Privacy Experts: Amazon Is Expanding Its Surveillance Empire Through Acquisitions

Privacy experts are warning of Amazon’s growing surveillance powers following the company’s acquisition of clinic chain One Medical and iRobot, the company behind Roomba.

Business Insider reports that legislators, antitrust advocates, and privacy experts have begun warning of Amazon’s growing surveillance powers following the company’s recent multi-billion dollars purchases of One Medical and iRobot. One company will give them access to patients’ medical info while the other will allow them to map users’ homes via the popular Roomba home vacuum robots.

ROMEOVILLE, IL – AUGUST 01: Workers pack and ship customer orders at the 750,000-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center on August 1, 2017 in Romeoville, Illinois. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

One data privacy expert commented to Business Insider that it’s “like the mythical Hydra, where you cut off one head and two more grow in its place.” Evan Greer, the director of the nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future noted that Amazon has relied on surveillance to dominate the competition for years.

“People tend to think of Amazon as an online marketplace, but really, Amazon is a surveillance company,” Greer told Insider. “Every aspect of their profit is derived from their ability to amass and leverage data.”

Amazon closely surveils its employees and tracks a “time off task” metric that measures worker productivity and punishes them accordingly. The company previously faced a scandal when delivery drivers complained of AI cameras fitted in their vans.

Amazon also tracks every click on its website, whether a user purchases an item or not, and tells the tech giant if you check reviews or price shop before completing a purchase and which ads you viewed. “Amazon has all this data available,” Greer told the Guardian. “They track what people are searching for, what they click, what they don’t. Every time you’re searching for something and don’t click, you’re telling Amazon that there’s a gap.”

Ron Knox, a senior researcher and writer for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told Business Insider: “This all works together because Amazon is trying as best they can to funnel information about its customers’ lives, about their spending habits, about their eating habits, sleeping habits, their shopping habits. They’re tracking all this data so that they can better sell us things. That’s what Amazon wants to do, that’s what its monopoly is based on.”