A Tesla owner is suing the carmaker for alleged privacy violations after employees reportedly shared sensitive images from vehicle cameras

The lawsuit is reported by Reuters a report Some Tesla employees have allegedly shared sensitive photos and videos recorded by the vehicles, including those inside customers’ garages — and even of a naked man approaching the car.

luck I contacted Tesla outside of normal business hours but did not receive an immediate response.

According to a Reuters report, groups of employees used an internal messaging system to share highly intrusive images from 2019 to 2022.

Henry Yeh, who owns a Model Y and lives in San Francisco, filed the lawsuit, with his attorney, Jack Fitzgerald, saying, “Like everyone else, Mr. Yeh was outraged at the notion that Tesla’s cameras could be used to violate family privacy, which is strictly protected by the California constitution.” .

The lawsuit alleges that Tesla employees accessed highly infringing images to “harmful entertainment” and “humiliate those who were surreptitiously recorded.” Yeh was filing a complaint “against Tesla on his own behalf, class members in the same situation, and the general public.”

Tesla equips its cars with an impressive array of cameras that can be useful in many ways, such as proving who was at fault in an accident and assisting with features like Autopilot and Autopark. But they can also capture private or potentially embarrassing moments, particularly in a customer’s garage.

Tesla’s customer privacy notice states: “Your privacy is and always will be extremely important to us… Camera recordings remain anonymous and are not associated with you or your vehicle.”

But the cameras have raised privacy concerns in other countries. Earlier this year Tesla Agree on Changing camera settings on vehicles sold in the European Union after the Dutch privacy regulator said the previous settings allowed privacy violations.

“If someone parks one of these vehicles in front of someone’s window, they can spy inside and see everything the other person is doing,” Katja Moore, a board member of a Dutch regulator, said. He said in the current situation.

In the European Union, cameras no longer record continuously around a vehicle. It remains disabled by default, unless the user turns on logging.

David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, to Reuters That, in the United States, Tesla employees sharing sensitive videos could be considered a violation of the company’s privacy policy and lead to the Federal Trade Commission’s intervention.