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

A Tesla car owner in California is suing the company for violating customers’ privacy, seeking class action status with other affected drivers. The suit was filed on 18 June after a Reuters report that some Tesla employees allegedly shared sensitive images and videos recorded by the vehicles, including ones from inside customers’ garages and even one of a naked man approaching a vehicle. According to the alleged internal messaging threads, videos and images were shared from 2019 to 2022. Henry Yeh, a San Francisco resident, who owns a Tesla Model Y, has filed the lawsuit along with his attorney, Jack Fitzgerald, on behalf of affected customers and the general public. 

Tesla equips its vehicles with an array of cameras that capture moments that may be private or embarrassing, particularly images from inside customers’ garages. The company’s customer privacy notice reads: “Your privacy is and will always be enormously important to us…camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” In response to privacy concerns, Tesla has made changes to its camera settings on vehicles sold in the European Union. Cameras now no longer continuously record around a car and remain disabled by default unless users turn on recording. 

According to David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, Tesla employees sharing sensitive videos could be considered a violation of the company’s privacy policy and trigger intervention by the privacy regulator Federal Trade Commission.  Earlier this year, Tesla’s camera settings were changed on vehicles sold in the European Union, after a Dutch privacy regulator declared the previous settings potentially allowed privacy violations. In response to the lawsuit, Tesla has made no public statement outside of normal business hours. 

The suit follows multiple concerns voiced by journalists and academics calling for stronger measures to address potential privacy violations caused by connected cars. In August 2020, UK journalist Mark Harris published an article highlighting privacy concerns about Tesla’s camera systems. Harris set up a private feed-sharing group to test privacy protections, and found concerns of potential breaches of privacy. If leaks of videos recorded by cameras in e.g. a car parked in front of a person’s window happened, there was a risk that everything the other person was doing could have been seen, said Katja Mur, a Dutch regulator board member.



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