‘Massive’ Tesla data leak reveals thousands of alleged safety complaints

Tesla has failed to adequately support information from customers, employees and concern partners and has received thousands of lawsuit complaints regarding the carmaker’s operator assistance system, Germany’s Handelsblatt has reported, citing 100 gigabytes of confidential information leaked by a whistleblower.

The Handelsblatt study said lawsuit information could beryllium recovered “in abundance” successful a information acceptable labelled “Tesla Files”.

The files see tables containing much than 100,000 names of erstwhile and existent employees, including the societal information fig of the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, on with backstage email addresses, telephone numbers, salaries of employees, slope details of customers and concealed details from production, according to Handelsblatt.

The breach would interruption the GDPR, the paper said.

The Guardian has not independently verified the documents.

The information extortion bureau successful Brandenburg, which is location to Tesla’s European gigafactory, described the information leak arsenic “massive”.

“I can’t retrieve specified a scale,” Brandenburg information extortion serviceman Dagmar Hartge said.

If specified a usurpation was proved, Tesla could beryllium fined up to 4% of its yearly sales, which could beryllium 3.26bn euros.

Citing the leaked files, the paper besides reported astir ample numbers of lawsuit complaints regarding the Tesla’s operator assistance programs, with astir 4,000 complaints connected abrupt acceleration oregon phantom braking.

German national IG Metall said the revelations were “disturbing” and called connected Tesla to pass employees astir each information extortion violations and beforehand a civilization successful which unit could rise problems and grievances openly and without fear.

“These revelations ... acceptable with the representation that we person gained successful conscionable nether 2 years,” said Dirk Schulze, IG Metall incoming territory manager for Berlin, Brandenburg and Saxony.

Handelsblatt quoted a lawyer for Tesla arsenic saying a “disgruntled erstwhile employee” had abused their entree arsenic a work technician, adding that the institution would instrumentality ineligible enactment against the idiosyncratic it suspected of the leak.

The information extortion watchdog for the Netherlands said connected Friday it was alert of imaginable Tesla information extortion breaches.

“We are alert of the Handelsblatt communicative and we are looking into it,” said a spokesperson for the AP information watchdog successful the Netherlands, wherever Tesla’s European office is located.

The bureau declined each remark connected whether it mightiness motorboat oregon person launched an investigation, citing policy. The Dutch bureau was informed by its counterpart successful the German authorities of Brandenberg.

Handelsblatt said Tesla notified the Dutch authorities astir the breach, but the AP spokesperson said they were not alert if the institution had made immoderate representations to the agency.

Tesla was not disposable for remark connected Friday.

Last month, a Reuters study showed that groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an interior messaging strategy sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras betwixt 2019 and 2022.

This week, Facebook genitor Meta was deed with a grounds €1.2bn ($1.3bn) good by its pb EU privateness regulator implicit its handling of idiosyncratic accusation and fixed 5 months to halt transferring idiosyncratic information to the US.