I got very stressed because I was working at Tesla and they falsely accused me of trying to steal their code for personal gain. Going up against a team of lawyers from a powerful corporation was really psychologically difficult for me and I kind of ended up withdrawing from the world. I am slowly coming back now. I kind of shut down all my old accounts during that time.
It was probably very counterproductive of me to isolate myself from people and resources who could have helped me, but there was something about the extreme stress and anxiety of having lawyers calling and emailing you where I fell back on my tendency to deal with my problems through avoidance.
The past few months have been really difficult. Hopefully I can slowly move on from that experience. I am desperately seeking employment at the moment. I am too anxious to even check my email unfortunately, but hopefully that will change soon.
In my opinion, Tesla's accusations against me were really unwarranted and meritless, and they were motivated by the fact that I raised minor concerns internally that they were not that meticulously compliant with following good data privacy practices. I felt that my attempt to raise this concern internally fell on deaf ears, and because I did not know if what I was seeing internally was actually legal or not, I eventually had to reach out to people outside Tesla, like professors and reporters, to ask about certain rules of handling and processing potentially sensitive data.
Within a week of me doing this - I do not know how they seemed to figure it out, but it seems they did - out of the blue comes an interrogation with Tesla's "security intelligence" team, including a guy who used to work at the NSA, with a bunch of far-fetched claims that I was possibly a mole for a competing AI company trying to steal trade secrets; then I got fired.
It has been really hard because I am not a professional lawyer and I can't afford a good one to help me understand my rights in this situation. Anyway, I think things are slowly getting better and I am coming out of my hole and reaching back out to the world.
