Even in your car, we spy on you! Tesla employees have admitted to circulating videos, including intimate ones, from the brand’s vehicle cameras within the company, without the knowledge of their customers…
“The protection of your personal data is and will always be one of our priorities”. This is a very nice promise that Tesla makes to its customers! In fact, there is cause for concern with the many on-board cameras that serve as driving aids by filming in real time the activity around the vehicles – the most recent models are even equipped with interior cameras. Devices that are used in particular for the operation of Autopilot, FSD autonomous driving, sentry mode and the Tesla Vision system for parking aids.
But are the drivers really aware of all that is recorded in this way? And, above all, that they share, and to whom? Reuters interviewed nine employees of Elon Musk’s company and discovered that, to break boredom, some employees use internal messaging to broadcast and comment on recordings from customer car cameras, in particular between 2019 and 2022. videos are particularly intrusive, with road accidents and intimate scenes. A scandal that raises the issue of privacy and data confidentiality, at a time when connected objects – and vehicles – of all kinds are multiplying and torrents of information are circulating on high-speed networks to dump on obscure servers…
Tesla: recordings viewed to train AI
The recordings shared by Tesla employees are very varied in nature. These can be cute and funny animal videos, but also shocking or intimate. Thus, one of the employees interviewed cites a video where a man approaches the vehicle naked, or a bicycle accident involving a particularly violent child. Some screenshots of these videos even become real “memes” in Tesla’s offices, where they are commented on, liked and shared by employees, including managers, in the Mattermost messaging system. A former employee explains that “People who were promoted to important positions shared a lot of these funny things and gained notoriety by being funny.” Statements that suggest that this is a well-established phenomenon, and not just the mania of a few isolated employees…
If each Tesla customer consents to the sharing of their data, the company clearly specifies in its customer privacy noticeyou that “Camera recordings remain anonymous and are not associated with you or your vehicle, unless we receive the data following a safety-related event (collision or airbag deployment)”. However, the employees interviewed say that there is a function allowing them, via software, to go back to the place where the recordings were recorded and to geolocate them on Google Maps. As the videos could at the time be taken when the car was off or parked, the employees had access to the interiors of the garages – they liked to share between them those which were particularly unusual – and go back to the place of residence. owners.
Initially, the data and images that Tesla collects are used to train the artificial intelligence models used for autonomous driving and other such functions. However, we tend to forget that people are responsible for viewing these videos in order to manually identify elements such as traffic signs, pedestrians, ground markings or even both traffic. This is the only way to train AIs to correctly analyze situations and adopt the appropriate behavior. By buying a Tesla vehicle, the customer does not necessarily realize all that involves the sharing of data to which he consents, and the morally reprehensible use that can be made of it. “It was a breach of confidentiality, to be honest”admits an employee interviewed by Reuters. “And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how some of these people’s data was handled.”