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liberethos_paradigm/rap_sheets/amazon.md

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Amazon

Amazon is the root of abuses of privacy, freedom, human rights, civil liberties, consumer rights, and the environment:

  1. Amazon mounts mutlifaceted attacks on privacy
    1. Amazon is making an astronomical investment in facial recognition to exploit a market worth $8 billion which will destroy physical travel privacy worldwide. Amazon's innaccurate technology erroneously matched 100 US and UK politicians to criminals. Amazon also developed the technology by unlawfully using people's images without consent to train facial recognition products.
    2. Amazon deploys Ring and Alexa to surveil neighborhoods and surveil the inside of homes.
      1. Amazon keeps Alexa recordings and transcripts indefinitely
    3. Amazon’s Echo and the smart TVs monitor everything you do -- even if you disable ad reporting. (Note the research paper is not open to the public because ACM locks their digital library in the exclusive walled-garden of CloudFlare)
    4. Amazon paid $195k to fight privacy in California by lobbying against the CCPA.
    5. Amazon supported CISA.
    6. War on cash is war on privacy: Amazon's grocery stores do not accept cash. They impose the same surveillance as ordering online from Amazon. Cashless shops discriminate against the 6.5% of the US population that does not have a bank account.
    7. Amazon spent $30 million and ranked in the top 5 promoters of Facebook ads in 2012 (thus substantially feeding a privacy abuser).
    8. Facebook and Amazon made a secret deal to give Amazon access to Facebook's data about users.
    9. The Kindle Swindle informs Amazon when the user reads books that didn't come from Amazon. It also tells Amazon which pages each user reads.
    10. Amazon distributes NRAtv which promotes a privacy-hostile political party and the resulting policies. Also sells the Trump line of suits in their webshop.
    11. Sensitive data for 100 million people banking at Capital One was leaked by an Amazon worker. Amazon refuses blame for it. Capital One was fined $80M for failing to do risk assessment.
  2. Amazon is responsible for human rights and civil liberties abuses
    1. Amazon supplies unlawfully developed facial recognition to law enforcement who use it to abuse civil liberties, despite protest by Amazon employees, 40 civil rights organizations, and 150,000 petitioners.
    2. Amazon supplies AWS to ICE and Palantir, a database firm that exploits social media to facilitate ICE and CBP to enforce Trump's inhumane zero tolerance immigration policy that entails child-parent separation. Palantir was also co-founded by a notorious xenophobic and billionaire backer of Donald Trump: Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel founded Palantir to help ICE deploy algorithms that find people to deport. Peter Thiel called Google "unpatriotic" for "not embracing opportunities to work with federal agencies" thinking that Google appeased employees who opposed inhumane treatment of immigrants (he was unaware that Google's announcement and action differed).
    3. Amazon supports Breitbart (the right-wing extremist site) by advertising there.
    4. Amazon uses FedEx (an NRA-supporting ALEC member who feeds republican warchests via ALEC and NRA [republican policy is xenophobic and detrimental to gun control and individual privacy]).
    5. Amazon in Germany hired "security" guards from a company of Nazi sympathizers to intimidate and repress foreign workers. Reporters came to cover this, and the guards tried to arrest them and take their cameras. (2013)
  3. Amazon is detrimental to consumer rights
    1. Amazon distributes ebooks in a way that strips users of many freedoms.
    2. The Amazon Kindle has a back door that can erase books. Amazon was caught remotely erasing thousands of copies of 1984.
    3. Amazon rents textbooks to students with a requirement not to take them across state lines.
  4. Amazon is notorious for mistreating employees despite its wealth and growth.
    1. Amazon runs an extreme sweatshop that diminishes quality of life. The consequential mental health crisis is evidenced by 189 calls from Amazon warehouses to 911 in five years.
    2. Amazon drug tests its employees, thus intruding on their privacy outside the workplace and also harming their healthcare.
    3. oppressive and callous attitude toward staff.
    4. 55-hour work weeks
    5. 90,000+ warehouse employees treated like cattle (7 examples)
  5. Amazon proliferates censorship
    1. Amazon has partnered with the MPAA to campaign for repression of sharing on the net.
    2. Amazon cut off service to Wikileaks, claiming that whistle-blowing violates its terms of service.
  6. Amazon is detrimental to the environment
    1. Amazon powers 50% of their servers with unclean energy.
    2. Amazon's excessive packaging destroys 1 billion trees annually. (examples)
    3. Amazon retaliates against employees who seek climate action.
    4. Amazon works for BP and Shell to deliver a machine learning service to discover locations to drill for oil and gas.
    5. Amazon has been caught financing climate deniers.
  7. Amazon is anti-consumer and anti-competitive
    1. Amazon sold diapers at a loss to drive Quidsi out of business.
    2. Amazon spent $4.38 million to lobby against antitrust law

See also Richard Stallman's Amazon RAP sheet, which we will one day merge into the above.