Thread: Slob zero slayam ,

Should we snub TESLA or become falashers?

A Ms Snnubliette of Bremerton said

"It wasn't me"

Tesla workers shared ‘intimate’ car camera images, ex-employees allege: ‘Massive invasion of privacy’




Cameras affixed on cars sent videos of customers and their property to the EV maker’s offices and spread ‘like wildfire’
Tesla 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.


An aerial view shows the Tesla Fremont Factory in Fremont, California on February 10, 2022. - California has sued Telsa alleging discrimination and harassment against Black workers at the electric carmaker's San Francisco area factory, which the complaint called a "racially segregated workplace." (Photo by JOSH EDELSON / AFP) (Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)" width="4660" height="2796" class="dcr-1e3yjba" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; width: 140px; height: auto;">
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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.
I saw some scandalous stuff sometimes - scenes of intimacy, a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t want anybody to see about my life
Former Tesla employeeOther 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 cars were parked and turned off. Several years ago, Tesla would receive video recordings from its vehicles even when they were off, if owners gave consent. It has since stopped doing so.
“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” said another former employee. “Let’s say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.”
Tesla didn’t respond to detailed questions sent to the company for this report.
About three years ago, some employees stumbled upon and shared a video of a unique submersible vehicle parked inside a garage, according to two people who viewed it. Nicknamed Wet Nellie, the white Lotus Esprit sub had been featured in the 1977 James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me.
The vehicle’s owner: Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, who had bought it for about $968,000 at an auction in 2013. It is not clear whether Musk was aware of the video or that it had been shared.
Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
To report this story, Reuters contacted more than 300 former Tesla employees who had worked at the company over the past nine years and were involved in developing its self-driving system. More than a dozen agreed to answer questions, all speaking on condition of anonymity.



Employees passed around images captured by a Tesla camera of a James Bond vehicle owned by Elon Musk. Photograph: Tim Scott/ReutersReuters was not able to obtain any of the shared videos or images, which ex-employees said they hadn’t kept. The news agency also wasn’t able to determine if the practice of sharing recordings, which occurred within some parts of Tesla as recently as last year, continues today or how widespread it was. Some former employees contacted said the only sharing they observed was for legitimate work purposes, such as seeking assistance from colleagues or supervisors.
Labeling pedestrians and street signs

The sharing of sensitive videos illustrates one of the less-noted features of artificial intelligence systems: they often require armies of human beings to help train machines to learn automated tasks such as driving.
Since about 2016, Tesla has employed hundreds of people in Africa and later the United States to label images to help its cars learn how to recognize pedestrians, street signs, construction vehicles, garage doors and other objects encountered on the road or at customers’ houses. To accomplish that, data labelers were given access to thousands of videos or images recorded by car cameras that they would view and identify objects.
Tesla increasingly has been automating the process, and shut down a data-labeling hub last year in San Mateo, California. But it continues to employ hundreds of data labelers in Buffalo, New York. In February, Tesla said the staff there had grown 54% over the previous six months to 675.
Two ex-employees said they were not bothered by the sharing of images, saying that customers had given their consent or that people long ago had given up any reasonable expectation of keeping personal data private. Three others, however, said they were troubled by it.
“It was a breach of privacy, to be honest. And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people,” said one former employee.
Another said: “I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don’t think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected. We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids.”
One former employee saw nothing wrong with sharing images, but described a function that allowed data labelers to view the location of recordings on Google Maps as a “massive invasion of privacy”.
Any normal human being would be appalled by this
David Choffnes of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern UniversityDavid Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, called the sharing of sensitive videos and images by Tesla employees “morally reprehensible”.
“Any normal human being would be appalled by this,” he said. He noted that circulating sensitive and personal content could be construed as a violation of Tesla’s own privacy policy, potentially resulting in intervention by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which enforces federal laws relating to consumers’ privacy.
A spokesperson for the FTC said it does not comment on individual companies or their conduct.
To develop self-driving car technology, Tesla collects a vast trove of data from its global fleet of several million vehicles. The company requires car owners to grant permission on the cars’ touchscreens before Tesla collects their vehicles’ data. “Your Data Belongs to You,” states Tesla’s website.
In its customer privacy notice, Tesla explains that if a customer agrees to share data, “your vehicle may collect the data and make it available to Tesla for analysis. This analysis helps Tesla improve its products, features, and diagnose problems quicker.” It also states that the data may include “short video clips or images”, but is not linked to a customer’s account or vehicle identification number, “and does not identify you personally”.



A camera on a Tesla electric vehicle. Photograph: Aly Song/ReutersCarlo Piltz, a data privacy lawyer in Germany, told Reuters it would be difficult to find a legal justification under Europe’s data protection and privacy laws for vehicle recordings to be circulated internally when it has “nothing to do with the provision of a safe or secure car or the functionality” of Tesla’s self-driving system.
In recent years, Tesla’s car-camera system has drawn controversy.
In China, some government compounds and residential neighborhoods have banned Teslas because of concerns about its cameras.
In response, Musk said in a virtual talk at a Chinese forum in 2021: “If Tesla used cars to spy in China or anywhere, we will get shut down.”
Elsewhere, regulators have scrutinized the Tesla system over potential privacy violations. But the privacy cases have tended to focus not on the rights of Tesla owners but of passersby unaware that they might be being recorded by parked Tesla vehicles.
In February, the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) said it had concluded an investigation of Tesla over possible privacy violations regarding “sentry mode”, a feature designed to record any suspicious activity when a car is parked and alert the owner.
The watchdog determined it wasn’t Tesla, but the vehicles’ owners, who were legally responsible for their cars’ recordings. It said it decided not to fine the company after Tesla said it had made several changes to sentry mode, including having a vehicle’s headlights pulse to inform passersby that they may be being recorded.
A DPA spokesperson declined to comment on Reuters’ findings, but said in an email: “Personal data must be used for a specific purpose, and sensitive personal data must be protected.”
Replacing human drivers

Tesla calls its automated driving system “autopilot”. Introduced in 2015, the system included such advanced features as allowing drivers to change lanes by tapping a turn signal and parallel parking on command.