German authorities have serious indications that Tesla may be in breach of data protection rules, Handelsblatt reported on Thursday, citing the data protection office of the state where the carmaker’s European gigafactory is located.
The Handelsblatt report said the U.S. electric car maker failed to adequately protect the data of customers, employees and business partners, citing a whistleblower who leaked 100 gigabytes of confidential data to the newspaper.
Data protection regulators in the Netherlands, where Tesla has its European headquarters, have been informed of the case, the paper said, adding that Tesla had also submitted a preliminary report on the matter to Dutch authorities.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) obligates companies to do this if they are concerned that personal data may have been compromised.
Brandenburg’s data protection office was not immediately available for comment.
Tesla could not immediately comment on the report.
Handelsblatt said a “vast amount” of customer data can be found in a data set known as the “Tesla Files.”
The documents include tables containing the names of more than 100,000 former and current employees, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Social Security number, as well as private email addresses, phone numbers, employee salaries, customer bank details and secret production details.
The newspaper added that the breach would violate the GDPR.
Business Daily quoted Tesla lawyers as saying that a “disgruntled former employee” abused his status as a service technician to obtain information, adding that the company would take legal action against the alleged former employee.
The whistleblower notified German authorities of the data protection breach in April, the newspaper reported.
Handelsblatt quoted a spokesman for the Brandenburg Data Protection Office as saying that if the evidence were conclusive, the matter would become serious from a data protection point of view.
Citing leaked documents, the newspaper reported thousands of customer complaints about the automaker’s driver assistance systems, including about 4,000 complaints about sudden acceleration or phantom braking.
Last month, a Reuters report revealed that groups of Tesla employees privately shared sometimes highly intrusive videos and images recorded by customer car cameras between 2019 and 2022 through an internal messaging system.
This week, Facebook parent company Meta was fined a record €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion, approximately Rs. 9,606 crore) by the EU’s main privacy regulator for its handling of user information, and was ordered to stop transferring user data to the United States within five months.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
