Can Vehicles be Criminal Voyeurs?
Rebecca Hatt
New vehicles come equipped with cameras and microphones that surveil the exterior, and often the interior, of the car in the name of safety and interactivity.[1] Some cameras only help with parking, however, many go much further than that.[2] For instance, Tesla’s exterior cameras surveil the outside of the car in Sentry mode, on the lookout for vandals or collisions, and the interior cabin cameras are known to record on impact and to monitor for attentiveness while using supervised features.[3] The theory is that these cameras help protect against damage, theft, and unsupervised use.[4] While these are laudable goals, the theoretical intention and the opt-in model of data sharing isn’t enough to escape state voyeurism laws in states like Maine.[5] In Maine, a person is guilty of violation of privacy if that person intentionally installs or uses in a “private place without the consent of the person or persons entitled to privacy in that place, any device for observing, photographing, recording, amplifying or broadcasting sounds or events in that place.”[6] When these vehicles, or those equipped with after-market dashcams, are parked in private garages, or used for private purposes in such a way that activity in them would normally be private, the recording conflicts with a person’s reasonable expectations of privacy, and with this criminal statute. An opt-in from the driver is not sufficient to allow the vehicle to breach the privacy of others under the law, and even if the driver sought to obtain consent from every passenger or passerby, some people are not able to give legal consent. Despite the impossibility, car makers like Tesla include disclaimers that “[i]t is your sole responsibility to consult and comply with all local regulations and property restrictions regarding the use of cameras.”[7] So when a child is changing at the back of the car using towels or a Car Cabana to provide privacy, who’s watching, how do we know, and who does the law protect?[8]
There are generally three categories of “watchers” in the case of vehicle recordings: the police, the reviewers of footage authorized by the automotive company, and anyone with physical access to the vehicle or to a related app. Turning first to the police, the footage could be protected by the Fourth Amendment which protects persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.[9] The amendment recognizes the importance of protecting a person’s privacy from the government because “a sane, decent, civilized society must provide some [private] oasis.”[10] Thus, warrantless searches are per se unreasonable, subject to limited exceptions.[11] One such exception is the automobile exception which has been applied widely to containers within a vehicle, and likely includes technological containers, although there are no definitive cases on point.[12] If the automobile exception does apply to SVR systems then probable cause to believe that there may be evidence of a crime contained within it would be sufficient to justify a warrantless search of the system if the other criteria of the automobile exception are met.[13] Once the system has been accessed via a permissible warrantless search, the plain view doctrine functionally allows the viewing of any recording, audio, or other material on the device. This means that if the vehicle were to roll through a stop sign, get into an accident, or be implicated in a crime, regardless of who was involved in that event, any vehicle recordings of any person could potentially be viewed by multiple police officers, copied, and admitted into evidence. The utility of any discoveries made is not restricted to the event that provided probable cause. Footage viewed through the plain view doctrine could potentially be used to jump-start an entirely new investigation into someone not even present in the vehicle at the time of the traffic infraction that justified the search. Outside of the criminal context there is still discomfort around the idea that, even unintentionally, a whole stationhouse could end up viewing footage of a husband and wife having an intimate moment in their garage, or a teenager changing shirts before practice. It is clear that this scenario is within the realm of possibility based on reports of Tesla data labelers who witnessed, and subsequently distributed internally, footage of everything from home and garage interiors, to moments of intimacy, to what later turned out to be a submersible vehicle from the Bond films that Elon Musk had purchased at auction.[15]
Video reviewers at companies like Tesla may have nearly unfettered access to view any recording, and while Tesla may have made changes after bad press, it is unclear which car companies are still using human review and how prevalent such review is.[16] Much is made of the idea that none of the recordings from a vehicle are saved or processed centrally without the driver’s consent.[17] However, consent is often required to use the myriad of technological features standard in modern vehicles and it is not clear that there is strong governance in place to ensure the car is effectively minimizing data collection.[18] Without extensive research and access to information there is no way to know how many hours of footage across thousands of vehicles could be saved and processed under the dubious auspices of driver consent. Due to the general lack of transparency there is also no way to know as a vehicle owner who at the company has viewed which recordings and when your privacy may have been intentionally violated. If there were to be an employee with socially or legally unacceptable tendencies there is also no assurance that companies are proactively identifying employees who seek out, and potentially distribute, intimate material or inappropriate material related to minors. Parents are told not to post pictures of their children in the bathtub for fear of illicit use, and yet there is no way to know, let alone call for accountability, if a car company employee is watching kids running around in the garage in a state of undress or changing in the car.[19] It is also difficult to know what recordings are being fed into AI models or how easy it will be to reconstruct or retrieve that material now or in the future with continued advances in technology.[20]
Lastly, any individual with physical access to the vehicle could potentially view or copy the recordings.[21] This could include a spouse looking for footage to prove an affair, a young person simply curious about what car surveillance footage looks like, an employee at a mechanics shop, a thief or vandal who has broken into the vehicle, and any number of other parties.[22] Many vehicles even offer an app where the user can view the camera feeds live and take images.[23] If used responsibly this is fine, but in rental cars, for instance, it might be difficult to ascertain who has access. Even if the vehicle is a personal car and only the primary driver has access, there’s still a risk if the security of the device or the app isn’t perfect, or if the primary driver is accessing the live video while other parties are using the vehicle.[24] Cars often track geolocation as well so not only are the images potentially available, but the people in them could be identified and tracked.[25]
One of the most concerning things about the vehicle as a voyeur situation is that as factory-installed and after-market recording devices become nearly ubiquitous in modern vehicles, it is almost impossible to know who is watching and when. The driver typically must consent to use of the cameras and microphones in order to utilize the full functionality of the vehicles infotainment systems, security features, and baseline functionality, like hands free calling.[26] However, no one else in or around the vehicle, and inevitably recorded, is asked to consent. Furthermore, it is unlikely that most drivers could articulate what they have actually agreed to thanks to the well-documented prevalence of consent fatigue.[27] Minors would not be able to consent to being recorded in states of undress, regardless.[28] Auto companies have attempted to make their privacy policies more palatable following a string of bad publicity in 2023 around policies that explicitly allowed them to track things like a customer’s sex life and to use and sell that information for ad targeting, among other high-profile data security and privacy issues. Some automakers’ privacy policies regarding the recording systems remain difficult to find online or layered into multiple disjointed policies, and they are often opaque at best. Auto companies have been notorious for comprising one of the worst industries for data privacy.[29] It is unclear, even after reading a large cross section of the widely available information, who exactly is looking at what information and for what purpose. Nor do the vehicles themselves appear to announce or indicate to those who could be impacted when they are actively recording. This makes it nearly impossible to know when a person is being recorded or who will ultimately see the recording and how it could be used.
Despite the high privacy risks and the relative impossibility of discovering when you are being recorded and when that recording is viewed, the intentionality element of statutes like the Maine invasion of privacy statute makes it nearly impossible for the vehicle or the automaker to be liable.[30] An automobile is not a person, although it could be programmed not to record in garages, it has not intentionally recorded something private, and it is not using that footage for an illicit purpose.[31] That being said, if the watcher happens to be an employee related to the automaker and is viewing or distributing footage for elicit purposes, there may be some vicarious liability.[32] If the watcher is police they will be allowed to view recordings under the law, but there could be an unauthorized access issue for repeated viewing or unnecessary distribution of footage of an intimate moment, for example. For watchers who have physical or app access, there could be liability for theft, invasion of privacy, or computer fraud and abuse. The larger problem, though, is that by failing to provide for a discovery mechanism or to require and enforce data minimization practices, the law fails to adequately protect people or allow individuals whose privacy has been violated to discover that this is the case. The infrastructure around the data sharing and governance makes it highly unlikely that someone who should be prosecuted under the law will actually be found out and can be proven to have intentionally used these devices improperly. It is likely that the best-understood impacts of the proliferation of these devices will be either high-profile hacking issues or case law discussing the admissibility of SVR footage in criminal cases.
In the future, it will be interesting to see if these automobile recording devices complicate our understanding of when there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in the first place. The Fourth Amendment protects people, not places, and thus the place does not exclusively determine whether or not a person’s privacy is protected.[33] What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection.[34] But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.[35] This means that if a family goes to the beach and parks their car in the open, but puts towels over the windows to provide privacy for children to change, despite the normally public location, privacy is likely protected in that instance. If that vehicle is now equipped with recording devices and the driver has consented to sharing recordings with third parties, it is unclear to what extent that reasonable expectation of privacy would survive, at least with respect to the driver. In another context, by parking a vehicle with recording devices within an attached garage, the owner of a vehicle may have waived their right to privacy in moments that would otherwise have been private. The driver has knowingly allowed the recording devices access to the garage and consented to its use and therefore has exposed the garage to the public and particularly to multiple unknown third-party viewers that may have access to the recordings now or in the future.
[1] See Smile, You’re on an In-Car Camera! How Driver Monitoring Systems Are Evolving, MotorTrend (Apr. 22, 2024), https://www.motortrend.com/features/in-car-camera-technology-driver-monitoring-systems.
[2] Id.
[3] Model 3 Owner’s Manual, Tesla, https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-EDAD116F-3C73-40FA-A861-68112FF7961F.html.
[4] See id.
[5] See Me. Stat. tit. 17-A, § 511 (2023).
[6] Id.
[7] Vehicle Safety and Security Features, Tesla, https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-safety-security-features (last visited Apr. 15, 2026).
[8] See generally Car Cabana, Car Cabana, https://carcabana.com/ (last visited Apr. 14, 2026).
[9] U.S. Const. amend. IV.
[10] U.S. v. On Lee, 193 F.2d 306, 315-316 (2d Cir. 1951) (Frank, J., dissenting).
[11] Katz v. U.S., 389 U.S. 347, 357 (1967).
[12] Compare id., and Carroll v. U.S., 267 U.S. 132 (1925), and Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373, 375, (2014), and Carpenter v. U.S., 585 U.S. 296, 310 (2018) with U.S. v. Camou, 773 F.3d 932, 942 (9th Cir. 2014).
[13] See Maryland v. Dyson, 527 U.S. 465, 467 (1999); U.S. v. Boatright, 678 F. Supp. 3d 1014, 1040 (S.D. Ill. 2023).
[14] See generally Coolidge v. N.H., 403 U.S. 443 (1971).
[15] Steve Stecklow, Waylon Cunningham & Hyunjoo Jin, Tesla Workers Shared Sensitive Images Recorded by Customer Cars, Reuters (Apr. 6, 2023), https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars-2023-04-06/.
[16] See Jay Stanley, Tesla Camera Scandal Is the Latest Lesson in Dangers of Letting Companies Record You, American Civ. Liberties Union (Apr. 6, 2023), https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tesla-camera-scandal-is-the-latest-lesson-in-dangers-of-letting-companies-record-you.
[17] See Model 3 Owner’s Manual, Tesla, https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-EDAD116F-3C73-40FA-A861-68112FF7961F.html; Privacy Notice, Tesla, https://www.tesla.com/en_in/legal/privacy (last visited Apr. 15, 2026).
[18]See *Privacy Not Included: A Buyer’s Guide for Connected Products, Mozilla Foundation, https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/ (last visited Apr. 15, 2026).
[19] See Andrew Limbong, Why You Should Think Twice Before Posting That Cute Photo of Your Kid Online, NPR: Life Kit (May 20, 2024), https://www.npr.org/2024/05/20/1251819597/why-you-should-think-twice-before-posting-that-cute-photo-of-your-kid-online.
[20] Jing Huang, Diyi Yang, Christopher Potts, Demystifying Verbatim Memorization in Large Language Models, The Stanford AI Lab Blog (Apr. 28, 2025), https://ai.stanford.edu/blog/verbatim-memorization/.
[21] See generally Tesla, supra note 7.
[22] See generally Rebecca V. Lyon, Hidden Home Videos: Surreptitious Video Surveillance in Divorce, 89 Chi. Kent L. Rev. 877, 878 (2014).
[23] See Compare Kia Connect Plans, Kia, https://owners.kia.com/content/owners/en/uvo-compare-packages.html (last visited Apr. 15, 2026).
[24] See Stan Kaminsky, Botnets on Wheels: The Mass Hacking of Dashcams, Kapersky Daily (Nov. 27, 2025), https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/dashcam-hack-botnet-on-the-wheels/54839/.
[25] See Sharing the Vehicle Location, Kia, http://webmanual.kia.com/ccNC/AVNT/KOR/English/Locationsharing.html (last visited Apr. 15, 2026).
[26] See Lexus Customer Service, LEXUS, https://support.lexus.com/s/article/What-happens-when-I-d-10437 (last visited Apr. 15, 2026).
[27] See e.g., Daniel J. Solove, Murky Consent: An Approach to the Fictions of Consent in Privacy Law, 104 B.U. L. Rev. 593, 593 (2024).
[28] See Me. Stat. tit. 17-A, § 511 (2023).
[29] Mozilla Foundation, supra note 18.
[30] See Me. Stat. tit. 17-A, § 511 (2023).
[31] See id.
[32] See generally Delledonne v. Dugrenier, No. CIV.A. CV-01-318, 2003 WL 1702257 (Me. Super. Jan. 2, 2003).
[33] Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351-52 (1967).
[34] Id.
[35] Id.