one-on-one, with it taking place as recently as the middle of 2022.
Reuters says that to compile the special report, it got in touch with more than 300 ex-Tesla employees who had worked for the company during the past nine years and who had helped develop the self-driving system.
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Those who agreed to take part would only do so if guaranteed anonymity. The former workers said they hadn’t kept any of the shared images or videos.
Reuters said it hadn’t been able to find out if sharing recordings was still going on or how widespread it was.
Some of the ex-workers who were contacted said the only sharing they saw was for legitimate work purposes, such as seeking help from supervisors or colleagues.
Two ex-workers said that they were sometimes asked to look at images of customers in and around their homes, including in garages, during their normal course of work as data labellers.
This was while Tesla worked on its Autopilot system to stop cars’ confusion over objects such as garden hoses and shadows while backing out of garages.
One ex-employee was quoted as saying: ‘I sometimes wondered if these people know that we’re seeing that.’
Another said: ‘I saw some scandalous stuff sometimes, you know, like I did see scenes of intimacy, but not nudity.
‘And there was just definitely a lot of stuff that, like, I wouldn’t want anybody to see about my life.’
The second person told of seeing ’embarrassing objects’ such as ‘certain pieces of laundry, certain sexual wellness items…and just private scenes of life that we really were privy to because the car was charging.’
Reuters said Tesla hadn’t replied to detailed questions that it had sent the manufacturer.
