Musk visits Beijing as Tesla’s China-made cars clear data security hurdles

Tesla CEO Elon Musk unexpectedly visited Beijing, coinciding with the city’s first major auto show in four years. During his visit, Musk met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang. This meeting follows Tesla’s announcement that local Chinese authorities have lifted restrictions on its cars after they passed China’s data security standards.

Tesla is also partnering with a Chinese tech giant Baidu to use its mapping and navigation technology, enabling data collection on China’s public roads for its Full Self-Driving feature. These developments come amid broader concerns over data privacy and international security related to imported vehicles.

Tesla, along with several other automakers, has met the new Chinese data security regulations for “connected vehicles,” which include privacy safeguards such as anonymizing facial recognition data collected from their vehicles.

The regulations assess if cars anonymize facial recognition data outside the vehicle, avoid collecting cockpit data by default, process this data internally and clearly inform users about personal data processing. Tesla met these compliance requirements in the first group of automakers.

In a press release, Tesla stated it localized data storage in 2021 at its Shanghai data center and achieved the ISO 27001 international standard for information security, confirmed by third-party auditors.

Elon Musk’s recent visit to China has also heightened anticipation for the upcoming availability of Tesla’s driver-assist software, Full Self-Driving, in the country.