Global Courant 2023-05-26 07:05:48
The Tesla factory in Tilburg, Netherlands.
Jasper Juinen | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The German authorities are aware of serious indications of possible data protection violations TeslaHandelsblatt newspaper reported Thursday, citing the data protection agency in the state where the automaker has its European gigafactory.
According to the Handelsblatt report, the US electric car maker has failed to adequately protect customer, employee and business partner data, citing 100 gigabytes of confidential data leaked to the newspaper by a whistleblower.
The data protection supervisory authority in the Netherlands, where Tesla’s European headquarters are located, has been notified of the matter, the paper said, adding that Tesla has also submitted a preliminary report to Dutch authorities on the matter.
The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, of the European Union stipulates that companies are obliged to do so if they fear that personal data has been leaked.
The Brandenburg data protection office was not immediately available for comment.
Tesla was not immediately available for comment on the report.
Handelsblatt said customer data could be found “in abundance” in the dataset, dubbed “Tesla Files”.
The files contain tables of more than 100,000 names of former and current employees, including Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk’s social security number, along with private email addresses, phone numbers, employee salaries, customer banking information, and secret production details.
The breach would violate the GDPR, the newspaper added.
Handelsblatt quoted a Tesla lawyer as saying that a “disgruntled ex-employee” abused his access as a service technician to get information, adding that the company would take legal action against the suspected ex-employee.
The whistleblower informed German authorities of the data breach in April, the newspaper said.
The case would become serious from a data protection point of view if the evidence becomes substantial, said a spokesman for the Brandenburg data protection agency, quoted by Handelsblatt.
Citing the leaked files, the paper reported thousands of customer complaints about the automaker’s driver assistance systems, with about 4,000 complaining of sudden acceleration or phantom braking.
Last month, one That reports Reuters showed that between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system, sometimes highly invasive videos and images captured by customer car cameras.
This week Facebook parent meta was fined a record 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) by the European Union’s leading privacy regulator for handling user information and given five months to stop transferring user data to the US
