San Francisco - According to a Reuters interview with nine former employees, between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras via an internal messaging system.

Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. Other recordings showed crashes and road-rage incidents, and some images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees turned into memes.

While Tesla assures customers that its camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to them or their vehicle, former employees claimed that the computer program they used at work could show the location of recordings, potentially revealing where a Tesla owner lived.

Additionally, some recordings appeared to have been made when cars were parked and turned off, with one former employee stating, “We could see inside people's garages and their private properties.”

Tesla did not respond to questions about this issue. Reuters was unable to obtain any of the shared videos or images and could not determine whether the practice of sharing recordings, which occurred within some parts of Tesla as recently as last year, continues today or how widespread it was.

The recent news of Tesla employees sharing sensitive videos and images highlights the role of human workers in training artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Since 2016, Tesla has employed hundreds of people to label images and videos to teach their cars to recognize various objects encountered on the road.

While Tesla has been automating the process, they continue to employ hundreds of data labelers in Buffalo, New York.

Some former employees have expressed concern over the sharing of images, noting that it violates customers' privacy and could be seen as a breach of Tesla's own privacy policy. One expert in cybersecurity and privacy called the practice "morally reprehensible" and warned of potential consequences from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Tesla collects vast amounts of data from its global fleet of vehicles to develop its self-driving car technology. While the company requires car owners to grant permission before collecting data, the recent news raises questions about how customer data is being handled and whether it is being used ethically.