A Tesla has many unique aspects, including the care cameras installed in each vehicle. These cameras capture some strange images.
Tesla claims that their in-car cameras are designed and built to protect owners’ privacy, but that might be a bit ambitious — if you believe some ex-employees who beg to differ. From 2019 – 2022, a story on ars Technical said Tesla employees used an internal messaging system to share videos that had been covertly recorded.
One of those former employees shared details of seeing a video of a man approaching a vehicle buck naked. Another spoke of videos with “scandalous stuff,” such as scenes of intimacy but not nudity.
One more former employee spoke of how the cameras would record mundane daily events along with radical images of more risqué fare, including “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.”
I get the picture. The gist of this story is the potential privacy violation Tesla could be making with these recordings. Tesla claims that “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.”
According to Reuters, seven ex-employees said the computer program they had access to show the recordings’ location—which could potentially reveal where a Tesla owner lived.
After the report, a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California was filed by Henry Yeh. It’s a class-action lawsuit, and Yeh owns a Model Y that he alleges employees were able to see videos of him for their “tasteless and tortious entertainment.”
Here’s a quote from his attorney Jack Fitzgerald.
“Like anyone would be, Mr Yeh was outraged at the idea that Tesla’s cameras can be used to violate his family’s privacy, which the California Constitution scrupulously protects. Tesla needs to be held accountable for these invasions and for misrepresenting its lax privacy practices to him and other Tesla owners.”
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