Tesla is back in the headlines once again, and this time the story is a bit more disconcerting than previous forays into national news. A report suggests that the company may have engaged in some problematic conduct concerning the privacy of its customers.

Reuters reported that “between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras.”

The authors interviewed nine former Tesla employees who informed them that some of these recordings captured customers in “embarrassing situations.” In one instance, one of the former workers discussed footage of a man walking to the vehicle in the nude.

There were more videos that surfaced among employees. From the report:

Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.

Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees.

In its “Customer Privacy Notice,” Tesla notes that its “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.”

But the employees Reuters interviewed say this is not accurate. The news outlet eventually interviewed about 300 former Tesla employees about the matter.

“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” said one individual. “Let’s say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.”

In another instance, the company found out that customers were having problems with Teslas on Autopilot not functioning properly. Two former employees said they were asked to monitor images of customers around their homes. “I sometimes wondered if these people know that we’re seeing that,” one of the workers said.

“I saw some scandalous stuff sometimes, you know, like I did see scenes of intimacy but not nudity,” another said. “And there was just definitely a lot of stuff that like, I wouldn’t want anybody to see about my life.”

The notion that these employees were sharing these images recreationally among themselves might be disturbing to anyone who owns a Tesla. However, some of these individuals didn’t seem to believe it was an issue. However, others were uncomfortable with the idea of violating people’s privacy.

“It was a breach of privacy, to be honest. And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people,” said a former employee.

Another told Reuters: “I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don’t think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected … We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids.”

One of the former Tesla employees told Reuters that sharing these images was commonly done for fun. From Reuters:

According to several ex-employees, some labelers shared screenshots, sometimes marked up using Adobe Photoshop, in private group chats on Mattermost, Tesla’s internal messaging system. There they would attract responses from other workers and managers. Participants would also add their own marked-up images, jokes or emojis to keep the conversation going. Some of the emojis were custom-created to reference office inside jokes, several ex-employees said.

Another said sharing the images was a way to “break the monotony.”

“If you saw something cool that would get a reaction, you post it, right, and then later, on break, people would come up to you and say, ‘Oh, I saw what you posted. That was funny,’” said another employee. “People who got promoted to lead positions shared a lot of these funny items and gained notoriety for being funny.”

A California man has filed a lawsuit against Tesla over the privacy issue. The suit alleges that the cameras in the company’s vehicles “captured highly-invasive videos and images of the cars’ owners, which Tesla employees were able to access—not for the stated purposes of communication, fulfillment of services, and enhancement of Tesla vehicle driving systems—but for the tasteless and tortious entertainment of Tesla employees, and perhaps those outside the company, and the humiliation of those surreptitiously recorded.”

“That such videos and images were made available to Tesla employees to view and share, at will, and for improper purposes, affects each and every person with a Tesla vehicle, their families, passengers, and even guests in their homes,” the filing reads.

So far, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has not commented on the Reuters report. But with concerns over privacy becoming more commonplace, this story will likely gain more traction – especially if more evidence of privacy violations comes to light.