The company Tesla has been singled out in the United States and Europe since the beginning of April after the revelations of ex-employees who say they exchanged sometimes embarrassing videos privately of owners of vehicles of the mark. Tesla is not yet on the radar screen of Canadian authorities. They say they are still closely following the connected vehicle sector.
A particularity of vehicles like those produced by Tesla is that they are full of sensors, including video cameras. If most of these cameras are directed towards the outside of the vehicle, some film what is happening in the passenger compartment.
“Connected vehicles can collect large amounts of personal information, and so this has been an area of interest for our Office for several years,” said the Duty a spokesperson for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. But, “the OPC has not investigated matters related to Tesla’s collection, use and disclosure of personal information,” the spokesperson added.
Perhaps it will when the outcome of a lawsuit filed against the carmaker led by billionaire Elon Musk, after it was discovered that videos of the occupants of Tesla vehicles were shared with the public. of these on internal messaging apps by Tesla employees.
According to what ex-Tesla employees revealed to the American agency Reuters, video footage filmed by cameras in its cars was shared internally between 2019 and 2022. Some of it would be rather embarrassing for people. filmed. In at least one case, the person filmed would be naked. Other videos showed cases of accidents or road rage.
In addition to US justice, authorities in Germany and France have been questioned about Tesla’s actions. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, essentially renders the actions of Tesla employees as reported by Reuters unjustifiable.
At home, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner has funded half a dozen study projects and dissertations on how connected vehicles should behave to respect the privacy of individuals.
“Technologies that make vehicles safer, more practical and better equipped […] reveal extremely intimate details of a person’s life, “summarized one of these reports in 2018. “Non-essential collection of information for data mining and market research opens the door to a whole range of privacy risks. »
Dura lex…
If it catches the eye of the federal watchdog, Tesla would become the second California company in just weeks to do so. The Office of the Commissioner announced in early April that it had launched an investigation into the company behind ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence application which, since it went online last November, has disrupted a host of economic and social activity sectors. Commissioner Philippe Dufresne said he received a complaint that “personal information was collected, used and disclosed without consent” between OpenAI and at least one of its users.
Tesla and OpenAI have this in common that they owe at least part of their success to their efficient processing of a wealth of personal data from their customers and users. They also seem to share a very annoying flaw: a difficulty in respecting good practices in data management.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Italy, Germany and Ireland have already decided or intend to do so soon: OpenAI violates the European General Data Protection Regulation which governs the way in which companies can process personal data collected on European territory. According to experts, given the scale of the data that its generative AI needs to operate, it is impossible for it to comply with the GDPR in the short term.
In Europe, it seems settled: the Californian language model ChatGPT does not respect the law on the protection of personal data. Canada, which is also investigating OpenAI’s AI, has yet to decide what will happen to this emerging technology. Bill C-27, which could be adopted by Parliament during the summer, contains provisions that would be able to limit the scope in Canadian territory of applications like ChatGPT.
As they sometimes make decisions with a certain autonomy, connected cars are often presented as a concrete application of artificial intelligence. It remains to be determined whether they too will have to comply with the same legislative constraints.