Handelsblatt's report said the US electric car manufacturer
has failed to adequately protect data from customers, employees, and business
partners, 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 is located, has been informed
of the case, the newspaper said, adding that Tesla also filed a preliminary
report to the Dutch authorities on the matter.
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR) stipulates that companies are obliged to do so if they fear personal
data may have 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 data set, dubbed "Tesla Files".
The files include tables containing more than 100,000 names
of former and current employees, including the social security number of Tesla
Chief Executive Elon Musk, along with private email addresses, phone numbers,
salaries of employees, bank details of customers and secret details from
production.
The breach would violate the GDPR, the newspaper added.
Handelsblatt quoted a lawyer for Tesla as saying a
"disgruntled former employee" had 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 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, a spokesperson for Brandenburg
data protection office was quoted as saying by Handelsblatt.
Citing the leaked files, the newspaper reported about
thousands of customer complaints regarding the carmaker's driver assistance
systems with around 4,000 complaints of sudden acceleration or phantom
breaking.
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' car cameras between 2019 and
2022.
This week, Facebook parent Meta was hit with a record 1.2
billion euro ($1.3 billion) fine by its lead European Union privacy regulator
over its handling of user information and given five months to stop
transferring users' data to the US. © Reuters
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