Tesla car camera recordings can be geolocated as some employees poked fun at private info

Tesla employs many people to look at imagery gathered from its car cameras and tag them appropriately in order to advance its autonomous driving algorithms. Bored by the mundane work, however, some of them have shared camera recordings which include sensitive items or situations with each other.

A few former employees have confirmed that they saw funny memes made out of those recordings being posted on Tesla's internal chat system Mattermost. There were also clips of accident shared, including one involving a child on a bicycle. Some imagery was of the inside of owners' garages, others included videos of embarrassing situations. As per some of the recollections:

I saw some scandalous stuff sometimes, you know, like I did see scenes of intimacy but not nudity. And there was just definitely a lot of stuff that like, I wouldn't want anybody to see about my life... certain pieces of laundry, certain sexual wellness items … and just private scenes of life that we really were privy to because the car was charging.

According to the former employees these were only shared internally to pass the time, but the more concerning part is that Tesla promises complete privacy and disassociation of the camera footage with owners or locations.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the media coming from the cameras that are present all around Tesla's electric vehicles, can still be geolocated. Data labelers who work for Tesla could even see where the image or video were taken on Google Maps and thus identify the owner, which one of the employees who leaked the sharing practice dubbed "a massive invasion of privacy."

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