Tesla Inc assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy "is and will always be enormously important to us".
The cameras it builds into vehicles to assist driving, it notes on its website, are "designed from the ground up to protect your privacy".
But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers' car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.
Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.
Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, "like wildfire," the ex-employee said.
Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees.
Tesla states in its online "Customer Privacy Notice" that its "camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle".
But seven former employees told Reuters the computer program they used at work could show the location of recordings - which potentially could reveal where a Tesla owner lived.
One ex-employee also said that some recordings appeared to have been made when ..
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