Tesla says your cabin camera footage is anonymous and private. But Tesla employees were caught sharing your private videos — including footage of people undressed, children, and inside garages — as entertainment and memes at work. They could also look up exactly where each video was recorded, defeating the claimed anonymity.
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Tesla promises to protect your personal data, but a whistleblower leaked over 100 gigabytes of Tesla's internal files — including Social Security numbers of 100,000+ employees, customer banking details, and hidden complaints about Autopilot accelerating on its own. If Tesla can't protect its own internal data, the privacy promises in their policy ring hollow.
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Tesla's privacy policy mainly talks about car data, but their phone app demands access to your contacts, calendar, microphone, phone camera, and the ability to make calls and change your phone settings. That's 40 permissions — far more than you'd expect from a car remote control app. Plus it includes advertising and analytics trackers watching how you use it.
Tesla says they only collect the minimum data needed to run your charger. But the Tesla app demands access to your microphone, camera, contacts, calendar, phone calls, and precise location — none of which are needed to charge a car. The app collects far more than the "minimum" Tesla claims.
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Tesla tells you the charger connects to Wi-Fi for updates and monitoring. What they don't mention is that it runs a web server on your home network that security researchers exploited to take full control of the device — no password needed. Another team hacked it through the charging cable in 18 minutes. Tesla never warned customers about these attack surfaces.
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Tesla promises your data isn't linked to your identity. But Reuters found Tesla employees were sharing private recordings from customers' cars and could see where owners lived using Tesla's own tools. Over 30,000 employees had access. Your charger data flows through the same Tesla systems where this abuse happened.
Tesla says footage is anonymous and not linked to you. Their employees were looking up car owners by VIN while sharing videos of garages, naked bodies, and car crashes on Slack. The word "anonymous" was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that policy.
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You spent $15,000 on Full Self-Driving. Your car records every mile and sends it to train Tesla's AI, which powers their robotaxi business worth hundreds of billions. You're not a customer — you're an unpaid data laborer who paid for the tools.
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Your Tesla grades your driving in real time. Brake too hard? Premium up. Drive at midnight? Premium up. Follow too close once? Up next month. Tesla built an insurance company that uses your car as the snitch. California banned this. Eleven other states didn't.
Elon Musk told customers their Teslas could drive themselves — just wait for a software update. He said it every year since 2018. People paid up to $15,000 for "Full Self-Driving." A California judge finally called it what it is: "unambiguously false." Then Musk admitted the hardware in millions of cars wasn't even capable of it. No refunds. No retrofit. Just a quiet name change to "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" and a $99/month subscription for something that still can't drive itself.
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Tesla says Autopilot is safer than you. NHTSA disagrees — they've escalated a probe covering 3.2 million vehicles to the last step before a forced recall, after finding FSD can't see through sun glare, dust, or fog until the moment of impact. A Florida jury awarded $243 million after a Tesla on Autopilot killed 20-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon at an intersection. Tesla said the crash data was gone. A hacker proved it wasn't.
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A 20-year-old woman was killed by a Tesla on Autopilot. Her family asked Tesla for the crash data. Tesla said it was gone — unrecoverable. Then a hacker pulled the data from the car's computer and proved Tesla wrong. The data showed everything: 62 mph, stop sign ignored, Autopilot engaged. The jury awarded $243 million. A federal judge refused to throw it out. Tesla knew the data was there. They said it wasn't.