Tesla, which entered our country as of April 4, has now come to the fore with a big scandal. It turned out that Tesla employees shared various videos of users and made fun of the images thanks to the cameras inside the vehicle.
According to a report by Reuters; Tesla employees; viewed and shared private videos of users of car crashes, road rage incidents, and other potentially embarrassing ones.
Images recorded on vehicle cameras were shared by employees
It turned out that Tesla employees were making fun of videos and people by circulating private videos recorded by vehicle cameras. Videos reportedly shared through Tesla’s internal messaging systems from 2019 to 2022 were recorded with cameras mounted on Tesla vehicles to enable autonomous driving features.
According to sources told Reuters; Recordings shared by Tesla employees range from graphic collisions and road rage incidents to more embarrassing scenes, including a video of a naked man approaching a car.
Some employees even reportedly created memes using footage from recorded videos and then shared them in private group chats.
A former Tesla employee told Reuters that some videos may have been recorded even when the vehicles were turned off. “We could see inside people’s garages and private property. Let’s say a Tesla customer had something distinctive in their garage, you know, people would post that sort of thing,” the former employee told Reuters. said.
However, Tesla claims on the support page for this feature that “Sentry Mode” recordings are not transmitted to the company, live streams are end-to-end encrypted and “not accessible” by the company.
This feature of Tesla has been a problem before
According to Reuters; Tesla previously had a policy that allowed the company to register non-working vehicles if customers approved it. After an investigation by the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) found that Tesla vehicles “filmed everyone who came near the vehicle,” Tesla was turning off its vehicles’ cameras by default until 2023.
Tesla also added a few more privacy-focused tweaks to Sentry Mode following the DPA’s investigation. Now the cameras start recording only when the vehicle is touched, not when it detects suspicious activity. In addition; The company also started to warn passers-by that their vehicles were recording by making the headlights of Tesla vehicles flash.
The company introduced Sentry Mode in 2019 as a way to warn drivers of suspicious activity around their parked vehicle and then store recorded events in the vehicle’s onboard memory.
But the Netherlands isn’t the only country where Tesla’s Sentry Mode is causing concern. Last year, Germany’s consumer organization VZBZ sued Tesla, alleging that Sentry Mode “violates data protection law.”
Tesla vehicles were also banned from the Beidaihe region of China last year over concerns that the vehicles’ cameras would capture a private meeting between the country’s top leaders, while the Chinese military banned Tesla vehicles in 2021 due to similar surveillance concerns.