(Reuters) — A Tesla owner in California sued the electric car maker on Friday in a potential class-action lawsuit, accusing it of violating customer privacy.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. 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 sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras between 2019 and 2022.
The suit, filed by Henry Yeh, a San Francisco resident who owns Tesla’s Model Y, alleges that Tesla employees were able to access the images and videos for their “tasteless and harmful entertainment”
; and “humiliation of those secretly recorded. ““As anyone would be, Mr. Yeh was outraged by the idea that Tesla’s cameras could be used to violate his family’s privacy, which the California Constitution carefully protects,” Jack Fitzgerald, a lawyer representing Mr. Yeh, said in a statement to Reuters.
“Tesla must be held accountable for these invasions and for misrepresenting its lax privacy practices to him and other Tesla owners,” Fitzgerald said.
Tesla did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
The lawsuit said Tesla’s behavior is “particularly egregious” and “highly offensive.”
The lawsuit asks the court “to order Tesla to address its wrongful conduct, including violating the privacy of customers and others, and to recover actual and punitive damages.”
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