'Naked Videos and Child Accident Scenes... Tesla Employee Watched Customer Car Footage'

Since 2019, Numerous Customer Private Videos Shared
It Is Unconfirmed Whether Elon Musk Is Aware

Controversy has arisen after reports that employees of the American electric vehicle company Tesla reviewed videos recorded by customer vehicle cameras.

On the 6th (local time), local media outlets reported this based on interviews with nine former Tesla employees.

According to their testimonies, Tesla employees shared numerous vehicle videos that could infringe on customers' privacy via internal messengers from 2019 until last year.

The shared videos included footage of a man approaching a vehicle naked and a Tesla vehicle driving at high speed hitting a child riding a bicycle.

There was even testimony suggesting that video recording occurred while the vehicle's ignition was off. About three years ago, some employees discovered footage of a uniquely shaped submarine-like vehicle parked in a garage, which was identified as a car from the 1977 007 series movie and owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

Foreign media analyzed that Tesla employees' behavior was likely influenced by Tesla's extensive video data collection. During the development of autonomous driving technology, a vast amount of video data was needed to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and many employees were hired to classify the collected videos.

Employees labeled each image with tags such as pedestrian, road sign, and garage, and were reportedly granted access to thousands of videos and images recorded by customers' vehicle cameras.

Tesla's customer privacy policy states that "if customers consent to data sharing, data collected by the vehicle may be provided to Tesla," but also notes that "such data is not linked to personal accounts or vehicle identification numbers." However, in reality, employees used computer programs at Tesla that could determine recording locations and potentially identify the vehicle owner's residence.

Foreign media reported, "It is unclear whether this practice of reviewing customers' vehicle videos is still ongoing," and "It has not been confirmed whether Musk is aware of these videos, and he did not respond to requests for comment."

David Choffnes of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Research Institute at Northeastern University in Boston pointed out, "Distributing sensitive and personal content could be interpreted as a violation of Tesla's own privacy policies and may prompt intervention by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which enforces federal laws related to consumer privacy."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.