Tesla staff secretly passed around 'intimate' videos, images from owners’ cars

Tesla staff disseminated and made fun of private videos taken by vehicle cameras Reuters reported. The recordings were made on the cameras that are put on Tesla vehicles to enable self-driving features. Allegedly, the media was exchanged via the company's internal messaging systems between 2019 and 2022.

The videos passed around by Tesla employees include humiliating images, such as a video of a naked man walking up to a car, as well as gruesome crashes and events involving road rage, according to individuals speaking to Reuters. According to reports, some workers even turned captured footage from recorded films into memes and shared them in secret group conversations.

According to a former Tesla employee, some of the films may have even been taken while the cars were not moving. A former employee tells the outlet that "we could see inside people's garages and their private properties."

Previously, Tesla had a policy that, if approved by customers, permitted the corporation to acquire recordings from not-running vehicles. Tesla was turning off its vehicles' cameras by default by 2023 after a Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) inquiry discovered that Tesla vehicles "were often filming everyone who came near the vehicle."

Twitter seems to not approve of the network's report. Some have criticised Reuters for taking the word of ex-employees who were fired. People think that they are not reliable sources.

"Reuters wasn’t able to obtain any of the shared videos or images, which ex-employees said they hadn’t kept," the report read, which people found suspicious.

Sentry Mode was introduced by Tesla in 2019, with the goal of warning drivers of any suspicious activity surrounding their parked cars and subsequently storing recorded instances in the vehicle's onboard memory. In a 2021 update, Tesla began enabling users to live stream their surroundings from automobiles using the cameras included in the cars.

Tesla notes that live streams are end-to-end encrypted and "cannot be accessed" by the firm while stating that "Sentry Mode recordings are not transmitted to us". 

Following the DPA's inquiry, Tesla also improved Sentry Mode in a few additional privacy-related ways. Instead of immediately beginning to record when it senses suspicious behaviour, cameras now only begin to do so when the vehicle is touched. Additionally, Tesla began flashing the headlights of its vehicles to alert onlookers that they are recording.