Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.
A file photo of a Tesla Model 3 vehicle using the Autopilot Full Self Driving Beta software while navigating a city road in Encinitas, California, US. 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 nine former employees. — ReutersTesla Inc assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy “is and will always be enormously important to us”.
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.
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 recognise pedestrians, street signs, construction vehicles, garage doors and other objects encountered on the road or at customers’ houses. To accomplish that, data labellers were given access to thousands of videos or images recorded by car cameras that they would view and identify objects.
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.” 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 isn’t linked to a customer’s account or vehicle identification number, “and does not identify you personally.
In February, the Dutch Data Protection Authority, or 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. To make the system work, Tesla initially installed sonar sensors, radar and a single front-facing camera at the top of the windshield.
In February, Tesla recalled more than 362,000 US vehicles to update their Full Self-Driving software after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it could allow vehicles to exceed speed limits and potentially cause crashes at intersections. By 2019, however, Tesla was no longer satisfied with the work of Samasource’s data labelers. At an event called Tesla AI Day in 2021, Andrej Karpathy, then senior director of AI at Tesla, said: “Unfortunately, we found very quickly that working with a third party to get data sets for something this critical was just not going to cut it ... Honestly the quality was not amazing.”
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 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.”
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