Scoop has an Ethical Paywall
Amazon's anti-privacy campaign is a business plan
Writing at Privacy News Online, Glyn Moody says online retailer Amazon has successfully lobbied against privacy protections.
Moody sourced some of his material from a Reuters report: Amazon wages secret war on Americans' privacy, documents show.
The company plans to use its Alexa speakers and
other surveillance technologies to collect vast amounts of
data on millions of customers. Amazon also uses fear to
bully policymakers and the press in order to shut down
resistance to its intrusive data
gathering.
... they were shocked by the quantity and granularity of the information Amazon held about them. For example, one reporter found that Amazon held more than 90,000 recordings that Alexa devices had made of family members since 2017.Alexa devices were also able to access data from iPhones and other non-Amazon systems, including one reporter’s iPhone calendar entries, complete with the names of the people he was to contact.
This exposes the central problem with Amazon’s Alexa systems: most people – even relatively savvy ones – don’t realize how much personal data the devices gather.
Key to addressing the data protection issues this raises is to make people aware, and to give them the choice as to whether to allow that information to be gathered constantly. The Reuters investigation reveals that the main thrust of Amazon’s lobbying activities was stopping that happening.
It's a damning and worrying story.
There are already 64 million people in the US using Amazon speakers. The company sells them at a loss because the data they gather is so valuable. The idea is to capture an ever increasing amount of personal data on customers to build complete profiles of what they might want and think.
For now that is all about selling to them through Amazon's retail operation, although there is potential to do so much more with this kind of data.
Amazon's anti-privacy campaign is a business
plan was first posted at
billbennett.co.nz.
Bill Bennett
Freelance journalist.
Auckland-based Bill Bennett writes technology and business stories that are directly relevant to New Zealand readers.
His emphasis is on telecommunications, but he also covers other aspects of technology and business. You can find his features in the New Zealand Herald and hear him regularly on RNZ Nine to Noon and the NZ Tech Podcast.
Bennett's The Download Weekly newsletter is published every Friday. You can sign up for it here.
If you want to support his work, you can make a donation to his PressPatron account.
Binoy Kampmark: Trump, AUKUS And Australia’s Dim Servitors
Peter Dunne: Dunne's Weekly - The Wrong Answer To A Question That Does Not Exist
Martin LeFevre - Meditations: Perception, Conception And Beauty
Alastair Thompson: On The Publication Of The First NCQG Text 'New Collective Quantified Goal On Climate Finance'
Ramzy Baroud: A Nation In Denial - Why Israel’s Defeat Is Imminent
Richard S. Ehrlich: Trump's Victory, Authoritarians & Trade Warriors