© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Tesla vehicles are displayed at a sales and service center in Vista, California, U.S., June 3, 2022. REUTERS/Mike Blake
By Hyunjoo Jin and Mike Scarcella
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – An owner of California Tesla (NASDAQ:) sued the electric carmaker on Friday in a potential class action lawsuit accusing it of violating customer privacy.
The lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California came after Reuters reported on Thursday that groups of Tesla employees privately shared, through an internal messaging system, videos and images to highly invasive times recorded by customers’ car cameras between 2019 and 2022.
The lawsuit, filed by Henry Yeh, a San Francisco resident who owns the Tesla Model Y, alleges that Tesla employees were able to access the images and videos for their “tasteless and torturous entertainment” and “the humiliation of those recorded surreptitiously”.
“As anyone would be, Mr. Yeh was outraged at the idea that Tesla’s cameras could be used to violate his family’s privacy, which the California Constitution scrupulously protects,” Jack Fitzgerald, an attorney representing Yeh, said in a statement to Reuters.
“Tesla must be held accountable for these encroachments and for misrepresenting his lax privacy practices to him and other Tesla owners,” Fitzgerald said.
Tesla did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
The lawsuit says Tesla’s conduct is “particularly egregious” and “highly offensive.”
He said Yeh was filing the complaint “against Tesla on his behalf, similarly situated class members, and the general public.” The lawsuit said the prospective class would include people who owned or leased a Tesla in the past four years.
Reuters reported that some Tesla employees could see customers “washing clothes and really intimate stuff. We could see their kids,” citing a former employee.
“Indeed, the interest of parents in their children’s privacy is one of the most fundamental liberty interests recognized by society,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit asks the court to “bar Tesla from engaging in its unlawful behavior, including violation of the privacy of customers and others, and to recover actual and punitive damages.”
