The data protection body of the Netherlands on Friday said it is aware of a possible Tesla data protection breach, but it was too early to get further confirmation from authorities about the ban as reported by Reuters
Handelsblatt, a German company on Thursday reported about the alleged Elon Musk’s Tesla failure to adequately protect their customer’s data, as well as employees and business partners, with about 100 gigabytes of confidential data reportedly being leaked by a whistleblower.
In their statement they said “We are aware of the Handelsblatt story and we are looking into it,” said a spokesperson for the AP data watchdog in the Netherlands, where Tesla’s European headquarters is situated.
Though they denied comment that the agency might launch or have launched an investigation, citing policy. The Dutch were informed of its German counterpart state of Brandenburg.
Handelsblatt said Tesla notified the Dutch about the breach, but an AP spokesperson said that they were not aware if the company had made any representations to the agency.
Tesla was not available immediately for comment on Friday on the Handelsblatt report, which said that customer data could be found “in abundance” in a data set labeled “Tesla Files”
The data leakage has been described as massive by the Brandenburg German office in the terms “I can’t remember such as scale” said Dragmer Hartage, officer of Brandenburg data protection.
The Dutch authorities have a few weeks to decide on how to deal with the case as part of the European procedure.
The files are said to include tables containing more than 100,000 names of former and current employees, including the social security number of Tesla CEO Musk, along with private email addresses, phone numbers, salaries of employees, bank details of customers, and secret details from production, Handelsblatt reported.