Tesla gets class action lawsuit over employee access to car videos

Tesla is going through a tough time following a complaint alleging that its employees had access to private video footage recorded from various vehicles that they later shared as memes in closed groups. After the report Reutersthe company could face a potential class action lawsuit.

The request was submitted last week, the day after it became known that the staff Tesla will share highly invasive videos and images captured by customers’ car cameras on corporate messaging systems between 2019 and 2022.

Henry Yeh, a San Francisco resident and owner of a Tesla Model Y, alleges in a lawsuit that Tesla employees violated customer privacy by accessing and sharing images and videos for their “disgusting and insidious entertainment”, leading to “humiliation recorded without their knowledge.” The plaintiff alleges that Tesla’s conduct is “particularly egregious” and “highly offensive.”

Ye has filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, and the potential class action lawsuit would include people who have owned or rented Teslas within the past four years. His lawyer Scott Fitzgerald told the media that “Like anyone else, Mr. Ye is outraged at the idea that Tesla cameras could be used to violate his family’s privacy, which is scrupulously protected by the California Constitution. other owners of cars of this brand.

Last week, a Reuters report collected testimonies from Tesla employees that pointed to the existence of an internal network of employees who accessed and shared videos and photos taken from cameras installed in vehicles to improve autonomous driving and surveillance systems.

Ex-employee says Tesla employees could see customers “does very intimate things. We could see his children.” Other images were images of dogs and funny road signs that became memes. Some videos were shared with only two employees in private messages, while others could be viewed more widely.

Seven former employees told Reuters that a computer program they used at work could display location data from records and potentially show where the Tesla owner lives. Tesla’s online customer privacy notice states that its “camera footage remains anonymous and is not linked to you or your vehicle.”