Henry Yeh, a Model Y owner, filed the suit in a United States District Court in California on Friday. It came just a day after Reuters published a report detailing the accounts of multiple unnamed former employees, who claimed that workers shared images and videos recorded by vehicles to amuse and entertain one another.
“Like anyone would be, Mr Yeh was outraged at the idea that Tesla’s cameras can be used to violate his family’s privacy, which the California Constitution scrupulously protects,” a lawyer who is representing Yeh, said in a statement seen by Al Jazeera. “Tesla needs to be held accountable for these invasions and for misrepresenting its lax privacy practices to him and other Tesla owners.”
Tesla has made no official remarks on either the Reuters report or the lawsuit but did release a video a month ago outlining its data privacy practices. The carmaker claims that it only looks at anonymized data that cannot be linked back to an individual vehicle or owner.
However, former workers claimed that while this was technically true, they had access to a tool that could tell them where a video was taken, even in cases where the footage was filmed inside a garage or on a driveway.
The former Tesla workers also alleged that videos and images of odd, unusual, or scandalous things were modified into memes and shared internally. The employees did not claim that any footage was shared outside of the company but said that amusing or titillating images spread “like wildfire” on Tesla‘s messaging service.
“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” one former employee alleged. “Let’s say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.”
The lawsuit against Tesla alleges that the videos and images were shared for the employees’ “tasteless and tortious entertainment,” and “the humiliation of those surreptitiously recorded.”
It called the behavior “highly offensive” and asked the court to “enjoin Tesla from engaging in its wrongful behavior, including violating the privacy of customers and others, and to recover actual and punitive damages.”
In the complaint, the prospective class was defined to include individuals who owned or leased a Tesla within the last four years.
Source: Carscoops
