100 GB of Tesla’s secret data exposed: here’s what’s in it

In German, Tesla ended up in the middle of a story that could have unpleasant consequences for the car manufacturer. Indeed, German newspaper Handelsblatt he came to own about 100GB of data about the American brand Over the course of six months, Handelsblatt’s team of twelve evaluated the collected files: 1,388 PDF documents, 1,015 Excel spreadsheets and 213 Powerpoint presentations, as well as numerous images, videos, audio files and emails .

The Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology then confirmed that there were no traces of alteration or forgery. That the data collected by the German newspaper is true is also shown by the fact that Tesla he asked for them to be deleted and talk about data theft. In fact, the German newspaper may also face possible legal consequences with Tesla who may decide to file a lawsuit. However, the German newspaper continued.

The files reportedly include the personal information of more than 100,000 current and former employees, as well as thousands of employees. problem reports with Tesla’s advanced driver assistance systems, Pilot and “Full Self-Driving”. Most complaints (from 2015 to 2022) would come from the US but there would be no shortage of European and Asian customers.

More specifically, the data would be, among other things, 2,400 complaints about sudden acceleration and 1,500 complaints about stopping problems. Speaking of brake problems, 139 cases of unnecessary emergency braking and 383 unnecessary vehicle stops linked to false collision warnings would have been reported. Handelsblatt says there have been more than 1,000 accidents and the data includes more than 3,000 entries in a table where customers have reported safety issues with the driver assistance system.

German publication he even wanted to contact Tesla owners to verify that the data was correct. In addition to customer complaints, the data would show that Tesla has responded to these problems, committing to discuss with customers as little as possible in writing, preferring more to verbal exchange of information.

Therefore, Handelsblatt would identify a number of technical problems related to driver assistance systems, greater than expected. After all, the title of the report,Mein Autopilot hat mich quickly umgebracht: Tesla-Files nhren Zweifel an Elon Musks Versprechen (which can be translated into: “My car almost killed me”: Tesla files question the promises of Elon Musk) is already very clear.

According to the newspaper, the German authorities have found a great sign of potential breach of data protection and American car manufacturer. In short, Tesla could not protect the data properly. As mentioned at the beginning, the data will also contain more than 100,000 names of past and present employees, personal email addresses, phone numbers, salaries, bank details, confidential production information and much more, as well as numbers of Tesla CEO Musk’s social security. . For this reason, the Dutch privacy watchdog, the country where Tesla has its European headquarters, is already studying what happened.

What remains is to wait to understand how this story will unfold and if there will be consequences for Tesla.