Tesla Inc assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy "is and will always be enormously important to us".
The cameras it builds into vehicles to assist driving, it notes on its website, are "designed from the ground up to protect your privacy".
But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers' car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.
Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle naked.
Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee.
The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, "like wildfire", the ex-employee said.
Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats.
While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, said several ex-employees.
Tesla states in its online "Customer Privacy Notice" that its "camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle".
But seven former employees told Reuters the computer programme they used at work could show the location of recordings, which potentially could reveal where a Tesla owner lived.
One ex-employee also said that some recordings appeared to have been made when cars were parked and turned off.
Several years ago, Tesla would receive video recordings from its vehicles even when they were off, if owners gave consent. It has since stopped doing so.
"We could see inside people's garages and their private properties," said another former employee.
About three years ago, some employees stumbled on and shared a video of a unique submersible vehicle parked inside a garage, according to two people who viewed it.
Nicknamed "Wet Nellie", the white Lotus Esprit sub had been featured in the 1977 James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me.
The vehicle's owner: Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, who had bought it for about US$968,000 at an auction in 2013.
It's not clear whether Musk was aware of the video or that it had been shared.
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.
Since about 2016, Tesla has employed hundreds of people in Africa and later the United States to label images to help its cars learn how to recognise pedestrians, street signs, construction vehicles, garage doors and other objects encountered on the road or at customers' houses.
To accomplish that, data labelers were given access to thousands of videos or images recorded by car cameras that they would view and identify objects.
Tesla increasingly has been automating the process, and shut down a data-labelling hub last year in San Mateo, California. But it continues to employ hundreds of data labellers in Buffalo, New York.
Two ex-employees said they weren't bothered by the sharing of images, saying that customers had given their consent or that people had given up any reasonable expectation of keeping personal data private.
Three others, however, said they were troubled by it.
"It was a breach of privacy. And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people," said one former employee.
Another said: "I'm bothered by it because the people who buy the car don't know that their privacy is not respected …
"We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids."
One former employee saw nothing wrong with sharing images, but described a function that allowed data labellers to view the location of recordings on Google Maps as a "massive invasion of privacy".
In China, some government compounds and residential neighborhoods have banned Teslas because of concerns about its cameras.
In response, Musk said in a virtual talk at a Chinese forum in 2021: "If Tesla used cars to spy in China or anywhere, we will get shut down."
The writers are from the Reuters news agency
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times