Privacy experts have warned of Amazon’s increased surveillance capabilities after the company bought the One Medical clinic chain and iRobot, the company behind Roomba.
Business Insider reports that legislators, antitrust advocates and privacy experts have begun to voice concerns about its increased surveillance capabilities after Amazon’s recent multibillion-dollar acquisition of One Medical and iRobot. One company will provide access to patients’ medical information, while the other will allow users to map their homes using popular Roomba home vacuums.
ROMEVILLE, IL – August 1: Employees pack and ship customer orders at Amazon’s 750,000-square-foot fulfillment center in Romeoville, Illinois, on August 1, 2017. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
One data privacy expert commented to Business Insider that it “looks like a mythical hydra where you cut off one head and it grows two more in its place.” Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future, said Amazon has relied on surveillance for years to dominate the competition.
“People tend to think of Amazon as an online marketplace, but Amazon really is a tracking company,” Greer told Insider. “Every aspect of their results comes from their ability to collect and use data.”
Amazon tracks its employees and a “downtime” metric that measures business performance and penalizes them accordingly. The company has previously faced controversy when delivery drivers complained of AI cameras installed in their vans.
Amazon also tracks every click on its website, regardless of whether the user has purchased a product, and tells the tech giant whether you’ve looked at reviews or the price list before purchasing, and what ads you’ve viewed. “Amazon has all this data,” Greer said. Guardian. “They track what people are searching for, what they are clicking on and what they are not clicking. Every time you search for something and it doesn’t click, you’re telling Amazon there’s room.”
Ron Knox, senior fellow and author of the Local Institute for Self-Efficacy, told Business Insider, “It all works together because Amazon creates a way to provide information about its customers’ lives, their spending habits, their eating habits, their sleeping habits. their shopping habits. They’re tracking all this data to sell us something better. That’s what Amazon wants to do, that’s the basis of its monopoly.”
Read more about Business Insider here.
Source: Breitbart
