car owners to grant permission on the cars touchscreens before tesla collects their vehicles data your data belongs to you states teslas website in its customer privacy notice tesla explains that if a customer agrees to share data your vehicle may collect the data and make it available to tesla for analysis this analysis helps tesla improve its products features and diagnose problems quicker it also states that the data may include short video clips or images but isnt linked to a customers account or vehicle identification number and does not identify you personally carlo piltz a data privacy lawyer in germany told reuters it would be difficult to find a legal justification under europes data protection and privacy law for vehicle recordings to be circulated internally when it has nothing to do with the provision of a safe or secure car or the functionality of teslas selfdriving system in recent years teslas carcamera system has drawn controversy in china some government compounds and residential neighborhoods have banned teslas because of concerns about its cameras in response musk said in a virtual talk at a chinese forum in 2021 if tesla used cars to spy in china or anywhere we will get shut down elsewhere regulators have scrutinized the tesla system over potential privacy violations but the privacy cases have tended to focus not on the rights of tesla owners but of passersby unaware that they might be being recorded by parked tesla vehicles in february the dutch data protection authority or dpa said it had concluded an investigation of tesla over possible privacy violations regarding sentry mode a feature designed to record any suspicious activity when a car is parked and alert the owner people who walked by these vehicles were filmed without knowing it and the owners of the teslas could go back and look at these images said dpa board member katja mur in a statement if a person parked one of these vehicles in front of someones window they could spy inside and see everything the other person was doing that is a serious violation of privacy the watchdog determined it wasnt tesla but the vehicles owners who were legally responsible for their cars recordings it said it decided not to fine the company after tesla said it had made several changes to sentry mode including having a vehicles headlights pulse to inform passersby that they may be being recorded a dpa spokesperson declined to comment on reuters findings but said in an email personal data must be used for a specific purpose and sensitive personal data must be protectedreplacing human drivers tesla calls its automated driving system autopilot introduced in 2015 the system included such advanced features as allowing drivers to change lanes by tapping a turn signal and parallel parking on command to make the system work tesla initially installed sonar sensors radar and a single frontfacing camera at the top of the windshield a subsequent version introduced in 2016 included eight cameras all