Hat tip to newsie.social/… for linking this Reuters story www.reuters.com/…
Apparently Tesla cars have cameras inside as well as outside the vehicle, and the video footage is all sent to Tesla.
Employees at Tesla have been exporting these videos and making memes and sharing footage in internal chat rooms. This footage has included naked owners approaching their vehicle on their own property, random people walking by the vehicles, children, the contents of owners’ garage, and more.
From the original story:
To report this story, Reuters contacted more than 300 former Tesla employees who had worked at the company over the past nine years and were involved in developing its self-driving system. More than a dozen agreed to answer questions, all speaking on condition of anonymity.
Most Tesla owners are unaware of the privacy issues that come from having such a highly instrumented vehicle.
As someone who once ogled Teslas (because, come on, they are gorgeous looking cars), I’m a big fan of moving away from oil to electric vehicles, and I’m grateful in hindsight that I didn’t have the means to acquire a Tesla of my own.
Now that Elon Musk has been publicly revealing his desire to dismantle the former public square Twitter, one that helped foster the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter, I would never drive a Tesla, even if I won one in a contest.