Your Tesla Is Watching

WIRED

26-02-2025

Is this Tesla spying on me right now? Probably not.
Can it? It definitely can.
[mellow electronic music]
This is a 2024 Tesla Model 3.
It has some of the most advanced navigation,
autonomous driving, and safety features
currently on the market, meaning it's full of equipment
that can record and track you and your surroundings,
but what happens to that data?
How much of it does Tesla collect
and can you trust the company
to protect your sensitive information?
I'm Andrew Couts.
Today, we're doing a deep dive into Tesla's privacy issues.
This is Incognito Mode.
[somber electronic music]
There have been roughly seven million Teslas sold,
and each one of them is
essentially a surveillance system on wheels.
The manual says there are Wi-Fi and GPS antennas
in the passenger-side mirror,
which lets your car see where you are and get directions
and download software updates
when it's parked in your garage.
Then, of course, there are all the cameras.
Every Tesla has a rear-view camera,
a common feature which has actually been required
in all new cars since 2018, but Teslas also have
either seven or eight other cameras depending on the model,
two mounted on the door pillars,
two mounted on the front fenders, one inside the car,
and either two or three mounted on the windshield
above the rear-view mirror.
These cameras record around the car
and feed that information
to an onboard AI called Tesla Vision,
which figures out things like
whether you're staying in your lane,
getting too close to other vehicles,
or if you're approaching a red light.
With this 360 view, you're really recording
a massive amount of information
about everything the car drives by, license plates,
people's faces, where people are on the street.
Basically, public information,
but it's a whole lot for a car to collect.
With all these sensors and cameras,
your Tesla is awash in data, data that the company says
your car needs to stay safe and get smarter,
and Tesla says that it keeps your data private,
but is it really that simple?
Let's look at what happens to
the most sensitive data that your Tesla collects.
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Your Tesla is constantly using its GPS sensor
to monitor where you go, but according to Tesla,
the company doesn't collect your location data
with two exceptions.
The first exception is
if you experience what the company calls a safety event.
Basically, if you get into an accident.
If your car senses a crash,
it'll send your location to Tesla.
The second is if you turn on location data sharing.
If you do that, your car will send location data to Tesla
so it can evaluate
how well its cars analyze and respond to road conditions.
Tesla promises that,
if you give it permission to collect this data,
it'll make sure it's anonymized.
The company says that it does not link your location
with your account or your identity
or keep a history of where you've been.
[somber electronic music]
Tesla says that it only collects camera footage
in limited circumstances.
For the exterior cameras, your car processes the data itself
unless you enable data sharing, in which case
recordings of up to 30 seconds are shared with Tesla
so it can evaluate
how well its cars analyze and respond to road conditions.
Just like when you voluntarily share location data,
Tesla says this information is anonymized.
According to Tesla,
the only time your car will share your camera footage
and link it to your identity is if you're in an accident.
Tesla's exterior cameras are also used for
a feature called Sentry Mode,
which basically lets you monitor your car's surroundings,
or if your car detects a threat or unusual movement,
you can watch a recording of the event.
Tesla promises that these features are secure.
The live view is protected with end-to-end encryption,
meaning that even Tesla can't access it,
and the recordings can only be saved on a USB drive.
That means they aren't sent to Tesla.
Still, you're gonna wanna keep Sentry Mode in mind,
and we'll explain more later.
As for the interior camera,
the one that might be seeing more sensitive things,
Tesla says that all its footage stays in the car
unless you enable data sharing.
If you turn on that sharing and you get in an accident,
your car will send Tesla short anonymized clips.
It's the same as with the exterior cameras,
but what's different about the interior camera is,
if you don't turn on data sharing,
the footage will never be sent to Tesla,
and if you're wondering about audio recordings
generated by voice commands
like asking your car to turn on the AC,
Tesla says those recordings stay in the car too
unless you enable data sharing
so it can improve the accuracy of your car's responses.
Just like with the cameras,
Tesla says it doesn't capture continuous audio recordings,
but can you trust Tesla's promises?
The truth is
your privacy isn't as simple as the company makes it sound.
[somber electronic music]
There are two big problems with Tesla's privacy claims.
The first has to do with anonymization.
Remember how Tesla claims that it anonymizes all the data
so it can't be traced back to you?
Well, this anonymization isn't fool-proof.
Each piece of data gets a temporary ID
when it's sent to Tesla servers,
but as IEEE Spectrum explained,
that temporary ID can stay active for days or even weeks,
and during that time, everything associated with that ID
is clearly linked for everyone at Tesla to see.
That could include repeated visits
to places that could clearly identify someone
like homes, schools, and office buildings.
As one Tesla owner who reverse-engineered
the car's data collection system told IEEE Spectrum,
You could probably match everything
to a single person if you wanted to.
And that leads to our second big problem,
how much you can trust Tesla itself.
Tesla makes a lot of privacy guarantees,
but when the Mozilla Foundation analyzed those promises,
it wasn't very impressed.
Tesla does brag on its privacy pages about
how they're committed to protecting your data privacy.
However, we worry that their actions
too often show otherwise.
Mozilla criticized the policy's really vague language
and lack of clarity on sharing with third parties,
and it said it was very worried about Tesla's privacy.
They even went as far as saying
it's hard to trust them with their current track record.
Tesla's had some pretty serious
privacy and security incidents over the past few years.
The biggest scandal involved
Tesla employees spying on customers
through the images and videos
recorded by their car's cameras.
[Reporter] A car owner
filing a potential class action suit
after a Reuters report published Thursday said
a small group of former employees
described sharing sensitive customer videos internally.
According to Reuters, between 2019 and 2022,
Tesla employees sent each other
highly invasive images and videos
from their customers' cars.
This included footage of naked people
and even a car hitting a child riding a bike.
Tesla employees could see inside homes and garages
as well as the GPS locations of their recordings.
After the news broke in 2023,
members of Congress took notice.
Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal
wrote to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, saying,
The apparent willful disregard of Tesla customers' privacy
is unacceptable and raises serious questions
about Tesla's management practices.
Employees spying isn't the only reason
to worry about how Tesla protects your privacy.
The company has also had trouble holding on to its data.
You have privacy questions
because information is being gathered about you
at all times, where you park, where you go,
and it's being kept by the automotive industry
without any real standards that are in place today.
In May 2023, a whistleblower gave a German newspaper
100 gigabytes of internal Tesla documents,
including sensitive employee details,
customers' bank information, and even production secrets.
A German data protection officer told The Guardian
that the data breach was unprecedented in scale.
Now that we've covered what's in a Tesla
and what to make of the company's privacy promises,
let's go over what could go wrong if you own, rent, ride in,
or just walk by one of these cars.
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When it comes to Tesla's privacy risks,
there's really three categories you have to consider,
government surveillance, hacking,
and good old-fashioned forgetfulness.
You own a Tesla, the government can just search your car.
They may not even need a warrant to do so.
The Fourth Amendment's so-called automobile exception
lets the police search a car without a warrant
as long as they have probable cause to be suspicious of you,
and searching a Tesla can involve
plugging your car into a computer
and analyzing all the data it's collected
about your travel history,
and here's something a lot of people don't know.
Even if you don't own a Tesla
and you don't take a ride in one,
you could still get caught in
the company's de facto surveillance.
Remember that Sentry Mode feature we told you about earlier?
If you're walking down the street near a Tesla
and a crime occurs nearby,
you could get caught up in a police investigation
without having anything to do with the incident.
Tesla's privacy policy contains vague and broad language
about when the company will share car data
with government authorities.
The company says that it will share information
in response to subpoenas, but it also says
it will turn over data if the company thinks
the law requires it for purposes of security
or other issues of public importance.
It's anyone's guess what that means.
Apart from government investigations,
there are also criminal gangs that like to hack companies,
take huge piles of customer data,
and charge ransoms not to post it online.
There's also the possibility
that hackers could steal your data right off your car.
In early 2023, researchers at Pwn2Own,
a security conference in Canada,
hacked into a Tesla Model 3 in less than two minutes.
They went from what's essentially an external component,
the Bluetooth chipset, to systems deep within the vehicle.
In addition to police and hackers,
there's a third privacy risk you should consider, yourself.
When people rent Teslas or trade in their used ones,
they sometimes forget to erase their car's memory.
Researchers have found sensitive unencrypted data
sitting on Teslas purchased at scrap yards,
where their previous owners probably thought
it would never be accessed again.
[somber electronic music]
Don't other cars have these problems too?
It's a fair question.
A 2023 Mozilla Foundation review
of connected vehicle privacy concluded,
Modern cars are a privacy nightmare.
The truth is
all car companies collect a lot of data on their customers.
Companies like Toyota use the car's interior camera
to make sure drivers are paying attention,
even to verify a driver's identity to prevent theft.
Another example is Nissan's privacy policy,
which states it could collect
not just your location history, but anything you might do
inside the privacy of your own car,
but not all of your car's data is equally sensitive
and not all car makers collect the same data
and handle it in the same way,
and when it comes to the most sensitive data,
Tesla stands out.
Given its unique quantity of cameras and sensor data,
its alarming privacy and security failures,
and its vague policy
about sharing information with the government.
As far as we know,
one researcher told IEEE Spectrum,
Tesla vehicles collect the most amount of data.
And in its 2023 review of car companies, Mozilla said,
Tesla is only the second product we've ever reviewed
to receive all of our privacy dings.
Of course, we can't talk about Tesla's privacy risks
without talking about Elon Musk.
The world's richest man has recently inserted himself
into the center of American politics
and aligned himself with President Donald Trump.
He's repeatedly twisted
the policies of his social media network X
to satisfy his own personal whims
and support Trump's political agenda,
and remember how Tesla says
it doesn't collect continuous video from its cars?
We don't know if that's a technological limitation
or just a company policy.
Basically, if the technology allows it,
all it takes is a policy tweak
for your level of privacy to drastically change.
[somber electronic music]
Now that you know how Tesla collects your information
and why it might not be as private as the company claims,
you're probably wondering how you can protect yourself.
If you own a Tesla,
the one thing you can do is disable data sharing.
Of course, we should point out that
disabling some of these features
will make your Tesla less smart.
Using technology is all about making trade-offs.
You'll have to decide for yourself
what you're most comfortable with.
If you're getting rid of your Tesla,
you can use the company's website or app
to request a total account deletion,
and if you're a pedestrian worried about ending up
in the background of a Tesla recording,
maybe just keep an eye out for that sleek T logo
and cross the street any time you see one.
Until next time.
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