The Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections

[douglas9]

In recent years, Amazon.com Inc has killed or undermined privacy protections in more than three dozen bills across 25 states, as the e-commerce giant amassed a lucrative trove of personal data on millions of American consumers.

Amazon executives and staffers detail these lobbying victories in confidential documents reviewed by Reuters.

In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted. In California, the company stifled proposed restrictions on the industry’s collection and sharing of consumer voice recordings gathered by tech devices. And in its home state of Washington, Amazon won so many exemptions and amendments to a bill regulating biometric data, such as voice recordings or facial scans, that the resulting 2017 law had “little, if any” impact on its practices, according to an internal Amazon document.

The architect of this under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama. Hired by Amazon in 2015, Carney reported to founder Jeff Bezos and built a lobbying and public-policy juggernaut that has grown from two dozen employees to about 250, according to Amazon documents and two former employees with knowledge of recent staffing.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-privacy-lobbying/

[Turbineguy]

1. We used to have respect for privacy.

[dalton99a]

2. Kick

Samirah, 30, got an Amazon Alexa-enabled smart speaker during last year’s holiday season. He said he only used it for three days before returning it after realizing it was collecting recordings. “It really sketched me out,” he said.

The device had already gathered all of his phone contacts, part of a feature that allows users to make calls through the device. Amazon said Alexa users must give permission for the company to access phone contacts. Customers must disable access to phone contacts, not just delete the Alexa app, in order to delete the records from their Amazon account.

Samirah said he was also unnerved that Amazon had detailed records of his audiobook and Kindle reading sessions. Finding information about his listening to the Quran disclosed in his Amazon file, he said, made Samirah think about the history of U.S. police and intelligence agencies surveilling Muslims for suspected terrorist links after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

That information can get quite personal. Amazon’s Kindle e-readers, for instance, precisely track a user’s reading habits, another reporter’s Amazon data file showed. The disclosure included records of more than 3,700 reading sessions since 2017, including timestamped logs – to the millisecond – of books read. Amazon also tracks words highlighted or looked up, pages turned and promotions seen.