SAN FRANCISCO: A California Tesla owner sued the electric carmaker in a prospective class action lawsuit accusing it of violating customers’ privacy.
The lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California came after Reuters reported on Thursday that groups of Tesla workers privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras between 2019 and 2022.
The lawsuit, filed by Henry Yeh, the San Francisco resident who owns Tesla’s Model Y, alleges that Tesla workers could access the videos and images for their “tasteless and tortious entertainment” and “the humiliation of those surreptitiously recorded.”
“As anyone would be, 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,” Jack Fitzgerald, the attorney representing Yeh, said in a statement to Reuters.
‘Tesla needs to be held accountable’
Fitzgerald said that “Tesla needs to be held accountable for these invasions and for misrepresenting its lax privacy practices to him and other Tesla owners”
Tesla didn’t respond to Reuters request for comment. The lawsuit said Tesla’s conduct is “particularly egregious” and “highly offensive.”
It said Yeh was filing the complaint “against Tesla company on behalf of himself, similarly-situated class members, and the general public.” The complaint said that the prospective class would include individuals who owned and leased a Tesla within the past four years.
Reuters reported that some Tesla workers could see customers “doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids,” citing an ex-employee.
The lawsuit said that “Indeed, parents’ interest in their children’s privacy is one of the most fundamental liberty interests society recognizes,”
The lawsuit asked the court “to enjoin Tesla company from engaging in its wrongful behaviour, including violating the privacy of customers and others, and to recover actual and punitive damages.”
