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The ether has sensed that it’s been a good while since we had a bout of privacy paranoia.

Well, buckle up because this one includes smart cars.

According to Reuters, Tesla cars have been sending nudes, and those nudes have been shared among Tesla workers.

That’s right, Elon Musk might have seen your butt. Careful, he might draw it on a desk at the office considering his incredibly childish sense of humour.

The report notes how some Tesla workers shared the sensitive photos and videos captured by the cameras on owners’ cars with each other for several years. Nine former employees told the outlet that colleagues shared the images in group chats and one-on-one communications between 2019 and last year.

Engadget mentioned one example describing a video of a man approaching a Tesla “completely naked”.

Charming.

Another former employee said, “We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids”.

The solution seems pretty obvious – if your car’s got cameras, keep your pants on – but schoolboy sniggering aside, there’s a real issue here:

The image-sharing practice “was a breach of privacy, to be honest,” one of the former employees said. “And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people.”

Elon used some of the data to get what he wanted even:

Workers are said to have sent each other videos taken inside Tesla owners’ garages, too. One clip reportedly showed a submersible white Lotus Esprit sub that appeared in the 1977 James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. As it happens, Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought that vehicle a decade ago, suggesting that his employees were circulating footage that a vehicle captured inside his garage.

While some of these breaches had more serious consequences:

According to Reuters, multiple former employees said that the program they used at work showed where recordings had been made, potentially revealing where the owner lived. And those recordings were of all kinds of things, including footage of “crashes and road-rage incidents” where some videos spread “like wildfire”.

On its website, Tesla says each new vehicle is equipped with eight external cameras and states in its customer privacy notice that it designed the camera system to protect user privacy:

It says that even if owners opt in to share camera recordings with Tesla for “fleet learning” purposes, “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle” unless it receives the footage due to a safety event, such as a crash or an airbag deployment. Even so, one employee said it was possible for Tesla data labelers to see the location of captured footage on Google Maps.

But according to these former employees, that simply isn’t true, T3 notes:

“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” one former Tesla worker told the reporter. “Let’s say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.”

It’s so bad that some employees “became paranoid” while driving the firm’s own cars.

Give the Reuters piece a read, apparently, it is well worth it.

[sources:engadget&t3]