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    Letter To Tesla On Vehicle Camera Recordings From Senators Markey and Blumenthal

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    ahawkins8223
    Tesla employees shared private photos and videos captured by cameras in customers' vehicles without consent. A Reuters report found that highly invasive videos and images displaying customers' homes, children, and in some cases traumatic events like crashes were spread widely within Tesla and accessed easily by employees. This raises serious concerns about Tesla's privacy practices and management of sensitive customer data. Senators Markey and Blumenthal request answers from Elon Musk about Tesla's policies on data collection and use, access restrictions, investigations into employee misuse of data, and steps taken to ensure privacy and prevent further breaches.

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    Letter To Tesla On Vehicle Camera Recordings From Senators Markey and Blumenthal

    Uploaded by

    ahawkins8223
    15K views3 pages
    Tesla employees shared private photos and videos captured by cameras in customers' vehicles without consent. A Reuters report found that highly invasive videos and images displaying customers' homes, children, and in some cases traumatic events like crashes were spread widely within Tesla and accessed easily by employees. This raises serious concerns about Tesla's privacy practices and management of sensitive customer data. Senators Markey and Blumenthal request answers from Elon Musk about Tesla's policies on data collection and use, access restrictions, investigations into employee misuse of data, and steps taken to ensure privacy and prevent further breaches.

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    Letter to Tesla on Vehicle Camera Recordings From Senators Markey and Blumenthal

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    Letter to Tesla on Vehicle Camera Recordings From Senators Markey and Blumenthal

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    Tesla employees shared private photos and videos captured by cameras in customers' vehicles without consent. A Reuters report found that highly invasive videos and images displaying customers' homes, children, and in some cases traumatic events like crashes were spread widely within Tesla and accessed easily by employees. This raises serious concerns about Tesla's privacy practices and management of sensitive customer data. Senators Markey and Blumenthal request answers from Elon Musk about Tesla's policies on data collection and use, access restrictions, investigations into employee misuse of data, and steps taken to ensure privacy and prevent further breaches.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    15K views3 pages

    Letter To Tesla On Vehicle Camera Recordings From Senators Markey and Blumenthal

    Uploaded by

    ahawkins8223
    Tesla employees shared private photos and videos captured by cameras in customers' vehicles without consent. A Reuters report found that highly invasive videos and images displaying customers' homes, children, and in some cases traumatic events like crashes were spread widely within Tesla and accessed easily by employees. This raises serious concerns about Tesla's privacy practices and management of sensitive customer data. Senators Markey and Blumenthal request answers from Elon Musk about Tesla's policies on data collection and use, access restrictions, investigations into employee misuse of data, and steps taken to ensure privacy and prevent further breaches.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 3

    April 14, 2023

    Elon Musk
    Chief Executive Officer
    Tesla, Inc.
    3500 Deer Creek Road
    Palo Alto, California 94304

    Dear Mr. Musk,

    According to an alarming new press report, Tesla employees have shared private photos
    and videos captured by cameras in Tesla customers’ vehicles. Although vehicle cameras have the
    potential to improve safety, these features do not need to come at the expense of consumer
    privacy. Tesla must take all necessary steps to protect consumer information and maintain strong
    privacy protections for its vehicle owners.

    Tesla vehicles capture huge amounts of consumer data, including videos and still images.
    For example, Tesla vehicles are equipped with multiple cameras, which record videos outside the
    vehicle and transmit those recordings to Tesla to train Tesla’s autonomous driving software
    (misleadingly named “Full Self Driving”1). These cameras also capture vast amounts of footage
    that reveal information about people inside and outside the vehicles, including sensitive
    information about the personal lives, belongings, and location of Tesla owners and the public.

    As Tesla operates this extensive data collection system, it claims to be committed to


    consumer privacy. Notably, Tesla’s Consumer Privacy Policy states: “Camera functionality has
    been designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.”2 Although Tesla owners have the
    option to turn off photo and video transmissions to Tesla, Tesla also states that it has established
    important privacy safeguards to protect consumers’ data. For example, the Consumer Privacy
    Policy states: “Even if you choose to opt-in, the camera recordings are limited to 30 seconds and
    remain anonymous, ensuring it’s not linked to you or your vehicle.”3 It further states: “In order to
    protect your privacy, personal data is either not logged at all, is subject to privacy preserving
    techniques, or is removed from any reports before they’re sent to Tesla.”4 This language creates
    the impression that Tesla customers can consent to their vehicle transmitting images and videos
    to Tesla without sacrificing their privacy.

    1
    Press Release, Blumenthal & Markey Call for FTC Investigation Into Tesla's Misleading Advertising of Driving
    Automation Systems” (Aug. 18, 2021), https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/markey-and-
    blumenthal-call-for-ftc-investigation-into-teslas-misleading-advertising-of-driving-automation-systems.
    2
    Customer Privacy Notice, Tesla (Feb. 2022), https://www.tesla.com/en_eu/legal/privacy.
    3
    Id.
    4
    Id.
    Mr. Musk
    April 14, 2023
    Page 2

    That impression appears to have been deeply misleading. According to a recent Reuters
    report, for years, “groups of Tesla employees” shared highly invasive videos and images from
    customers’ vehicles — without their consent or notification — including images and videos
    displaying their homes, their children, other details of their daily lives, and in some cases,
    traumatic events such as crashes and severe child injury.5 These videos, including one in which a
    Tesla vehicle traveling at high-speed hit a child, spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo,
    California like “wildfire.”6 A former employee stated: “I don’t think [Tesla owners] know that
    their privacy is, like, not respected. . . . . We could see them doing laundry and really intimate
    things. We could see their kids.”7 And despite Tesla’s Customer Privacy Policy stating that
    camera recordings are anonymous, former Tesla employees claimed that they could easily see
    the location of recordings, which could be used to deduce a Tesla owner’s location. Shockingly,
    the Tesla employee practice of sharing private consumer data has reportedly been so common
    that camera recordings were distributed throughout company group chats to dozens of employees
    with no apparent response from Tesla leadership.8 In fact, one former Tesla employee stated they
    “would never buy a Tesla after seeing how [the company] treated some of these people.”9

    This apparent willful disregard for the privacy of Tesla customers is unacceptable and raises
    serious questions about Tesla’s management practices. We urge you to take all necessary actions
    to ensure that any images or videos consensually collected from Tesla vehicles are subject to
    strict privacy safeguards, and we request written answers to the following questions by May 5,
    2023.

    1. Please fully describe the purposes for which Tesla collects and retains vehicle recordings,
    how long those recordings are kept, and who has access to them.
    2. Does Tesla restrict access to these vehicle camera recordings to certain employees or
    contractors through policy and technical measures? If so, please describe in detail those
    restrictions.
    3. Why were Telsa’s policy and technical measures unable to prevent the wrongful sharing
    of vehicle recordings? Has Tesla investigated this misuse of highly invasive customer
    information?
    4. Were Tesla executives aware that their employees were sharing consumer vehicle
    recordings, including videos and images, on internal company messaging software prior
    to Reuters’ public reporting on this topic?
    a. If so, for how long were the executives aware of this employee behavior and what
    steps did Tesla take to stop this employee behavior?

    5
    Steve Stecklow, Waylon Cunningham & Hyunjoo Jin, Special Report: Tesla Workers Shared Sensitive Images
    Recorded by Customer Cars, Reuters (Apr. 6, 2023), https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-
    sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars-2023-04-06/.
    6
    Id.
    7
    Id.
    8
    Id.
    9
    Id.
    Mr. Musk
    April 14, 2023
    Page 3

    b. If not, will Tesla commit to taking all necessary steps, including formal policy
    changes, to ensure that this breach of consumer privacy does not happen again?
    5. Are Tesla executives certain that Tesla employees no longer share vehicle camera
    recordings for unauthorized purposes?
    6. Tesla’s Customer Privacy Policy states that camera recordings “remain anonymous,” but
    the Reuters report suggests that a customer’s location could be easily deduced from those
    recordings, including tagging those videos on a map. Please describe the steps Tesla has
    taken to protect user anonymity.
    a. What steps is Tesla taking to ensure that the camera recordings are actually
    anonymous?
    b. Will Tesla commit to taking all necessary steps, including formal policy changes,
    to ensure that vehicle camera recordings do not identify the location of the Tesla
    customer?
    Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

    Sincerely,

    Edward J. Markey Richard Blumenthal


    United States Senator United States Senator

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