According to Reuters, Tesla staff members shared and made fun of private recordings recorded by car cameras. The videos were captured using the cameras that Tesla cars have installed to allow self-driving capabilities. Between 2019 and 2022, the media is said to have been communicated via the company’s internal communications platforms.
According to people who spoke to Reuters, the films sent by Tesla employees contain degrading visuals, such as a video of a nude guy approaching a car, as well as gory accidents and incidents involving road rage. Reports claim that some employees even created memes using the collected video from recorded movies and distributed them among themselves in private group chats.
Some of the films may have even been taken while the cars were not moving, claims a former Tesla employee. We were able to “see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” a former employee claims to the media site.
Previously, Tesla had a policy allowing the company to get recordings from non-running vehicles with user consent. After a Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) investigation found that Tesla vehicles “were often filming everyone who came near the vehicle,” Tesla began turning off its vehicles’ cameras by default in 2023.
Twitter doesn’t appear to agree with the information from the network. Some people have condemned Reuters for relying on the testimony of dismissed ex-employees. People believe they are not trustworthy sources.
People were sceptical of the article since it said that “Reuters was unable to obtain any of the shared videos or images, which ex-employees claimed they had not kept.”
In order to alert users to any unusual behaviour around their parked cars and afterwards save recorded incidents in the vehicle’s onboard memory, Tesla developed Sentry Mode in 2019. Tesla introduced the ability for people to live broadcast their surroundings from inside cars in a 2021 update using the built-in cameras.
Sentry Mode recordings are not sent to us, Tesla claims, adding that live broadcasts are end-to-end encrypted and “cannot be accessed” by the company.
Tesla has made a few more privacy-related improvements to Sentry Mode in response to the DPA’s request. Cameras no longer start recording as soon as they detect suspicious conduct; instead, they wait until the vehicle is touched before they start. Tesla also started flashing the headlights of its cars to let people know they are being recorded.
