German enterprise newspaper Handelsblatt claims Tesla has violated knowledge safety legal guidelines after a whistleblower leaked 100 gigabytes of confidential knowledge to the publication.

Greater than 23,000 recordsdata present that Tesla has did not adequately defend knowledge from prospects, workers, and enterprise companions, Handelsblatt reported. The whistleblower additionally notified the German authorities in regards to the knowledge safety breach in April.

The leaked paperwork, dubbed “Tesla Recordsdata,” embrace tables containing greater than 100,000 names of former and present workers, together with the social safety variety of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The recordsdata additionally embrace personal e-mail addresses, cellphone numbers, salaries of workers, financial institution particulars of shoppers, and secret particulars from manufacturing.

Citing data from the leaked recordsdata, the newspaper additionally reported about hundreds of complaints from prospects associated to Tesla’s driver help programs, together with 1,000 crashes in reference to driver help programs comparable to Autopilot lately.

There are additionally 2,400 complaints on unintended acceleration and 1,500 complaints on braking issues, together with 383 circumstances of phantom braking and 139 circumstances of emergency braking. The oldest complaints from the information leak date from 2015, whereas the newest are from March 2022. Many of the incidents came about within the US, however there are additionally complaints from Asia and Europe, together with many from Germany.

Handelsblatt confirmed the information’s authenticity with  Fraunhofer Institute for Safe Info Know-how, which discovered no proof of doctoring or fabrication within the recordsdata. Tesla tried to cease the publication from utilizing this knowledge in its reporting, and even threatened authorized motion towards Handelsblatt.

Nonetheless, the paper determined to make use of data from Tesla Recordsdata because it considers this is without doubt one of the extraordinary circumstances when reporting on illegally obtained knowledge can be authorized underneath European Union legislation.

The info safety workplace within the German state of Brandenburg, the place Tesla’s European manufacturing facility is situated, described the information leak as “large.” 

“I am unable to bear in mind such a scale,” Brandenburg knowledge safety officer Dagmar Hartge mentioned in accordance with Reuters. He added that the case had been handed to the Dutch authorities as a result of Tesla‘s European headquarters are in The Netherlands.

The info safety watchdog for the Netherlands mentioned it’s too early to say whether or not it might begin an investigation into doable Tesla knowledge safety breaches. The info breach would violate the European Union’s Basic Knowledge Safety Regulation (GDPR). If confirmed in courtroom, it might end in a fantastic of as much as 4 % of Tesla’s annual gross sales, which could possibly be $3.5 billion (3.26 billion euros).

Whereas Tesla didn’t touch upon the report, Handelsblatt quoted a lawyer for the EV maker as saying that the whistleblower is a “disgruntled former worker” who had abused his entry as a service technician to get data. The lawyer mentioned Tesla would take authorized motion towards the suspected ex-employee.

This isn’t the primary time Tesla is accused of information safety violations. Final month, a Reuters report confirmed that teams of Tesla workers shared by way of an inner messaging system generally extremely invasive movies and pictures captured by prospects’ automobile cameras between 2019 and 2022.