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from the your-car-shouldn’t-spy-on-you dept
Ever since Tesla first made the news, I had thought it would be a great car to own. The last few years have really disabused me of that notion, given the serious questions raised about the integrity of the company’s CEO. But even so, I’m pretty shocked by this latest Reuters report detailing how Tesla employees regularly would not only view images from Tesla’s built in cameras, but also make jokes and memes out of them and share them around the office.
This is the kind of behavior you’d expect in an late 90s dot com bubble era startup before it got serious, but Tesla is big enough and prominent enough that it is seriously troubling to learn it does not have basic controls to prevent this sort of privacy invasion:
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.
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.
Other 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.
Serious, professional companies put in place controls and security systems to prevent this sort of thing, because if they don’t, everyone knows what will happen — which is exactly what appears to have happened in the Elon Musk-led company.
I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise at all that a company run by a guy with the maturity of a insecure 15-year-old would not really give two shits about people’s privacy and make jokes and pass around private videos. Of course, fair play: it looks like the Tesla employees also spied on Elon Musk’s own garage.
The boss’s lax attitude towards anyone else’s rights or concerns seems to have trickled down to his employees:
Two ex-employees said they weren’t 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.
Indeed, the Reuters report seems to suggest that the boss’s obsession with memes and stupid, sophomoric jokes was encouraged among the young people at the office:
Tesla staffed its San Mateo office with mostly young workers, in their 20s and early 30s, who brought with them a culture that prized entertaining memes and viral online content. Former staffers described a free-wheeling atmosphere in chat rooms with workers exchanging jokes about images they viewed while labeling.
According to several ex-employees, some labelers shared screenshots, sometimes marked up using Adobe Photoshop, in private group chats on Mattermost, Tesla’s internal messaging system. There they would attract responses from other workers and managers. Participants would also add their own marked-up images, jokes or emojis to keep the conversation going. Some of the emojis were custom-created to reference office inside jokes, several ex-employees said.
One former labeler described sharing images as a way to “break the monotony.” Another described how the sharing won admiration from peers.
“If you saw something cool that would get a reaction, you post it, right, and then later, on break, people would come up to you and say, ‘Oh, I saw what you posted. That was funny,’” said this former labeler. “People who got promoted to lead positions shared a lot of these funny items and gained notoriety for being funny.”
Literally: the privacy of Tesla owners is a joke to Tesla employees. Thankfully, at least some people who worked there had a conscience.
“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.”
Later on in the story, we get at least a few more Tesla employees with a conscience:
In interviews, two former employees said in their normal work duties they were sometimes asked to view images of customers in and around their homes, including inside garages.
“I sometimes wondered if these people know that we’re seeing that,” said one.
“I saw some scandalous stuff sometimes, you know, like I did see scenes of intimacy but not nudity,” said another. “And there was just definitely a lot of stuff that like, I wouldn’t want anybody to see about my life.”
As an example, this person recalled seeing “embarrassing objects,” such as “certain pieces of laundry, certain sexual wellness items … and just private scenes of life that we really were privy to because the car was charging.”
And, clearly, someone who saw all this reported it to the Reuters journalists.
This does raise questions about whether or not this use of the images and videos violates various regulations around data protection and privacy. While the US doesn’t have a federal privacy law, there are some state privacy laws in effect that this might violate, and the FTC usually doesn’t take kindly to the idea that data is used for purposes that the consumer did not realize they were consenting too. And it seems like the head of the FTC is already none too pleased with Elon Musk.
But, of course, there may be more serious problems in the EU where this would likely raise some big GDPR concerns. While I have many issues with the GDPR, at the very least this seems like exactly what that law is supposed to prevent.
Incredibly, the article ends by noting top performing data labelers could win the use of a Tesla for a day or two (it’s not like Tesla paid its data labelers enough to afford its cars themselves), but some of those who won felt uncomfortable claiming the prize, as they worried about invasions of their own privacy.
I often think that many of the privacy concerns people discuss regarding the internet are totally overblown. People don’t mind sharing certain data in exchange for something valuable, but the key elements for dealing with privacy is that users should (1) understand the trade-offs involved, with knowledge of what data they’re giving up and what concrete benefit they’re getting in exchange, and (2) they should have some control and visibility into that data to make sure that the trade-offs remain aligned.
I can’t see how Tesla employees making memes of the images and videos they took inside people’s garages of occasionally intimate and private situations, even when the car is off, meets any of those criteria.
Filed Under: cameras, data labeling, elon musk, memes, privacy, surveillance, videos
Companies: tesla
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