2025-04-01

How did Dogequest obtain Tesla owners' personal information?

Dogequest is a website that appeared last month purporting to reveal the names, emails, addresses, and social media profiles of Tesla owners across the US on a searchable map.

This begs the question: where did this data come from?

If you take any one of the emails listed on the site, and enter it into haveibeenpwned.com, these 2 data breaches will always¹ show up:

ParkMobile is a US parking payment app that had 21 million user records leaked in 2021. While not mentioned by HIBP, the leaked data also includes full names, addresses, and often vehicle makes and models in a column labeled ‘Descriptions.’

I picked two random emails from Dogequest and searched for them in the leaked ParkMobile data dump, and as expected, records for both emails showed up, with the keyword Tesla present in each account’s vehicle description column:

The other breach in common with all Tesla owners listed on Dogequest is The Post Millennial, which is a conservative news site that had ~60 million emails and many other user records leaked in 2024, along with the temporary defacement of the site.

Once again, personal information appears for both emails when searched in the leaked files:

For people on the map where there is a LinkedIn or Twitter username listed, these 2 additional breaches will also show up:

From here, it’s not hard to piece together what happened:

• Emails were extracted from the ParkMobile data dump where the vehicle description matched the keywords ‘Tesla’ or ‘Model S|3|X|Y`.
• These emails were then filtered through The Post Millennial dump, retaining only those who were (most probably) right-leaning, and extracting further personal information in the process.
• Where it was possible, the 2021 LinkedIn and Twitter Email scrapes were used to find social media handles for emails.

TL;DR: public data repurposed to cause moral panic causes moral panic