Tesla employees walked around mocking private videos recorded by vehicle cameras, according to a report by Reuters. The videos, reportedly shared between 2019 and 2022 through Tesla’s internal messaging systems, are recorded on the cameras mounted on Tesla vehicles to enable self-driving capabilities.
As described by sources on Reuters, footage shared by Tesla employees ranges from graphic crashes and road accidents to more embarrassing scenes, including a video of a naked man approaching a car. Some employees reportedly even made memes using recordings from recorded videos and later shared them in private group chats.
Tesla Says “Sentry Mode Shots Won’t Be Sent To Us”
That says a former Tesla employee Reuters that some videos may have even been recorded with vehicles turned off. “We were able to look into people’s garages and their private property,” says a former employee Reuters. “Let’s say a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post stuff like that.”
According to Reuters, Tesla previously had a policy that allowed the company to receive recordings of non-driving vehicles if customers signed up for them. After a investigation by the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) found that Tesla vehicles “often filmed anyone who came near the vehicle,” Tesla turned off its vehicles’ cameras by default by 2023.
Tesla launched Sentry mode in 2019, promoting the feature as a way to alert drivers to suspicious activity around their parked vehicles and then save recorded incidents to the car’s onboard memory. Tesla updated this feature in 2021 and began letting drivers use their cars’ cameras to live stream their car’s surroundings from the Tesla app.
On its support page for the feature, Tesla says “Sentry Mode recordings won’t be sent to us,” adding that live streams are end-to-end encrypted and “cannot be accessed” by the company. Tesla has also added a number of other privacy-focused tweaks to Sentry mode following the data protection authority’s investigation. Now cameras only start recording when the vehicle is touched, rather than immediately when it detects suspicious activity. Tesla also began warning passersby that its vehicles are recording by flashing their headlights.
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