Tesla employees accessed and shared videos taken by the cars’ external cameras without their owners’ permission, sometimes circulating private images of people, their houses and their children on an internal messaging system, Engadget reports. And one of the videos circulated appeared to show detailed images of Elon Musk’s own garage.
One video showed a Tesla hitting a child on a bicycle at high speed on a residential road. Another showed a naked man walking around his car in the privacy of his yard; video from that vehicle also depicted the family’s children. And the piece de resistance of the trove: a geotagged image of the special Lotus submarine used in the 1977 James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. Elon Musk bought the prop and stores it in his garage. Much of the video collected was filmed while the vehicles were turned off and unoccupied.
Besides the hypocrisy and hilarity of Musk’s own employees monitoring his activities after he went apoplectic when he found a Twitter account tracking his plane’s location using publicly-available information, the practice violates Tesla’s declared privacy policy provided to vehicle purchasers.