Tesla employees shared and joked about sensitive videos taken by vehicles

A man approaching his car naked, a child being thrown off his bike and someone being pulled into a car apparently against his will are some of the videos taken by Tesla vehicles, the employees reportedly shared via the company’s internal messaging system.

In a Reuters investigation, nine former employees revealed that the company posted private and sometimes highly invasive videos between 2019 and 2022.

Video of a collision involving a child on a bicycle showed a Tesla speeding through a residential area. A former employee said the recording spread “like wildfire” through private one-on-one conversations in a Tesla office in California.

Another video shows a unique submarine from the 1977 James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me in the garage of its owner – Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Tesla assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy is “and always will be very important to us,” but the investigation revealed what both employees and experts consider to be gross invasions of privacy.

“We could look into people’s garages and people’s private property,” said a former employee. “Suppose a Tesla customer had something special in their garage. You know, people would post stuff like that.”

“It was an invasion of privacy, to be honest,” said another. “And I used to joke that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how some of these people were treated.”

To develop its self-driving system, Tesla has been collecting data from its cars for years. In its customer privacy statement, the company states 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 and features faster and diagnose problems faster.”

It also states that the data may include “short video clips or images” but is not linked to a customer account or vehicle identification number, so “does not personally identify you”.

However, Carlo Piltz, a data protection lawyer in Germany, told Reuters it is difficult to find legal justification under European law for the internal dissemination of vehicle data when it “has nothing to do with providing a safe or secure car or the functionality “. of a vehicle dealing with Tesla’s self-driving system.

In addition, the shared videos are often not collected while driving, but when parking.

A former employee said: “It bothers me because I think the people buying the car don’t know that their privacy is not respected… We could see them doing laundry and doing very intimate things. We could see their children.”

Another said: “I’ve seen some outrageous things, you know, like seeing intimacy scenes but no nudity. And there were certainly a lot of things in my life that I didn’t want anyone to see.”

The former employee recalled seeing “embarrassing articles,” such as “certain laundry articles, certain articles about sexual well-being…

Another former employee said he saw nothing wrong with image sharing, but described a feature that allowed data taggers to show the location of recordings on Google Maps as “a huge invasion of privacy”.

David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, called Tesla employees sharing sensitive videos and images “morally objectionable.”

“Any normal person would be shocked by this,” he said.

A key part of developing Tesla’s self-driving system is identifying objects in images and videos to teach the car how to react to them in real life. After initially outsourcing the work, Tesla brought it in-house in 2019 by hiring a 1,000-strong data labeling team.

According to several former employees, some labellers shared screenshots, sometimes tagged in Photoshop, in private group chats on Mattermost, the company’s messaging system. There, they attracted comments from other employees — including managers — who added their own tagged photos, jokes or emojis to keep the conversation going. Some emojis are tailored to refer to inside jokes, several ex-employees said.

A former labeler described image sharing as a way to “break the monotony.” Another described how sharing posts on Mattermost won the admiration of colleagues.

“If you saw something nice that was going to get a comment, you posted it, okay, and then later, during the break, people would come up to you and say, ‘Oh, I saw what you posted. That was nice,'” they said “People who were promoted to leadership positions shared a lot of these funny things and became notorious for being funny.”

Some of the content resembled internet memes: dogs, interesting cars, and clips of people tripping and falling. There was also disturbing content of someone apparently being dragged into a car against their will, a former associate said.

Video clips of Tesla crashes were also sometimes shared in private chats on Mattermost, several former employees said. These were examples of bad driving or collisions where people were hit while riding a bicycle – such as the one with the child – or a motorcycle. Some data IDs rewind such clips and play them in slow motion.

The former employees said Tesla executives sometimes take action against inappropriate image sharing on public Mattermost channels, claiming the practice violates company policy. However, screenshots and memes based on them continued to circulate through private chats on the platform. Midway through last year, employees shared them individually or in small groups.

Tesla did not respond to detailed questions sent to the company for investigation by Reuters.