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Content type: Examples
AI-powered cameras made by the startup Netradyne and used in Amazon's delivery vans incorrectly penalises drivers for events beyond their control or which do not constitute unsafe driving such as if they are cut off by another vehicle. The data collected by the cameras is sent to Amazon, which uses the information to evaluate drivers' performance by assigning them with a score for safe driving. https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-…
Content type: Examples
A BBC Panorama investigation that brought hidden cameras into a UK-based Amazon warehouse found that workers walked up to 11 miles in a shift and had just 33 seconds on average to find each product, following instructions from a handset. Experts on stress at work say the warehouse conditions are ideal for increasing the risk of mental and physical illness.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25034598Publication: BBCPublication date: 2013-11-25Writer: BBC
Content type: Examples
Humans who review footage of warehouse workers flagged by Amazon’s AI computer vision system to check for employee errors - are themselves surveilled in detail to ensure they make punishing targets. The workers, who are paid as little as £212 a month to review thousands of images and videos per day, report physical problems, deteriorating eyesight, and cognitive exhaustion. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-11-21/the-eyes-of-amazon-a-hidden-workforce-driving-a-vast-…
Content type: Long Read
In 2023, Privacy International continues to produce real change by challenging governments and corporations that use data and technology to exploit us.Since the beginning of the year, we had some significant achievements we're proud of and want to share with you. Take a look below to see how we are changing the world for the better.SpringBetter EU regulation of digital products PI’s continuous advocacy around the Cyber Resilience Act resulted in further adjustment of the…
Content type: Examples
Behind every powerful AI system are huge numbers of people labelling and clarifying data to train it, contracted by companies like Remotasks, a subsidiary of Silicon Valley-based data vendor Scale AI, whose customers include the US military and OpenAI. Often the workers, who are assigned tasks they don't understand for a purpose they don't know, are sworn to secrecy. Yet labelling is crucial; it can make the difference between a car stopping to spare the person walking a bike across the road or…
Content type: Examples
Technology companies that call themselves "AI first" rely on heavily surveilled gig workers who label data, deliver packages, moderate content, and perform gig work via platforms. Startups pressured by their venture capital funders even hire humans to pretend to be chatbots so they can claim to be "AI" companies. For these reasons, worker exploitation needs to be a central part of the discussion of the ethical development and deployment of AI systems.https://www.noemamag.com/the-exploited-labor…
Content type: Examples
A former Amazon warehouse worker writes that every day was "brutal" because of the "exploitative and dangerous" standards enforced by Amazon executives. Amazon's anxiety-inducing policies about bathroom use and low pay should be seen in context with fast food and retail workers, who frequently encounter violence on the job and many essential workers' struggle to afford the basic necessities of life. In response, workers are beginning to target investors as an important voice that can help…
Content type: Examples
An excerpt from the new book "Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door—Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy", describes in detail the tracking systems used in Amazon warehouses to ensure workers meet their managers' targets. The system is a mix of surveillance, measurement, psychology, targets, incentives, slogans, and proprietary technologies.https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-way-amazon-uses-tech-to-squeeze-performance-out-of-workers-deserves-its-own-name-bezosism-…
Content type: Examples
Documents filed with the US National Labor Relations Board show that Amazon issues warehouse workers with radio-frequency handheld scanners to track and record every minute of "time off task". The filing is part of a dispute at the State Island Amazon warehouse, where workers voted to unionise in 2022. Managers must ask the person with the most "time off task", which includes time spent in the bathroom, talking to other associates, and navigational errors, about their whereabouts for each "…
Content type: Examples
Amazon has begun issuing partner delivery companies with AI-enabled cameras to monitor and track drivers' behaviour on the road. The cameras add another layer of monitoring to existing requirements to run the smartphone app Mentor; drivers complain that the app's bugs lead to unfair disciplinary action against them; the app may also follow them into their homes. Drivers swap tips on gaming the app on Reddit.https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/12/amazon-mentor-app-tracks-and-disciplines-delivery-…
Content type: Examples
Amazon delivery partner companies are ordering their drivers to turn off Amazon's Mentor monitoring app so they can take more risks in order to hit Amazon's delivery targets. Mentor, made by a company called eDriving, is a smartphone app Amazon uses to monitor drivers in Amazon-branded vans that tracks drivers' speed, braking, acceleration, and cornering; it also detect "phone distraction" and gives drivers a safe driving score. Amazon has pushed the liability for infractions onto the more than…
Content type: Examples
Numerous video clips from Amazon's in-van driver-facing surveillance cameras are appearing on Reddit in violence of Amazon's stated privacy policies and raising questions about drivers' privacy. The videos are clearly not being posted by drivers themselves, but come from inside Amazon delivery partners, though who is posting them is unknown. The cameras capture all aspects of drivers road behaviour; the company claims they protect road safety. Drivers say they do not have access to the videos.…
Content type: Examples
A 24-year-old man in Atlanta, Georgia is suing Amazon after being left with extensive brain and spinal cord injuries after an Amazon van crashed into his car. Amazon claims it isn't legally liable because the driver worked for the delivery company Harper Logistics LLC. However, the lawsuit seeks to prove that Amazon controls all aspects of deliveries from how many packages drivers are assigned to their continued employment and tracks drivers intensively, pressuring them to take risks in order…
Content type: Advocacy
Background
In August 2022, Amazon announced that they had entered into a definitive merger agreement to acquire iRobot, a company that specialises in designing and building consumer robots. The transaction was formally notified to the European Commission on 1 June 2023, while the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has already launched an investigation into the transaction since April 2023.
We believe that this acquisition is likely to significantly impede effective competition in and…
Content type: Long Read
In August 2021, PI published the report An unhealthy diet of targeted ads where we uncovered how personal data was shared by diet companies through their online ads and online testing. Our findings were quite grim, with highly sensitive personal data shared with third parties without consent.
Following this initial report, we performed follow-up research with the same methodology and by September 2021 we reported a number of positive changes from two of these websites: BetterMe and VShred.…
Content type: Video
Quick corrections!
GDPR compensation is in theory possible through court action
GDPR Article 80(2) not Section 20 something as I stated!
Links
Cory's website
Chokepoint Capitalism coauthored with Rebecca Giblin
Giphy and Meta
Chokepoint Capitalism: the audiobook
How to leave dying social media platforms (without losing your friends)
Cory on Mastodon: https://mamot.fr/@doctorow and https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic
PI on Mastodon
Crad Kilodney documentary
Algorithms…
Content type: Examples
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: Key Resources
i. Added Literature review
There are several resources available that simplify and popularise complex technologies, starting with Wikipedia. Other resources can be tremendously useful even with little to no technical background, such as semi-specialised press. See for example:
MIT Technology review (e.g. quantum computing)
ArsTechnica, (e.g. on NFTS)
PC Mag (e.g. on 5G Mag)
Academic papers are also an avenue to find information although the language might be less accessible without…
Content type: Advocacy
Now is the time to strengthen not weaken data protection to keep us all safe. Here we outline some edited areas of our consultation response that highlight the impact of the proposed loss or weakening of many important protections:
The proposal to broadening consent and further processing for research purposes:
PI urges caution with regard to provisions that seek to potentially undermine the strict conditions around obtaining consent. The GDPR placed stronger conditions on obtaining consent…
Content type: Video
Links
Donate to PI and get your facemask
Mozilla's *privacy not included project
US PIRG's Trouble in Toyland
Roomba home maps and concerns from 2017 about Roomba sharing that information
ICO advice
Our guides for protecting yourself from online tracking
Our Amazon Ring report "One Ring to Watch Them All"
Find out more about our legal work
Extra audio credit details in order of appearance:
acclivity (sleigh bells)
dj997 (additional bells)
Marta Tsvettsikh (fire sound)
waxsocks…
Content type: News & Analysis
To add your voice to the letter below, which we'll be sending to gig economy companies like Uber, Deliveroo, Bolt, Amazon Flex, Just Eat, Free Now, and Ola, sign the Managed by Bots petition. (PETITION IS NOW CLOSED, SEE UBER'S RESPONSE TO OUR CAMPAIGN LETTER. SEE DELIVEROO'S RESPONSE.
Worker Info Exchange (WIE), the App Drivers and Couriers Union (ADCU), Privacy International (PI) and other civil society organisations* are today writing to you with urgent questions about the exploitation of…
Content type: Long Read
What if your boss was an algorithm? What would you do if your employer suddenly fired you or reduced your pay without telling you why? And without being willing to give you a reason when you ask for one?
This is not science fiction or some far-fetched reality. Millions of people worldwide are working in the gig economy sector for companies like Uber, Deliveroo, Bolt, Just Eat… And this could be the future of work for people working outside the gig economy, as surveillance technologies are…
Content type: News & Analysis
What if we told you that every photo of you, your family, and your friends posted on your social media or even your blog could be copied and saved indefinitely in a database with billions of images of other people, by a company you've never heard of? And what if we told you that this mass surveillance database was pitched to law enforcement and private companies across the world?
This is more or less the business model and aspiration of Clearview AI, a company that only received worldwide…
Content type: Long Read
For over 20 years with the start of the first use of ICTs in the 1990s, we have seen a digital revolution in the health sector. The Covid-19 pandemic significantly accelerated the digitalisation of the health sector, and it illustrates how fast this uptake can be and what opportunities can emerge; but also, importantly, the risks that it involves.
As we've said many times before, whilst technologies can be part of the solution to tackle some socio-economic and political challenges facing our…
Content type: Long Read
For many, browsing the internet or checking social media comes with its fair share of being targeted with ads selling “fad diet” subscription-based programmes, magic weight-loss powders, or promising a secret trick to lose weight quickly. Some of the products and programmes sold have been described as scams, with a very real impact for those suffering from eating disorders and those who fall prey to these ads. This is even more problematic due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has seen the…
Content type: Explainer
An array of digital technologies are being deployed in the context of border enforcement. Satellite and aerial surveillance are part of the surveillance toolkit and yet, they are also used by organisations seeking to hold government actions to account and improve efficacy of their own work. To effectively critique state use and delve into potential benefits of satellite and aerial surveillance, we must first understand it.
In this explainer we dig into a technology which many are aware of for…
Content type: News & Analysis
It is difficult to imagine a more intrusive invasion of privacy than the search of a personal or home computer ... when connected to the internet, computers serve as portals to an almost infinite amount of information that is shared between different users and is stored almost anywhere in the world.
R v Vu 2013 SCC 60, [2013] 3 SCR 657 at [40] and [41].
The controversial Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill includes provision for extracting data from electronic devices.
The Bill…
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: Examples
When Dallas police posted on Twitter asking for videos of the protests taking place after George Floyd's killing, a flood of videos and images of K-pop stars were uploaded to its anonymous iWatch Dallas tip-off app. Law enforcement can call on vast numbers of networked cameras - from cars, food and retail chains that are typically willing to share with police, law enforcement agencies' own networks of surveillance and body cameras as well as object and face recognition software, protesters and…
Content type: Long Read
The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK government’s historical mass interception program violates the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. The Court held that the program “did not contain sufficient “end-to-end” safeguards to provide adequate and effective guarantees against arbitrariness and the risk of abuse.” As a result the Court ruled that UK law "did not meet the “quality of law” requirement and was therefore incapable of keeping the “…