Smile – You’re Being Watched

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Recent interviews with former Tesla workers found that it was common practice in some Tesla offices to share sensitive and embarrassing video clips of customers taken by their own cars, without their knowledge.

At least that’s what nine former Tesla employees recently divulged to Reuters news agency.

The employees said hundreds, if not thousands, of private video clips from customers Tesla’s cars were regularly viewed by staff from 2019 through the middle of 2022, and maybe longer.

“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” said one former Tesla employee.

Although some of the video clips were benign – for example, dogs or funny road signs – others were said to reveal Tesla owners and their family members in embarrassing, compromising, and even dangerous situations.

Ex-Tesla employees described videos of naked car owners, people tripping and falling, people driving badly, crashes, collisions, road rage incidents, and even someone being dragged into a car seemingly against their will.

The so-called entertainment videos were commonly made into screenshots and memes, marked up with added annotations, recreated in slow-motion, and would continuously circulate through Tesla’s in-house messaging platform by way of private chats, emails or in small groups.

“If you saw something cool that would get a reaction, you post it, right, and then later, on break, people would come up to you and say, ‘Oh, I saw what you posted. That was funny,’” one ex-employee from Tesla’s San Mateo, California office told Reuters.

“People who got promoted to lead positions shared a lot of these funny items and gained notoriety for being funny,” the worker said.