Amazon appears to be present in everything, from what you buy online to how you remember duties to when you check your doorway.
And it seems the business has no plans to curtail its reach anytime soon. Amazon has just stated that it plans to invest billions of dollars in two enormous purchases that, if authorized, will increase its already significant involvement in consumers’ lives.
This time, the business is focusing on two industries: health care, where it will spend $3.9 billion to acquire primary care provider One Medical, and the “smart home,” where it will merge with iRobot, the company behind the well-known robotic Roomba cleaner, to increase its already sizable position.
Both deals have heightened long-standing privacy worries about how Amazon collects data and what it does with it, which is maybe not surprising for a firm known for its extensive collecting of consumer information. For instance, the most recent Roombas use sensors to map and memorize a house’s floor plan.
Ron Knox, an opponent of Amazon who works with the anti-monopoly organization Institute for Local Self-Reliance, stated that “it’s gaining this massive amount of data that Roomba collects about people’s houses.” “Its evident goal is to be in your home, as evidenced by all the various goods it offers to customers. Because it is acquiring market share, there are also antitrust issues in addition to the privacy ones.
The reach of Amazon extends well beyond that. According to some estimates, the retail behemoth holds a 38% share of the American e-commerce market, giving it access to detailed information about the shopping habits of millions of Americans and other people across the world. According to estimates by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, its Echo devices, which house the speech assistant Alexa, have dominated the U.S. smart speaker market, accounting for about 70% of sales.
Ring, which Amazon paid $1 billion to acquire in 2018, keeps an eye on doorsteps and aids in crime investigation, even though users aren’t necessarily aware of it. Additionally, the company is experimenting with palm-scanning technology at some Whole Foods locations and Amazon stores, which enables customers to pay for items by storing biometric data in the cloud. This has raised concerns about the possibility of a data breach, which Amazon has made an effort to allay.
The business stated on a website that offers details about the technology, “We treat your palm signature exactly like other highly sensitive personal data and keep it safe using best-in-class technical and physical security safeguards.”
Even customers who consciously steer clear of Amazon are likely to have little influence over how their employers run their corporate computer networks, which Amazon and Google have long controlled through their cloud computing service AWS.
According to Ian Greenblatt, who oversees tech research at the consumer research and data analytics company J.D. Power, “It’s difficult to conceive of another enterprise that has as many contact points as Amazon has to an individual.” It’s challenging to describe and almost overwhelming.
And like any business, Amazon wants to expand. The company has recently joined with the building firm Lennar to create tech-powered homes and purchased the Wi-Fi startup Eero. It would add another component to the ideal smart home with iRobot, as well as, of course, more data.
Customers have the option of not having the layout of their homes stored by iRobot devices, according to the vacuum manufacturer. Data privacy experts are concerned that the deal will provide Amazon another opportunity to gather data that it may use to target customers with advertisements or incorporate into its other products.
A spokesman for Amazon, Lisa Levandowski, refuted the claim in a statement.
Levandowski stated, “We do not use home maps for targeted advertising and have no plans to do so.
Another question is whether that will allay worries, especially in light of information about Amazon’s other products. Voice data from Amazon’s Echo devices are used to target advertisements to consumers, according to a paper published earlier this year by a group of academics; this was something the corporation had previously denied.
The study’s principal investigator, Umar Iqbal, a postdoc at the University of Washington, said that he and his team discovered Echo devices using third-party Skills, or Alexa programs that interact with advertising.
Customers can choose not to receive “interest-based” advertisements by changing their settings on Amazon’s advertising choices page, according to Levandowski. She added that Alexa inquiries are not shared with advertising networks by Amazon.
According to the business, skills that gather personal data must publish their privacy rules on a detail page in Amazon’s marketplace. However, researchers discovered that only 2% of Skills make explicit reference to how they acquire data, and the vast majority make no mention whatsoever of Alexa or Amazon.
According to Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame, data collection is done for more reasons than merely for data’s sake by firms like Amazon.
Martin said: “You almost get the sense that they’re just attempting to construct a bigger image of an individual.” It concerns the conclusions that can be drawn about you particularly and then you in relation to others.
For instance, the Amazon-One Medical partnership has raised concerns about how the business will handle any personal health information that comes into its possession.
Customers’ health information will be managed separately from all other Amazon businesses, according to Levandowski, should the merger be finalized. In addition, she stated that without the customer’s express consent, Amazon will not divulge sensitive health data outside of One Medical for “promotion or marketing objectives of other Amazon products and services.”
It doesn’t follow, though, that One Medical wouldn’t be able to obtain information from other divisions of Amazon’s business that could help it better profile its patients, according to Lucia Savage, chief privacy officer at the chronic care provider Omada Health. She claimed there was only one direction the information could go.
Of course, privacy issues are not exclusive to Amazon. For instance, following the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Google declared that it will automatically delete data about customers who visit abortion facilities. As for the usage of “cookies” roughly ten years ago that tracked users even after they signed off Facebook, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, settled a class action lawsuit in February.
However, Alex Harman, director of competition policy at the anti-monopoly group Economic Security Project, noted that unlike Meta and Google, whose core priority is on selling ads, Amazon might gain more from data collection because its primary goal is to sell items.
According to Harman, “data is all about persuading you to buy more of their goods and be trapped into their stuff.”
