Tesla Class Action: Test-Driver’s License Info Collected Without Permission

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A California man says Tesla has been illicitly skimming information from the drivers’ licenses of consumers who test-drive the company’s vehicles.

Plaintiff Wayne Skiles says that before he test-drove a vehicle from a California Tesla dealership, a dealership employee scanned his driver’s license without his permission.

Skiles now claims that Tesla and several other defendants are working together to collect driver’s license information and use it for marketing purposes without first getting the license holder’s permission.

According to Skiles, when a Tesla employee scans a driver’s license, information from the license’s magnetic strip is transmitted to a marketing database maintained by defendant Salesforce Ventures LLC.

Salesforce relays the information to defendant Experian Information Solutions Inc., which uses it to assign the license-holder a “Mosaic” score based on their credit history. Tesla then uses the Mosaic score for marketing and sales purposes, Skiles claims.

The Tesla class action argues this practice violates several federal privacy laws:

• The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, which prohibits persons and businesses from knowingly obtaining, disclosing, and using information from motor vehicle records for an impermissible purpose;
• The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which prohibits a third party from intercepting or disclosing certain communications without authorization; and
• The Fair Credit Reporting Act, which restricts the use of consumer information to a limited number of permissible purposes.

Skiles says his own driver’s license was scanned when he visited a Tesla dealership in Newport Beach, Calif. He says that in the course of setting up a test drive, he gave his driver’s license to a Tesla employee, who scanned the license into an iPad. Skiles says he was under the impression that this process was only used to verify the license, and that no data collected would be retained longer than necessary.

The plaintiff says he later found out that his driver’s license information, as well as his email address and phone number which the Tesla employee had manually entered on the iPad, was immediately uploaded to Tesla’s Salesforce database, then transferred to Experian. He says the Tesla employee never once disclosed that this was how his personal information would be handled.

Skiles seeks to represent a plaintiff Class covering all U.S. persons whose driver’s license information was taken by the defendants without consent, at any time within four years prior to the filing of this Tesla class action lawsuit. He also proposes a second Class for Class Members whose information was used to acquire a consumer report without their consent.

He seeks a court injunction barring the defendants from continuing the practices complained of here. He seeks an award of punitive, statutory and liquidated damages as high as $10,000 per Class Member, plus an award of attorney fees and court costs.

Skiles is represented by attorneys Abbas Kazerounian, Mike Kazerouni, Jason A. Ibey and Emily C. Beecham of Kazerouni Law Group APC, and by Joshya B. Swigart of Hyde & Swigart.

The Tesla Driver’s License Data Theft Class Action Lawsuit is Skiles v. Tesla Inc., et al., Case No. 3:17-cv-05434-JCS, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.