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.
critical
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.
critical
Tesla's Sentry Mode turns every parked Tesla into a public surveillance camera. It films the street, sidewalk, and neighbouring homes 24/7 — capturing anyone who walks by, their faces, and their license plates, all without their knowledge or consent. Tesla markets this as 'security' but it's also mass surveillance of public spaces that may violate privacy laws in many countries.
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.
critical
Sentry Mode records everyone who walks past your parked Tesla. Dutch privacy regulator: if every car did this, nobody could walk down a street unfilmed. Tesla's solution wasn't to stop filming — it was to make YOU responsible for the surveillance camera they bolted to your car.
critical
You paid $15,000 for "Full Self-Driving." Tesla quietly rewrote your contract to say "supervised" — then broke the link to the original. One owner found his purchase agreement now points to a dead page. The car company is editing history.
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.
high
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.
high
Tesla says they only collect the bare minimum data from your charger. In reality, your charger reports every charging session to Tesla's servers — when you plug in, how long you charge, how much energy you use. This data reveals when you're home, when you leave for work, and your daily routine. That's surveillance, not the "minimum" Tesla promises.
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.
high
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.
high
Tesla's website promises nobody but you knows where you've been. Then a Cybertruck exploded in Las Vegas and Tesla reconstructed the driver's entire five-day road trip across four states within hours — every charging stop, every route. The sheriff thanked Elon Musk personally on camera. Helpful for catching a bomber. But it proved that Tesla knows exactly where every car has been, all the time, despite telling you otherwise.