A Tesla customer is suing the electric vehicle giant, in the first legal action since Tesla employees were revealed to share private customer information(Opens in a new tab).
The potential class action lawsuit was filed on April 7 by Tesla Model Y owner Henry Yeh, who sued the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to hold Tesla accountable to owners of its cars equipped with an autopilot.
“Like anyone, Mr. Yeh was outraged that Tesla’s cameras could be used to violate his family’s privacy, which the California Constitution scrupulously protects,” Yeh’s attorney said, Jack Fitzgerald, in a statement. Reuters. Yeh wrote that he felt violated by employees’ actions to share sensitive data taken from his car for the purpose of “tasteless and tortious entertainment” and “humiliation of those surreptitiously recorded”.
On April 7, Reuters reported(Opens in a new tab) on claims by nine former Tesla employees that team members were share personal video footage and images taken from the car’s internal cameras on employee channels. The posts shared included “intimate” scenes of customers’ homes and events on the road, which were broadcast by Tesla’s artificial intelligence trainers (known as “taggers”) as a form of corporate influence.
In the complaint, Yeh wrote that it was filed “against Tesla on its behalf, similarly situated class members and the general public” in a possible class action lawsuit from customers who rented or bought a Tesla vehicle in the past four years.