Amazon Subsidiaries Worry Data Protection Advocates
From customers’ reading habits on Amazon Kindle to the groceries they like to buy on Prime, Amazon has perfected the art of tracking. The software is so good at predicting user preferences that third parties can contract its algorithms through Amazon Forecast.
But does not stop there. The great tech titan has bought over 100 companies since it was created. Companies let him collect more consumer data to inform predictions. Amazon’s technology has changed from simply waiting and responding to your requests to anticipating them. In an Amazon Alexa demowhen you ask the voice assistant to book movie tickets, this it keeps asking if you want to make a dinner reservation or call an Uber.
But”is potentially problematic if Amazon is sharing data between the different companies it owns”, Simon David to hiresbrrunner, of the humanwsobefored wcomputing rto look for ggroup from the Freie Universität Berlin, told DWTheconsumer data is collected in different contexts. “Amazon data scientists may not be able to identify and manage privacy issues dependent on these specific contexts.”
Amazon works with healthcare provider
Earlier this year, Amazon closed a $3.9 billion deal to buy One Medical, a US primary care provider with 815,000 members. One Medical has 15 years of medical and health systems data that Amazon can use to help it build AI-powered health products, target interventions and predict future costs.
But privacy advocates raged against the takeover, even though laws prohibit the company from sharing personal health information with other parties without a user’s permission. This is due in part to Amazon’s spotty data protection record. A 2020 investigation by the US newspaper Wall Street Journal revealed that Amazon employees used data about independent sellers to develop competing products – in violation of its own policies. In 2021, he was fined $886.6 million by the National Data Protection Commission (CNPD) for allegedly violating EU data protection laws.
“The way that Amazon is aggressively expanding into even more sensitive areas like healthcare means that we’re likely to have little choice in how different data is connected on Amazon,” Garfield Benjamin, senior lecturer in sociology at Solent University, told DW.
But Amazon claims that – and the companies it acquired – use and share customers’ personal data only as permitted by law and its privacy notice, for the purpose of providing its products and services to its customers.
“Like other retailers, we analyze sales and store data to give our customers the best possible experience,” Amazon told DW. “The process you refer to was made public almost two years ago. We strongly disagree and appeal the decision of the CNPD, as the decision regarding how we show relevant advertising to customers is based on subjective and untested interpretations of European law of privacy.”
Source: DW
Lori Barajas is an accomplished journalist, known for her insightful and thought-provoking writing on economy. She currently works as a writer at 247 news reel. With a passion for understanding the economy, Lori’s writing delves deep into the financial issues that matter most, providing readers with a unique perspective on current events.