German authorities have serious indications of possible data protection breaches by Tesla, the Handelsblatt newspaper reported on Thursday, citing the data protection office in the state where the automaker has its European gigafactory.
The Handelsblatt report says the US electric carmaker has failed to adequately protect customer, employee and business partner data, citing 100 gigabytes of sensitive data leaked to the newspaper by a whistleblower.
The data protection supervisory authority in the Netherlands, where Tesla’s European headquarters is located, has been informed of the case, the newspaper said, adding that Tesla has also submitted a preliminary report to Dutch authorities on the matter.
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) stipulates that companies are required to do so if they fear personal data has been leaked.
The Brandenburg data protection office was not immediately available for comment.
Tesla was not immediately available to comment on the report.
Handelsblatt said customer data can be found “in abundance” in the dataset, dubbed the “Tesla Files.”
The files include tables containing more than 100,000 names of former and current employees, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s social security number, along with private email addresses, phone numbers, employee salaries, bank details of customers and secret production details.
The breach would violate the GDPR, the newspaper added.
Handelsblatt quoted a Tesla lawyer as saying a “disgruntled former employee” had abused his access as a service technician to obtain information, adding that the company would take legal action against the alleged former employee.
The whistleblower notified the German authorities about the data protection breach in April, according to the newspaper.
The matter would become serious from a data protection point of view if the evidence becomes substantial, Handelsblatt said, citing a spokesman for the Brandenburg data protection office.
Citing the leaked files, the newspaper reported on thousands of customer complaints regarding the automaker’s driver assistance systems with around 4,000 complaints of sudden acceleration or phantom braking.
Last month, a Reuters report showed that groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ in-car cameras between 2019 and 2022.
This week, Facebook’s parent company Meta was fined a record €1.2 billion (Rs 1.3 billion or roughly Rs 9,606 crore) by its top European Union privacy regulator for its handling of information. of users and gave you five months to stop transferring user data to US.
© Thomson Reuters 2023