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Emails obtained by EFF show that the Los Angeles Police Department contacted Amazon Ring owners specifically asking for footage of protests against racist police violence that took place across the US in the summer of 2020. LAPD signed a formal partnership with Ring and its associated "Neighbors" app in May 2019. Requests for Ring footage typically include the name of the detective, a description of the incident under investigation, and a time period. If enough people in a neighbourhood…
Content Type: Examples
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has filed a lawsuit in Hamburg against three AdTech industry trade bodies including the Interactive Avertising Bureau (IAB). Members of the IAB include big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter...), data brokers (Equifax, Experian, Acxiom...) and advertising agencies (Groupm, Publicis, IPG...).
The lawsuit follows the filing in 2018 of complaints with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) and UK Information Commissioner (ICO), which…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Back in 2019, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced a partnership between the NHS and Amazon Alexa. The goal of the partnership was for Alexa to be able to use the content of the NHS website when people asked health-related questions.
At the time, we expressed a number of concerns regarding this agreement: Amazon did not appear to be an actor that should be trusted with our health information, and seeing the Health Secretary publicly praising this new agreement appeared to give…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Today, the CNIL announced fines of €100 million and €35 million for Gooogle and Amazon, respectively, for breaches of the French Data Protection Act.
The fines resulted from two separate investigations carried out by CNIL in relation to the use of cookies on the French websites of Google and Amazon.
The decision against Google
While it seems to be broadly stated that the CNIL fined Google €100 million, a more accurate statement is that the CNIL fined Google LLC (the parent company of Google’…
Content Type: Examples
French data protection regulator CNIL fined Google and Amazon €100 million and €35 million respectively for breaches of the French Data Protection Act. The CNIL found that the French websites of Google and Amazon had not sought the prior consent of visitors before advertising cookies were saved on computers, and failed to provide clear information to users as to how they intended to make use of online trackers and how to refuse any use of cookies.
In relation to Google, the CNIL made an…
Content Type: Long Read
In April 2018, Amazon acquired “Ring”, a smart security device company best known for its video doorbell, which allows Ring users to see, talk to, and record people who come to their doorsteps.
What started out as a company pitch on Shark Tank in 2013, led to the $839 million deal, which has been crucial for Amazon to expand on their concept of the XXI century smart home. It’s not just about convenience anymore, interconnected sensors and algorithms promise protection and provide a feeling of…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Yesterday, Amazon announced that they will be putting a one-year suspension on sales of its facial recognition software Rekognition to law enforcement. While Amazon’s move should be welcomed as a step towards sanctioning company opportunism at the expense of our fundamental freedoms, there is still a lot to be done.
The announcement speaks of just a one-year ban. What is Amazon exactly expecting to change within that one year? Is one year enough to make the technology to not discriminate…
Content Type: Case Study
You have the right to decent standards and dignity at work, and the right to join a union to protect yourself and your rights. That might come as a shock to Amazon - who have been using Covid-19 as a reason to undermine those rights.
Chris Smalls, an organiser and now former Amazon warehouse assistant manager, led a walkout at a New York City facility and within days he’d been fired under a dubious pretext.
The walkout was to ensure workers’ safety - they were asking for the warehouse to be…
Content Type: Examples
To speed up daily temperature checks, Amazon has installed thermal cameras to screen workers for coronavirus symptoms in its warehouses around the world. Cases of COVID-19 have been reported at more than 50 of the company's US warehouses. Thermal cameras will also replace thermometers at staff entrances to many of Amazon's Whole Foods stores. Workers have claimed it is almost impossible to socially distance inside the warehouses.
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52356177
Writer:…
Content Type: Case Study
In 2015, James Bates was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Victor Collins. Collins was found floating face down in Bates’ hot tub in November 2015. Bentonville police served two search warrants ordering Amazon to turn over the “electronic data in the form of audio recordings, transcribed records, text records and other data contained on the Amazon Echo device” in Bates’ home.
The reason for the warrants? According to the police, just because the device was in the house that…
Content Type: Long Read
Following a series of FOI requests from Privacy International and other organisations, the Department of Health and Social Care has now released its contract with Amazon, regarding the use of NHS content by Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant. The content of the contract is to a big extent redacted, and we contest the Department of Health’s take on the notion of public interest.
Remember when in July this year the UK government announced a partnership with Amazon so that people would now…
Content Type: Examples
In October 2018, the answers to a FOIA request filed by the Project on Government Oversight revealed that in June 2018 Amazon pitched its Rekognition facial recognition system to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials as a way to help them target or identify immigrants. Amazon has also marketed Rekognition to police departments, and it is used by officers in Oregon and Florida even though tests have raised questions about its accuracy. Hundreds of Amazon workers protested by writing a…
Content Type: Examples
In December 2018 Walmart was granted a patent for a new listening system for capturing and analysing sounds in shopping facilities. The system would be able to compare rustling shopping bags and cash register beeps to detect theft, monitor employee interactions with customers, and even listen to what customers are saying about products. The company said it had no plans to deploy the system in its retail stores. However, the patent shows that, like the systems in use in Amazon's cashier-less Go…
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In 2009, Amazon Kindle readers were surprised to find that their copies of George Orwell’s 1984 was missing from their devices. Amazon had remotely deleted these copies after it found out from the publisher that the third-party vendor selling them did not own the rights to the books. Amazon refunded the cost of the books but told its readers who were affected that they could no longer read the books and that the titles were “no longer available for purchase.” This was not the first time that…
Content Type: Examples
From 2014 to early 2017, Amazon used an artificial intelligence (AI) hiring tool to review prospective employees’ resumes and select qualified candidates, based on Amazon’s previous hiring decisions from a ten-year period; however, the tool was much more effective at simply selecting male candidates, rather than the most qualified candidates, because Amazon had hired predominantly male candidates in the past. The hiring tool learned to discriminate against resumes that included the word “women’…
Content Type: Examples
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) used Rekognition, Amazon’s facial recognition software, to compare images of US lawmakers to a publicly available database of 25,000 mugshot photos. The ACLU’s study validated research that has shown that facial recognition technology is more likely to produce false matches for women and people with darker skin. Amazon’s software misidentified 28 lawmakers as being the people in mugshots, and these false matches were disproportionately of members of…
Content Type: Examples
More than 450 Amazon employees delivered a letter to Jeff Bezos and other Amazon executives, demanding that the company immediately stop selling facial recognition software to law enforcement, sever connections to companies like Palantir that help immigration authorities track and deport immigrants, and provide greater employee oversight when making ethical decisions. The employees protested against Amazon allowing its technologies to be used for mass surveillance and abused by those in power,…
Content Type: Examples
Amazon shareholders rejected two non-binding proposals governing its facial recognition software, Rekognition: one would have limited sales of Rekognition to governments, unless a board determined that such sales would not violate peoples’ rights, and the other was to study the extent to which Rekognition infringed peoples’ privacy and other rights. These two proposals were presented to shareholders despite Amazon’s effort to stop the votes, which were thwarted by the US Securities and Exchange…
Content Type: Examples
Millions of people own smart home devices like the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot—equipped with the Alex cloud-based artificial intelligence service—which have concerning implications for privacy rights. While, Amazon’s own policies promise that only the user and Amazon will listen to what those devices record, it was recently reported that Amazon failed to follow its own policy when it erroneously shared one user’s information with a total stranger.
In August 2018, a German customer exercised his…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Today, the British Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced a partnership between the NHS and Amazon to use the NHS’s website content as the source for the answer given to medical question, such as “Alexa, how do I treat a migraine?”
While we welcome Amazon’s use of a trusted source of information for medical queries, we are however extremely concerned about the nature and the implications of this partnership. Amazon is a company with a worrying track record when it comes to the way they…
Content Type: Long Read
CEOs of the big tech companies have all recently discovered the value of privacy. On Tuesday, 30 April 2019, Mark Zuckerberg, announced his future plans to make Facebook a "privacy-focused social platform". This was followed by Google's Sundar Pichai demand that “privacy must be equally available to everyone in the world.” Meanwhile, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, has described the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as "net-positive", while Apple had already positioned itself as the champion of…
Content Type: Examples
The miniature security camera maker Ring, which was acquired by Amazon in 2017 for a reported $1 billion, has a history of inadequate oversight of the data collected by those cameras on behalf of its customers. In 2016, it reportedly granted virtually unlimited access to its Ukraine-based research and development team to a folder on Amazon's S3 cloud service that held, unencrypted, every video Ring cameras around the world had recorded in order to compensate for weaknesses in its facial and…
Content Type: Examples
Similar to the European Commission’s investigation and the stand-alone German and Italian investigations into Amazon’s anti-competitive behaviour, Austria is now investigating whether Amazon is exploiting its market dominance in relation to other retailers that use its website as a marketplace.
The Austrian regulator said it would examine terms and conditions under which the U.S. online giant grants Austrian vendors access to its marketplace.
In a statement, it said “[T]here is a suspicion…
Content Type: Examples
The European Commission, EU’s antitrust watchdog, is nearing a decision on its investigation into Amazon. According to a report in Seeking Alpha, EU Competition Chief Margrethe Vestager said the Commission gathered “a lot of data” in its investigation into Amazon. The report noted the EU sent out 1,500 questionnaires to businesses as part of the investigation.
Sources: https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/eu-vestager-closes-in-on-amazon-investigation/ and https://www.…
Content Type: Examples
On April 16th 2019, Italy’s antitrust authority said that it had launched a probe into five Amazon companies for possible abuse of dominant market position in e-commerce and logistical services. The companies being looked into include Amazon Services Europe, Amazon Europe Core, Amazon EU, Amazon Italia Services, and Amazon Italia Logistica. In comments sent via e-mail, Amazon said “We are fully cooperating with the Authority.” The Authority said the probe would be wrapped up by April 15th, 2020…
Content Type: Examples
Following Ms. Vestager’s investigation into Amazon and its own sector enquiry into online price comparison services in October 2017, in June 2018 the German Federal Cartel Office (“Bundeskartellamt”) claimed that it “received a lot of complaints” and is said to be “looking at the role and market power of Amazon” with regards to Amazon’s hybrid function. (Nicholas Hirst, MLEX, 27 June 2018, Amazon’s ‘hybrid function’ catches eye of German antitrust enforcers.) Germany is Amazon’s…
Content Type: Examples
Reports that Amazon is planning on launching a free ad-supported music service caused Spotify’s (the Swedish audio streaming platform) shares to fall 4% on Monday, April 15th. And, on April 18th, Amazon published a blog post where it announced that launch of Amazon’s free music-streaming service in the US. The ad-supported free service became available exclusively through Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant programmed into Echo devices. It has been reported thatthe Alexa only launch…
Content Type: Examples
In September 2018, EU’s antitrust watchdog, the European Commission, launched a preliminary investigation into how the platform uses data about merchants. Margrethe Vestager, EU Competition Commissioner said that the informal probe concerns the e-commerce group’s dual role as a competitor while simultaneously acting as a host to third-party merchants, who sell goods on Amazon’s websites. “The question here is about the data,” Ms. Vestager said.
The Amazon marketplace investigation follows up…
Content Type: Examples
Amazon has been accused of treating its UK warehouse staff like robots. Between 2015 and 2018, ambulances were called out close to 600 times to Amazon’s UK warehouses. A Freedom of Information request to ambulance services from the GMB union revealed 115 call-outs to Amazon’s site in Rugeley, near Birmingham, including three related to pregnancy or maternity related problems and three for major trauma. At least 1800 people work year-round at the Rugeley warehouse and more than 2000 more can…
Content Type: Examples
On 10 April 2019, an investigation by Bloomberg, disclosed that thousands of Amazon employees around the world are listening in on Amazon Echo users. In order to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers, the team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software to help Alexa’s understanding of human speech. In marketing materials, Amazon says Alexa “…