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Tesla is facing a prospective class action lawsuit over allegations that the company’s employees violated their customers’ privacy by sharing videos and images from Tesla dash cams.
The lawsuit was filed last week, a day after Portal reported that Tesla employees were privately sharing on the company’s messaging systems, sometimes highly invasive, videos and images captured by customers’ dash cams between 2019 and 2022.
Henry Yeh, a San Francisco resident who owns a Tesla Model Y, alleges in the lawsuit that Tesla employees violated customers’ privacy by accessing and sharing the images and videos for their “distasteful and illicit entertainment.” secretly recorded what resulted in “the humiliation of those individuals.” The lawsuit says Tesla’s behavior was “particularly egregious” and “highly offensive.”
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Tesla vehicles are on display at a Tesla store in Palo Alto, California. (Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto via Getty Images/File/Fox News)
Yeh filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District Court of California, and the potential class would include individuals who have owned or leased a Tesla within the past four years.
His attorney, Scott Fitzgerald, told Portal: “Like everyone else, Mr. Yeh was outraged at the idea that Tesla’s cameras could be used to invade his family’s privacy, which the California Constitution scrupulously protects. Tesla must be held accountable for invasions and for misrepresenting its lax privacy practices to itself and other Tesla owners.”
Portal’ original report was based on interviews with several anonymous former employees of the automaker.
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Tesla is facing a prospective class action lawsuit over allegations that the company’s employees violated their customers’ privacy by sharing videos and images from Tesla dash cams. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images/File/Getty Images)
A former Tesla employee told the outlet that video was shared of a naked man approaching a vehicle. Another said video was shared of a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area before hitting a child riding a bike.
A former employee said Tesla employees have seen customers “do laundry and do really intimate things. We could see their children.”
Other images included images of dogs and funny street signs turned into memes. Some of the videos were only shared between two employees in direct messages, while others could be seen more broadly.
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A former employee said Tesla employees have seen customers “do laundry and do really intimate things. We could see their children.” (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images/File/Getty Images)
Seven former employees told Portal the computer program they used at work could show location data from records and potentially reveal where a Tesla owner lived.
Tesla’s online “Customer Privacy Notice” states that its “camera footage remains anonymous and is not linked to you or your vehicle.”
| ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TSLA | TESLA INC. | 185.06 | -0.46 | -0.25% |
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Another former employee said some footage appeared to have been taken as cars were parked and turned off. A few years ago, Tesla could receive video from cars even when the vehicles were off if owners consented, a practice the company has since stopped.
As part of the development of self-driving car technologies, Tesla collects a huge amount of data from its global fleet of several million vehicles and their cameras.
Tesla did not immediately respond to Portal’ request for comment.
Portal contributed to this report.